The French Center of Excellence is pleased to announce it will host Professor Annabel Kim on November 20, 2025 as part of the Autumn 2025 lecture series. Professor Kim's lecture, entitled "Free Fiction: Darrieussecq v. Laurens", will explore French and Francophone culture, language, and society.
In 2007, Camille Laurens attacked Marie Darrieussecq, accusing her of having committed plagiat psychique (psychic plagiarism) in her then latest novel, Tom est mort, which narrates a mother’s grief at the death of her young son. Laurens, who had published an autofictional text recounting the loss of her own son, Philippe (1995), laid out a strong claim that there are certain experiences, such as the loss of a child, the Holocaust, living with AIDs, that can only be written by those who have actually lived through them. Darrieussecq rejected this limitation on the novel, publishing a full- throated defense of fiction’s freedom and the right to invention in her 2010 work, Rapport de police: Accusations de plagiat et autres modes de surveillance de la fiction.
In this talk, Professor Kim will take up two biographical texts published at around the same time by each author— Darrieussecq’s Être ici est une splendeur (2016), Laurens’s La petite danseuse de quatorze ans (2017). On the face of it, these works would seem to be quite similar projects, bringing Darrieussecq and Laurens onto the same page, with each author delving into the history of art to excavate an individual life, but they are produced by authors who have starkly different views of what fiction is and should be able to do, and hence, different views of and for literature. Despite the documentary nature of both of these texts, I read them as an extension of the querelle between these two authors, as being interesting less for what they have to say about the individual lives they are writing, and more for what they have to say about fiction and its affordances.
Annabel L. Kim is Professor and Chair of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, and the author of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (2018) and Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (2022). Kim is also the editor of a special issue of Diacritics on the politics of citation, "Citation, Otherwise" and the co-editor, along with Morgane Cadieu, of "Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig," for Yale French Studies.
This event is sponsored by the Department of French and Italian’s French Center of Excellence, which receives funding from French Cultural Services in the US and the Consulate General of France in Chicago. This series is also supported by the following departments and centers at Ohio State African American & African Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, Germanic Languages & Literatures, English, the Humanities Institute, and the Center for Languages, Literatures, & Cultures.
In December of 2020, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States selected the Department of French and Italian at The Ohio State University to join its prestigious network of Centers of Excellence. OSU’s Center of Excellence has the goal of promoting French and Francophone culture in the Midwest and beyond.
