This project, speaheaded by Charlotte Danino, from the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, aims at bringing together the expertise of academics (linguists, literature specialists, etc.) and medical staff in order to analyse the birth narratives told by women on social media, in interviews, novels, poems, etc. The main idea is to make sense of the particular words they use, their intonations, hesitations, which words and ideas they still find difficult to articulate in order to better understand what women are really saying when they are narrating this peculiar moment in their lives. I would like to look at the images female authors use when they write about their experience of childbirth, and interrogate how genre matters in how it is delievered.
The first aim is to establish a corpus of birthing narratives from the mothers themselves, and to complete it with a literary corpus composed of autobiographical narrative, memoirs, poems. The aim is then to work hand in hand with medical specialists, midwives, gynaecologists, and see what can be made of this insight into women’s interior perception of the event.
Watch this space as I will be posting the calendar for our new seminar, as well as news for the first of two conferences, which we hope to hold some time in the Spring or Fall of 2021. In the meantime, go and check out our website to find out more about what the project is about.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Alice Braun (September 20, 2020). The Birthing Stories project. Mothers and writers. Retrieved December 10, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rolq
