School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol

10-11 September 2014

LR8, 21 Woodland Road

  

Keynote speaker: Prof Hilary Footitt (University of Reading)

2014 will see a series of commemorative events and acts across the world that will seek to remind us of the seventieth anniversary of the defeat of fascism in Europe and of imperial Japan in Asia and the Pacific. This conference explores a range of cultural representations of the events of 1944-45 considering how these have contributed to the memory, but also the mythologisation of that period in a broad range of national cultures. In the West in particular, the events of 1944-45 are often simplified in popular historic memory, cast as the relatively unproblematic unshackling of nations from the Nazi yoke. The reality, however, was that what was for some liberation became for others occupation. The Allies’ former enemies now found themselves occupied by Allied forces and facing an uncertain future, posing a series of existential dilemmas as to the very existence of the nation in whose name war had been waged. Yet nations freed from occupation sometimes came to know a new form of ‘occupation’; this time at the hands of the liberating forces. The occupation/liberation binary in fact disguises a range of reactions and positions before the physical presence of another on one’s national territory which are discernible in a broad spectrum of cultural production since the Second World War. This conference will tease out these tensions and ambiguities through the analysis of cultural representations of liberation and occupation produced since the events of 1944-1945. It will consider how literature, film, art, photography and other cultural media embody and reflect a range of problems with which nations grappled for many years: what should one make of, and do with, those who had welcomed the former occupier? How should the liberated think of the seemingly all-powerful liberator who had supplanted the latter, often occupying the terrain he had held? How could a nation liberated by another’s hand reassert its own selfhood and heal (or hide) the divisions prompted by occupation and liberation? It will thus consider the ways in which such cultural representations simplify the period, contributing to its mythologisation within a nation’s memory, or, conversely, complicate our understanding of it, promoting complexity but perhaps also proposing solutions to the problems posed by the passage from occupation to liberation (and vice versa).

In association with the Group for War and Culture Studies and supported by

Conference Programme

Wednesday 10 September

09.30 - 10.00 Registration

10.00 - 11.30 Panel 1: Perceptions of Occupation

Chair Ruth Glynn (Bristol)

Karine Varley (University of Strathclyde), ‘Occupiers Who Became Liberators: Remembering and Forgetting the Italian Occupation of France’

Ester Lo Biundo (University of Reading), ‘The Self-portrait of the British in the BBC Broadcasts to Italy (1943-45)’

Manu Braganca (Queen’s University, Belfast), ‘Quand la France occupait l’Europe’: WWII, Germans, and Germany in the Novels of the Hussards (1949-1954)’

11.30 - 12.00 Coffee

12.00 -1.00: Panel 2: Liberation/Occupation and its Aftermaths 1

Chair: John Flower (Kent)

Eugene Michail (Bader International Study Centre, Queen's University (CA)), ‘Who Won the War? The Politics of Remembering in Greece, from the 1940s to Today’

Carl Tighe (Derby): ‘Libertaion/Occupation: The Polish Case’

1.00 - 2.00 Lunch

2.00-3.30: Panel 3: Beyond Enemy Lines: the British and American Cultural Occupation of Germany, 1945

Chair: Mark Allinson (Bristol)

Lara Feigel (KCL), Wresting Comedy out of Ruin: Billy Wilder in Post-war Germany

Elaine Morley (KCL), ‘Ernst Robert Curtius: Cultural Criticism from the Liberated, Occupied Germanies’

Emily Oliver (KCL), ‘German Responses to Allied Cultural Initiatives, 1945-49’

3.30 - 4.00: Tea and coffee

4.00 - 5.00 Panel 4: Morality and Liberation

Chair: Martin Hurcombe (Bristol)

Marisa Escolar (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). 'Scrivere Napoli e poi...' Representing Liberation Naples in The Gallery, La pelle and Naples' 44'

Fraser Mann (York St John University), ‘ “Fitted into a fear ladder” – The paradox of Moral War in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead’

 

5.30 Keynote Lecture: Hilary Footitt (University of Reading), ‘A Transnational Liberation? Revisiting the Cultural Spaces of 1944-45’

Chair: John Flower (Kent)

 

 

Thursday 11 September 2014

9.30 - 10.30: Panel 5: Liberation / Occupation in Naples (1943-44)

Chair: Charles Burdett (Bristol)

Paola Gambarota (Rutgers University), ‘On the Liberation of Naples: Steinbeck, Gervasi, and Capa, Special Reporters’

Ruth Glynn (University of Bristol), ‘Gendering the Occupation in Liliana Cavani’s La pelle’

10.30 - 11 00.: coffee

11.00-12.30: Panel 6: Liberation/Occupation and its Aftermaths 2

Chair: John Flower (Kent)

Silvia Cassamagnaghi (Università degli Studi di Milano) ‘Not Just War Brides: The Encounter between American Soldiers and Italian Women’

Martyn Cornick (University of Birmingham), ‘The New Resistance? French Intellectual Realignments after the Liberation: The Case of Armand Petitjean’

Bill Kidd (University of Stirling), ‘Occupation-Liberation: The View from the lycée’

12.30 - 1.30: Lunch

1.30 - 3.00: Panel 7: Contemporary Francophone Literature and the Memory of 1944-45

Chair: Martin Hurcombe (Bristol)

Alan Morris (University of Strathclyde), ‘An Ever-Present Past: Didier Daeninckx’s Itinéraire d’un salaud ordinaire (2006) and Missak (2009)’

Helena Duffy (University of Wroclaw), ‘The Great Victory and Liberation in Andreï Makine’s Work’

Angela Kimyongür (University of Hull), ‘Representations of Summer 1944 in Contemporary French Crime Fiction’

3.00 - 3.30 Coffee

3.30 - 4.30: Panel 8: Representing Liberation: France, Visual Culture and Memory

Chair: Siobhan Shilton (Bristol)

Hanna Diamond (Cardiff University), ‘Those “glorious days”: Photography, Memory and the Liberation of Paris

Claire Gorrara (Cardiff University), ‘What the Liberator Saw: Bert Hardy, Photography and the Liberation of Normandy’

4.45 - 5.45  Roundtable and concluding remarks Summarised and chaired by Prof John Flower (University of Kent)

Participants: Hilary Footitt, Carl Tighe, John Flower, Paola Gambarota

 

Venues

Registration and all refreshments: Student Common Room, 17 Woodland Road

All panels, keynote lecture and round table discussion: LR8, at the rear of 21 Woodland Road.

 

Any enquiries may be directed to Martin Hurcombe (martin.hurcombe@bristol.ac.uk) or James McFarthing (fhjrmf@bristol.ac.uk)