University Room: Omid & Gisel Kordestani Rooftop Conference Center (Q-801)
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photo: Ivo Danchev
Join us for a celebration of the work of AUP professor Amanda Dennis, author of no.43 in AUP’s Cahiers Series, A Mother's Discourse. Amanda will be in conversation with AUP professor Dan Gunn, founder of the Cahiers Series, followed by a Q&A with the audience. Novelist and critic Amanda Dennis documents the transformations experienced during the first three months of her daughter’s life, moving between raw postpartum notes and meditations on her encounter with these notes two years later. She draws on phenomenology and Roland Barthes’ ‘lover’s discourse’ as she struggles to capture radically disorienting change, as well as motherhood’s fluidity – and absurdities. Her meditations were drafted first in a foreign language, French, in the hope that the resistance of the foreign might better capture the press of the body in words as it sustains overwhelming change; they were then translated into the English that appears here.
Registration for this event is mandatory for outside guests as seats are limited.