17 November - Subtle Forms: Women Reading in Contemporary Fiction
Department of English, research seminar series
Sophie Corser, University College Cork
17 November 2021, 3-4 pm, Online, Microsoft Teams: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3awm5lwLLEXYJV16sFRgA7khFo8H42QWE7ISvhC2-qcqg1%40thread.tacv2/1631615817221?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2246fe5ca5-866f-4e42-92e9-ed8786245545%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%229388a8d1-25e6-4ab4-ab6f-56373146031f%22%7d
How can the myriad effects of reading be communicated in written form? Women’s writing forges innovative ways of inscribing the act of reading and the experience of women’s reading. During my IRC postdoctoral research fellowship at UCC I’ll be considering these stylistic experiments through a cross-genre comparative analysis of contemporary works of Anglophone women’s writing. This research will describe reading as a practice which offers solace, challenges prejudice, binds people together, or provides valuable privacy – and as an act of rethinking, unravelling, making strange, or queering. Drawing on one particular strand of my project, in this talk I will look at playful manipulations of intertextuality, narrative, and structure in representations of reader characters within fiction.