Dr Akane Kawakami
MA, MPhil, DPhil (Oxon)
Programme director, BA French Studies
Lecturer: 20th and 21st-century French and francophone literature.
Contact details
Department of European Cultures and Languages
Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PD
E-mail: a.kawakami@bbk.ac.uk
Tel: 0207 631 6169
Profile
Dr Akane Kawakami teaches and researches French literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Her interests include contemporary French and francophone fiction, travel narratives, critical theory and interactions between literary and visual culture.
Before coming to Birkbeck in 2006, she taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick.
She has published extensively in the field of modern and contemporary culture, with numerous articles in refereed journals on a variety of writers (see selected publications, below) and two monographs: A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano's Postmodern Fictions (Liverpool University Press, 2000), and Travellers' Visions: French Literary Encounters with Japan, 1881-2004 (2005).
She has also published two books of essays in Japanese. She is currently working on a book provisionally entitled The Act of Writing: Gestures and Creation in the French and Francophone Imagination, 1897-2009, about the physical manifestations of writing in the 20th and 21st centuries.
She is a Steering Committee member of the Birkbeck Centre for Research in Representations of Kinship and Community, and a Member of the Advisory Council of the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies (IGRS). She is currently supervising two PhD students, working with Daniel Pennac and Julien Green.
Selected publications
Books
A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000).
Travellers’ Visions: French Encounters with Japan, 1887-2004 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005).
For more information on these books, visit www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk
Refereed journals
‘Claudel’s Fragments of Japan: ‘Connaissance de l’autre’ in Cent Phrases pour éventails’, in French Studies, 53 (1999), 176-188.
‘Claudel’s Mémoires improvisés, or the Unimportance of Autobiography’, in Romance Studies, 17 (1999), 151-161.
‘Barbarian Travels: Textual Positions in Michaux’s Un Barbare en Asie’, in Modern Language Review, 95 (2000), 978-991.
‘The Misreading of Madame Chrysanthème: Stereotype Formation and Sleeping Women’, in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 38 (2002), 278-290.
‘Nathalie Sarraute’s Accent: the Poetry of Tropismes’, in French Studies, 58 (2004), 499-512.
‘Un coup de foudre photographique: Autobiography and Photography in Hervé Guibert’, Romance Studies, 25 (2007), 211-225.
‘Kyoukai no yokubou: Michel Butor, Nihon no mawarini’ in Waseda Bungaku, 2 (2009), 328-345.
‘Proof of Life: Annie Ernaux’s plural self-portrait in L’Usage de la photo’, to be published in French Studies, 2010.
‘When the unfamiliar becomes familiar… ? Proust, Planes and Modernity’, to be published in Alison Finch, Gill Rye and Naomi Segal (eds.), When familiar meanings dissolve… Essays in Honour of Malcolm Bowie, special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies, 2010.
Articles in books
‘Patrick Modiano’s Unreliable Detectives’, in Anne Mullen and Emer O’Beirne (eds.), Crime Scenes: Detective Narratives in European Culture since 1945 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 195-204.
‘In Claudel’s Footsteps’, in Margaret Topping (ed.), Eastern Voyages, Western Visions: French Writing and Painting of the Orient (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 289-310.
‘Flowers of Evil, Flowers of Ruin: walking in Paris with Baudelaire and Modiano’, in John E. Flower (ed.), Patrick Modiano (Amsterdam/NY: Rodopi, 2007), 257-269.
‘L’humble objectif: photographie, voyage et mémoire dans Un Monde qui ressemble au monde’, in Gérard Macé, la « pensée littéraire », écritures contemporaines 9 (Caen: lettres modernes minard, 2008), 101-111.
Translations and reviews
Translations of selected texts in:
Harrison, Wood and Gaiger (eds.), Art in Theory, 1815-1900 (Oxford: Blackwells, 1998)
Harrison, Wood and Gaiger (eds.), Art in Theory, 1648-1815 (Oxford: Blackwells, 2000)
Commissioned Reviews in French Studies, Modern Language Review, Modern and Contemporary France
Selected conferences, conference papers and invited lectures
September 2008: Invited Lecture, entitled ‘Désir liminal : Michel Butor autour du Japon’, at ‘Michel Butor: à la frontière, ou l’art des passages’ (attended by Butor), held at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan
July 2008: ‘Portrait of a Life/Proof of Life: Annie Ernaux’s L’Usage de la Photo’, Annual Conference of the Society for French Studies, Liverpool, UK
May 2008: ‘When the unfamiliar becomes familiar…? Proust, Planes and Modernity’, at ‘When familiar meanings dissolve… Malcolm Bowie Memorial Conference’, held at the IGRS, London, UK
March 2004: Invited Lecture, 'Flowers of Evil, Flowers of Ruin: Walking in Paris with Baudelaire and Modiano' at ‘Colloque Patrick Modiano’, held at the University of Kent.
December 2003: Sole Organiser of international colloquium, ‘Gérard Macé: Travel, Translation, Photography’ (attended by Macé), held at University College London. Paper entitled 'Travel and Photography in Un Monde qui ressemble au monde'.
