Cheryl Morgan, professor and chair of French and Francophone studies, and Claire Mouflard, assistant professor of French and Francophone studies, gave presentations at the Women in French conference, hosted this year by the Winthrop-King Institute at Florida State University in Tallahassee on Feb. 8 to 10.
Morgan's paper, "Voices (from the Archive) Carry: The Dialogue Fictions of Jeanne Marni (1854-1910)," examines how French writer and journalist Jeanne Marni's dialogue fiction registered the sounds of fin de siècle Parisians. Focusing in particular on Fiacres, a series of 25 conversations, each of which takes place around and in Paris cabs for hire, Morgan links Marni to a line of French women urban chroniclers that begins with Delphine de Girardin and leads to Annie Ernaux and Leîla Sebbar.
Mouflard's paper was titled "Préfaciers et traducteurs: manipulations du témoignage de la femme d'origine maghrébine en France chez Josée Stoquart et David Thomson" ("Preface Writers and Translators: Manipulating the Woman of North-African Origin's Testimony in France in the works of Josée Stoquart and David Thomson").
It discusses the strategic editing techniques used by two French journalists in their transcription of testimonies given by women of North-African heritage: their edited texts - or translations - promote a fabricated image of these women as defiant and resistant to France's Republican ideals, an image that fits into the contemporary political narratives of conflict and dis-integration of second-generation immigrants in France.
