Title of the PhD project: “Going Places: Self-narrative, space and revolt in the American Sixties” / “Going Places: Ecriture de soi, spatialité et révolte dans les années 1960 américaines”
Thesis director: Hélène AJI (ENS)
Co-director: Emma WILSON (University of Cambridge)
Academic year of registration: 2022-2023
Summary of the PhD project:
My doctoral work, situated at the intersection of literary studies (non-fiction), contemporary cultural history, and social sciences, is supervised by professors Hélène Aji (Ecole normale supérieure-Université Paris Sciences et Lettres) and Emma Wilson (University of Cambridge). I focus on the American and transnational “long Sixties” (1958-74) and their broad range of countercultures as well as protest and youth movements in the genre of memoirs and through the lens of spatial studies (literary geography, geocriticism and French theory, geopoetics). Some of the writers I am most interested in include Maya Angelou, Abbie Hoffman, Cleve Jones, Patti Smith, and Gloria Steinem.
Space remains underrepresented as an analytical tool in non-fiction literary studies. I therefore intend to demonstrate how spatial analysis allows for a comprehensive understanding of a selection of memoirs (historical, socio-political and biographical contexts), their politics as much as their poetics, which covers the material and aesthetical matters in the production and reception of these works (intention, composition, and writing, but also individual and collective appropriation in the perception and idealization of an era). The memoirs I selected all recount the American 1960s, a particularly prolific and decisive period, but this (spatial) methodology for reading and critically analyzing the production of nonfiction as much as its concrete influence (mythification, transmission, mobilization) could be applied to many other contexts (different memoirs and authors, other time and place).
I am particularly interested in the contemporary permanence and political relevance of a certain “myth of the Sixties” (from New social movements, environmentalism, and the emergence of “the generation” as a dissenting political category to identity politics and culture wars). Such approach, rooted in cultural studies, requires to question the reliability and motivations behind the works central to my study. My project therefore draws on direct interviews with writers and activists (e.g. C. Jones, G. Steinem) as well as archival work, including at the Yale Beinecke Library (grant from the Association française d’études américaines, 2024).
Research interests and interdisciplinarity
- Literature: American literature (20th and 21st centuries), French-American comparative literature, self-narrative (autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, correspondence, speeches, New Journalism, biopics), non-fiction writing (creativity through collection and recombination, mimetic theory), Beat Generation, Simone de Beauvoir, Patti Smith
- Political and social sciences: political and cultural history of the “long Sixties” (1958-74), philosophies of revolt (existentialism, New Left, Albert Camus), youth and citizen mobilizations (New Social Movements, environmentalism, intersectionality, identity politics)
- Theory: transnational and spatial studies (literary geography, cultural studies, French theory), ecological turn (Anthropocene, ecopoetics, zoopoetics)
