French Jewish Women’s Writing The Shoah, Gendered Identities, and Exemplary Memory - Lecture by Professor Lucille Cairns

As Sartori and Cottenet-Hage remark in their co-edited volume Daughters of Sarah: Anthology of Jewish Women’s Writing in French, ‘[s]cholars of the literature of Jews in France only occasionally mention women writers, even though Jewish women in France have been writing and publishing since the middle of the nineteenth century, often with great success’. French-language writings of Jewish women are largely ignored within their own Jewish community because of their gender, and within French studies in English-speaking universities because of their ethnicity. In this lecture Professor Lucille Cairns (of Durham University) will provide a broad synopsis of that larger corpus, and then focus more closely on key authors, texts, and the following themes: the Shoah, gendered identities, and what the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has called exemplary memory.