Description:

Come join PAS for our weekly lunch and lecture. Lunch provided.

Speaker: Vanessa Guignery (contemporary English literature and postcolonial literature, École Normale Supérieure, Lyon, France)

Title: The Poetics of Voice in Ben Okri's The Famished Road

Bio: Vanessa Guignery is Professor of contemporary English and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research focuses more specifically on literary genres and the poetics of voice and silence. She has been a Fellow at the Harry Ransom Humanities Centre in Austin, Texas several times since 2006. She published several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Macmillan, 2006), and Conversations with Julian Barnes (Mississippi Press, 2009), co-edited with Ryan Roberts. She has published articles on writers from India (Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai), Nigeria (Ben Okri), New Zealand (Janet Frame), Canada (Alice Munro) and Britain (Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts, Alain de Botton, David Lodge, Jonathan Coe, Zadie Smith), as well as several essays and a monograph on B.S. Johnson, Ceci n’est pas une fiction (Sorbonne UP, 2009). She is the author of Seeing and Being: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (Presses Universitaires de France, 2012), has edited a special issue of Callaloo on Ben Okri (2015) and published a monograph on Jonathan Coe for Palgrave Macmillan (2015). She is the editor of about fifteen books on contemporary literature in English, including a collection of interviews with eight contemporary writers, Novelists in the New Millennium (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and The B.S. Johnson—Zulfikar Ghose Correspondence (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). Website: www.vanessaguignery.com

Cosponsored with the French Interdisciplinary Group.