You are invited to participate in the series of online online seminars
Spaces of Creativity, Creating Space
organized by the
Centre for Creativity Research
(Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Faculty of Polish Studies)
Thursday 30 March 2023
18.00 (6 p.m.) Cracow & Paris time / 17.00 (5 p.m.) London time
11.00 (11 a.m.) Chicago time / 19.00 (7 p.m.) Kyiv time
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2187583567?pwd=Rmh3NGZxRVc0eHpqOU5JbHgxSXdhZz09
Meeting ID: 218 758 3567
PROGRAMME
- Catherine Rovera (École Normal Supérieure-CNRS, ITEM)
Keynote “Jean Rhys’s Manuscripts: Fashioning Creole Modernist Dreamscapes”
With her many protagonists wandering the streets in a state of drunkenness, teetering on the brink of madness or even flirting with death, Jean Rhys has created dream-texts in which pristine Caribbean landscapes alternate with the dark alleys of London and Paris. Nowhere are these “Two Tunes” characteristic of a new kind of experimental fiction—with its unique blend of English and West Indian influences—more visible than in her extant manuscripts from the thirties (one of them a modernist collage with Joycean overtones).
This paper will look into these Creole modernist dreamscapes through the lens of genetic criticism as manuscripts, if anything, can shed light on the fashioning of such trance-like texts. One may even wonder to what extent Jean Rhys’s manuscripts could be regarded as dreamscapes in their own right. Indeed, some dream sequences—revised with a time lapse of almost thirty years—reveal an uncanny web of echoes between the interwar novels (Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight) and Wide Sargasso Sea, her last novel. They also reveal that Jean Rhys’s earliest intimations of the first Mrs Rochester long predated her self-proclaimed intent to revisit Jane Eyre and to rectify Charlotte Brontë’s misconception of Caribbean madness.
Catherine Rovera is Senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Paris-Dauphine and head of the James Joyce research team at ITEM (École Normale Supérieure-CNRS), Paris Sciences & Lettres.
A specialist in genetic criticism and modernism, she has written a monograph (Genèses d’une folie créole: Jean Rhys et Jane Eyre, Hermann 2015), co-edited a collection of essays (Genesis and Revision in Modern British and Irish Writers, Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and co-authored a genetic edition of two of Virginia Woolf’s reading notebooks (forthcoming).
- Discussion
- Centre for Creativity Research: forthcoming events
dr. hab. Mateusz Antoniuk, prof. UJ
Head of the Centre for Creativity Research