Forms, Fragments and Fractures in Contemporary Women’s Life Writing: Spain, Portugal, and Italy

Twenty-First-Century Autofictions 

Maite Usoz de la Fuente (University of Leicester): ‘From Singular to Collective: Cristina Fallarás’ A la puta calle (2013) and Ahora contamos nosotras (2019)’
Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Durham University): ‘Lost Diasporic Archives: Narrating Transgenerational Trauma in Igiaba Scego’s Autofiction’
Olivia Glaze (University of Exeter): ‘Trauma Autofiction and Self-Camouflage: Remembering the End of the Portuguese Empire’

Maite Usoz de la Fuente (University of Leicester), ‘From Singular to Collective: Cristina Fallarás’ A la puta calle (2013) and Ahora contamos nosotras (2019)’
In this paper, I offer a close reading of Cristina Fallarás’ A la puta calle (2013), which chronicles the author’s experience of unemployment in the wake of the global 2008 crisis and her subsequent and progressive impoverishment, which culminates in her eviction from her Barcelona home in 2012. The working hypothesis in this paper is that Fallarás’ 2013 text, in which she explores her own transformation from middle class liberal professional to ‘pesada, beligerante, furbiunda y piquetera individual’ [wearisome, belligerent, furious, individual picketer] (2013: 77), foreshadows her later, collectively authored work Ahora contamos nosotras (2019), which collects a series of testimonies by women gathered through social media. While the first text is an individual account focussing on economic exclusion and the second is a collective work centred around experiences of sexual abuse, both are driven by a belief in the importance and power of language as a means to render visible hidden and systemic forms of violence. Moreover, Fallarás’ first-hand experience of destitution is crucial in understanding the author’s move from first-person testimony towards collectively shared and authored narratives.

Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Durham University), ‘Lost Diasporic Archives: Narrating Transgenerational Trauma in Igiaba Scego’s Autofiction’
Igiaba Scego, Italian novelist and journalist, centres her works of autofiction (La mia casa è dove sono (2010), and Cassandra a Mogadiscio, 2023) on a family history that has been profoundly shaped by Italian colonialist atrocities committed in her parents’ native Somalia, as well as by the lasting legacies of fascism. In her works, the author-narrator sets herself the task of (re)constructing a collective memory of the past by interweaving the orally transmitted stories bequeathed by her extended family, thereby positioning herself not only as an empathic listener (Assmann) but also as an archive. In a close reading of the novels’ spatial, corporeal and visual topographies, I will show how the author’s relational storytelling (Cavarero) provides a unique way of reconstructing a long-lost archive and of articulating the transgenerational transmission of trauma in the aftermath of the fascist regime. Set against the backdrop of Rome, Scego’s texts establish an oblique relationship with the city whilst mapping a violent past onto the heterotopic spaces that lie beyond and beneath its urban splendours. At the same time, the bodies she narrates are afflicted by physical marks, illness, and disease that evoke the structural disarticulations of trauma. Lastly, she uses photographic images or paintings, retrieved from the Roman colonialist archives, to conjure up the repressed imagery of a widely undocumented past.

Olivia Glaze (University of Exeter), ‘Trauma Autofiction and Self-Camouflage: Remembering the End of the Portuguese Empire’
In this paper, I explore the autofictional strategies present in the work of three contemporary Portuguese female authors whose writing traverses thematic intersections of trauma, fiction, and personal memories of the decolonisation period in Angola and Mozambique: Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios (1988) [The Murmuring Coast (1995)], Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais (2009, 2015) [Notebook of Colonial Memories (2015)], and Dulce Maria Cardoso’s O Retorno (2011) [The Return (2016)]. I argue that the autofictional techniques applied by Jorge, Figueiredo, and Cardoso enable their protagonists and characters to act as fictional versions of their past Selves, through whom the authors can navigate and negotiate traumatic memories from a distanced and less vulnerable position. When considering autofiction’s ability to offer a therapeutic renovation of the Self in the face of trauma, this paper contends that trauma autofiction can be viewed as a form of self-camouflage, behind which an author can move freely between reality and fiction, without ever having to distinguish between the two for the reader.

All are welcome to attend this seminar, held online via zoom at 4.30pm BST/5.30pm CEST . Please register in advance to receive the booking link, by clicking Book Now at the top of this page.

