The French and Francophone Studies Department at Macalester College would like to invite you to the French Lecture Series on Monday, November 15 at 4:45 PM in Humanities 401.
Stephanie Cox, Visiting Professor from Carleton College will present "Immigrant Writing in Quebec and Ying Chen"
Francophone Asian-Canadian Writer Ying Chen was born in Shanghai, came to Montreal in the 1990s, and now lives in Vancouver. As the first Chinese writer in Quebec, she attracted attention and her first three novels have been popular in and outside the classroom. Since Quebec society had always identified itself strongly in opposition to the Other, be it the English, the Amerindian, the French and the American, the immigrant gaze reversed its position and inaugurated its role as dominant society. After becoming an icon of Immigrant Writing, Ying Chen made major changes within her writing, thereby risking to lose a portion of her readers but with the aim to avoid the kind of ethnic reading which she felt the categorization of "écritures migrantes" (Immigrant Writing) leads to. Instead of instructing Western readers about the Chinese culture as a cultural ambassador, she invites the reader to meet through the universal experience of exile, whether it be geographic or social.
Stephanie Cox is a Visiting Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Carleton College where she teaches courses on Quebec, Acadia and Louisiana, including "Women of New France" and "Marginality and Renaissance in Francophone North America." She is the author of "La vie probable" a forthcoming study on the writing of Ying Chen. She is the recipient of a Faculty Enrichment Grant from the Canadian Embassy to design a course on "Transnational Writers of Quebec."
