You are cordially invited to attend a public talk by Professor Melanie Hawthorne (Texas A&M University) entitled: Biography as Museum: Picturing the Life of Renée Vivien This coming Friday (14 March) at 2pm in room G08. Prof. Hawthorne is a leading expert in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, with special emphasis on prose fiction of the Decadent period and on women writers. Her approach tends to emphasize how narrative expectations shape the stories we find compelling, and in particular the conventions of life-writing. Friday’s talk will focus on Renée Vivien (born Pauline Tarn, 1877-1909), a turn of the century novelist and poet who wrote exclusively in French. Of Scottish and American ancestry, she was educated in England, but she lived nearly all her life in Paris and wrote in French. Her poetry was influenced by Keats and Swinburne; by Baudelaire; by Hellenic culture; by her extensive travels in Norway, Turkey, and Spain; and by her lesbianism. Like her contemporary Anna de Noailles, she was gifted with beauty, fortune, talent, and fame, but she was deeply unhappy and hated the crassness of her age. Her major works are Cendres et poussières (1902; “Ashes and Dust”); Les Kitharèdes (1904; “The Women of Kithara”); translations from Sappho; and Sillages (1908; “Sea Wakes”). Vivien seems to have found peace shortly before her death with her conversion to Roman Catholicism, intimated in the new austerity of her last works, Dans un coin de violettes (1908; “In a Violet Garden”) and Le Vent des vaisseaux (1909; “Ship Wind”). Her Poésies complètes were published in 12 volumes in 1901–10 and in two volumes in 1934. Little of her work exists in English translation. (source: Encyclopedia Britannica).
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 16:47:10 +0000
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