Reading by Cécile Wajsbrot 2019

Cécile Wajsbrot's latest novel Destruction (Paris 2019) focuses on a woman who has dedicated her life to reading and writing and whose only means of artistic expression in her country's newly established dictatorship is an audio blog commissioned by a mysterious client. Through the contrasting interplay of different voices, this dystopia models the frightening change in society from an open to an authoritarian one: how could it come to this, what were the first signs, what could have been done to counter it?

With Destruction and the other four novels in the "Haute Mer" pentalogy, from which readings were given on this evening, Cécile Wajsbrot not only reflects on the emergence of various art forms, their reception and their functions, but also provides a diagnosis of contemporary societies.

Cécile Wajsbrot, a multi-award-winning author, translator and literary scholar, lives alternately in Paris and Berlin and is therefore regarded as an exemplary representative of "writing between worlds". Her unique position within contemporary French literature is based on this, as her work not only questions and captures the immediate present like a seismograph, but is also characterized by an awareness of history and an interest in cultural mediation processes. In the 2018/19 winter semester, Cécile Wajsbrot held a DRESDEN Fellowship as the holder of the lectureship in poetics at the newly founded Centrum Frankreich | Frankophonie at the TUD Dresden University of Technology.

You can find more information about the colloquium on this page.

Some photo impressions of the event: