6 February 2025, 5.30pm UTC (online)
Lellida Marinelli, “Reading, writing, being writerly selves through essayistic practice. Deborah Levy’s trilogy on writing and Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects.”
The paper will focus on ‘essayism’ as a dialogical, protean, literary mode of reading and thinking manifesting itself in diverse literary forms and expressions. The essay is undefinable by definition, but it is a “literary region” (Bugliani) with paths that cross other well-known genres such as autobiography, memoir, and literary criticism.
Deborah Levy’s ‘living autobiography’, which comprises Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), The Cost of Living (2018) and Real Estate (2021), is an interesting example of the self-discovery and affirmation of a “writerly self” and of how such discovery, by means of an essayistic mode of thinking, enriches an autobiographical narration that plays with structure and perspective. Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects (1995) is a collection of metaliterary essays on literature, writing, and the experience of art. While they are two different forms of metaliterary essayism, both Levy’s trilogy and Winterson’s book deal with key questions of what it means to be a writer.
After presenting the texts this paper will, through a selection of key passages, attempt to trace a path through Levy’s and Winterson’s ideas on writing, embedded in acts of reading and reading-through other voices (the most prominent being Virginia Woolf), including researching ‘a writerly voice’; construing ‘female characters’; and the relevance of spaces for writing in Levy or the idea of writing as transformation, which can happen through a very close listening of the “subtle sound of prose” (Manganelli) in Winterson.
Elisa Russian, “Landscapes with Social Figures: On the Autobiographical Mode of British Cultural Studies“
In this paper, I examine the relationship between lived experience, storytelling, and critical theory in British cultural studies—a field that features, in Raymond Williams’s words, several “hybrid[s] of autobiography and argument.” I analyze the narrative and rhetorical function of social figures, particularly the working-class mother, within three essays that belong to this tradition: The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (1957), by literary scholar and sociologist Richard Hoggart; Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (1986), by historian Carolyn Steedman; and Respectable: The Experience of Class (2016), by journalist Lynsey Hanley.
In their works, Hoggart, Steedman, and Hanley recount the forms of social mobility they experienced as intellectuals from working-class backgrounds. By foregrounding the figure of the mother, these authors both reflect on the distance that separates them from their family’s milieu and reassert the validity of the values inherent in their upbringing.
Through a discussion of the literary and theoretical genres on which these writers rely, as well as of the genealogical ties that bind them, I suggest that saying “I” in historically- and sociologically-oriented texts is often instrumental in countering existing theoretical frameworks.
The seminar will be chaired by Anna Borgarello (Columbia).
Attendance is free but booking is required to receive a link to attend.
The speakers
Lellida Vittoria Marinelli is postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Naples L’Orientale, where she has recently completed her PhD in English Literature with a dissertation titled Being a Contemporary Woman Writer. Essays on Writing: Deborah Levy, Jeanette Winterson and Zadie Smith.
Her research interests include experimental and self-reflexive essayistic writing, essayism as a literary practice of reading, thinking, and experimenting, hybrid literary forms, metafiction and postcolonial literatures. She has a background in literary translation and an interest in publishing and personal knowledge management.
Elisa Russian is a postdoctoral fellow in the Romance Studies Department at the University of Zurich. She received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, from the University of California, Berkeley.
A scholar of Italian and comparative literature, she works at the intersection of cultural studies, philosophy, and sociology. Her current book project, titled Lived Critique, bridges the study of contemporary life-writing and social theory to demonstrate how hybrid forms of narration use personal experiences to advance critical arguments. She has published in journals such as California Italian Studies, Moderna, and Qui Parle. Her research has been supported by the Swiss Government Excellence Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Program in Critical Theory, and the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley.