Series convenors: 
Raquel Fernández Menéndez (University of Salamanca)
Hannie Lawlor (University of Oxford)

This series explores the diverse forms that women’s life writing has taken in the shifting socio-political contexts of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Southern Europe. It draws into dialogue works from three countries that remain underrepresented in Anglophone discussions and theorisations of life writing and whose twentieth-century history is marked by dictatorship: Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Taking a comparative approach, the series seeks to demonstrate the richness and importance of these autobiographical practices and to explore the relationship between formal choices and contextual challenges. Through the focus on ‘forms’, ‘fractures’ and ‘fragments’, it considers the evolution of life-writing practices alongside socio-political developments and investigates how the slippages, divergences, and obfuscations that have contributed to the underrepresentation of these literatures in autobiography theory to date might in fact broaden the methodological and theoretical frameworks for the analysis of life-writing across different national and cultural contexts. Proceeding chronologically, the five sessions move from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, considering representations of the self across memoirs and magazines, diaries and autofictional experiments. By comparing contexts and case studies between as well as within sessions, the series considers how women’s narratives of the self are transformed by the changing constraints on and new possibilities of expression across the period, and the alternative perspectives that these self-representations offer, in turn, on what we recognise as and understand by life writing today.   
 
The series builds on the success of previous comparative initiatives developed at the CCWW, such as Un/Doing Queerness in the European South: Crises/Critique/Grammars of Resistance, and on the interest in French- and English-language autobiographical writing at past CCWW conferences and events. In making Spain and Portugal a central focus, as well as Italy, it turns the spotlight on languages and contexts that have featured less or not at all in seminar series to date. It also dedicates one session to women’s life writing in minority and minoritised languages in Spain, showcasing the importance these literatures hold for international discussions of autobiographical practices and gender theory.  

PROGRAMME
6 March 2025
Fragmented Autobiographies (1900-1936)
Ursula Fanning (University College Dublin): ‘Sibilla Aleramo: Fracturing Forms, Negotiating Self-Representations’
Xon de Ros (Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford): ‘Filiation through Affiliation: Mother-Daughter Bond in C20th Women's Autobiography’
Christina Bezari (Université Libre de Bruxelles): ‘Fractured Lives: Women’s Biographies in Iberian Avant-Garde Periodicals (1915–1936)’

13 March 2025
Fractured Autobiographies (1936-1975)
Cláudia Pazos Alonso (University of Oxford): ‘Life-writing as Funambulism during the Portuguese Dictatorship’
Mara Josi (University College Dublin): ‘Multifaceted, Fractured, and Torn Selves: Autobiographies of Lives in Hiding during the German Occupation of Italy’
Raquel Fernández Menéndez (University of Salamanca): ‘The Ethics of Diary Keeping: Narcissism and Vulnerability in Rosa Chacel’s Alcancía’

20 March 2025
Postmodern Autobiographies (1975-2000)
Álvaro González Montero (University of Leeds): ‘Cristina de Areilza’s Diario de una rebeldía: “writing the inner Monster”’
Maria Pereira Branco (University of Oxford): “Revolution Within and Without: The Transformative Power of Life-Writing in Natália Correia’s Não Percas a Rosa”
Vilma de Gasperin (University of Oxford): ‘Autobiography as Invention of the Self in Anna Maria Ortese: 1930s-1950s and Beyond’

27 March 2025
Minorities, Minorization and Autobiography
Maria Àngels Francés-Díez (University of Alicante): ‘Women’s Life Writing as a Reflective Surface: The Case of Four 20th-Century Catalan Women Writers’
Iker González-Allende (University of Nebraska-Lincoln): ‘Men’s Violence, Heteropatriarchal Vampirism and Feminist Community in the Memoirs of Itziar Ziga’
María Xesús Lama (Universitat de Barcelona): ‘Rosalía de Castro in Revolutionary Road. Lives that are Exploding’

3 April 2025
Twenty-First-Century Autofictions 
Maite Usoz de la Fuente (University of Leicester): ‘From Singular to Collective: Cristina Fallarás’ A la puta calle (2013) and Ahora contamos nosotras (2019)’
Katrin Wehling-Giorgi (Durham University): ‘Lost Diasporic Archives: Narrating Transgenerational Trauma in Igiaba Scego’s Autofiction’
Olivia Glaze (University of Exeter): ‘Trauma Autofiction and Self-Camouflage: Remembering the End of the Portuguese Empire’

 
Image: Depósito comodato Colección Telefónica. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Fotografía: Fernando Maquieira