Monday Seminar:
Kristina Kosnick
Germaine Brée Dissertation Fellow (2009-2010)
French and Italian, UW-Madison
This presentation will examine recent trends in queer-centered (French) literary criticism. It will also break with these trends both by foregrounding the politico-literary contributions of contemporary women writers and by advocating a critical approach that values the performative force of literary texts over their mimetic capacities. Although it isn’t uncommon for a reader to announce that a book changed her life, do some literary works have the potential to alter the reader’s relationship to language itself such that her ways of conceptualizing “identity,” “difference” and agency in the world are transformed?
Kristina Kosnick is a doctoral candidate in French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. minor in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her interests include contemporary women’s writing (especially self-identified lesbian and queer women’s writing), experimental literature, feminisms, queer theory, literary theory, lesbian cultural productions, LGBTQ activism and issues of social justice—not to mention her love of 17th-century French theater. Kristina is also currently a Humanities Exposed (HEX) public scholar and facilitates a workshop entitled Reading, Writing and Relating LGBTQ Narratives—a project she is implementing in collaboration with OutReach, Madison’s LGBT Community Center, and with support from UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities.