We invite you to a conversation with US writer Laird Hunt.
- Jan. 18, 4-6pm, U Paris Cité, Olympe de Gouges 164/Zoom.
The session (co-organized by Anne-Laure Tissut [LARCA/ERIAC] and Anne-Julie Debare [UPEC, IMAGER]) will focus on Hunt’s novel Neverhome (Little, Brown, 2015), about a woman-soldier who dressed up as a man to go to fight in the Civil War.
Hunt’s most recent novel, Zorrie (Bloomsbury, 2021), inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s « Un Cœur Simple », will also be part of the discussion, as well as the historical vein tapped in Hunt’s more recent work, which he calls « the Dark America Quartet ». Its specific form of realism blends with poetic invention and an elaborate play on structures which links it with Hunt’s earlier, more visibly experimental work. Moving back to the early times of the colonies and the hardships imposed on women especially by a strict Puritan doctrine (In the House in the Dark of the Woods, 2019), Hunt’s work also portrays slavery (Kind One, 2012), the Civil War (Neverhome 2014), and lynching (The Evening Road 2017). All those novels are first person narratives, staging women’s voices.
Questions may include Hunt’s fictional (re-)writing of history, writing and memory, genres and voices, the literary representations of trauma, the international influences, and the part played in his writing by the practice of translation.
Two excerpts of Neverhome (to be posted on the A19 website: https://a19.hypotheses.org/) will also give us the opportunity for some close reading.
The seminar will be followed by a reading at Atout Livre, 203 bis avenue Daumesnil, Paris, 12th arrondissement.
