Alexandra Kurmann

Biography

Alexandra Kurmann is a Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies. She completed a PhD in Comparative French and German Literature in 2014 at the University of Melbourne and her first book entitled Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader, was published in 2016 with Lexington Books. Her monograph reveals the intertextual relationship between the contemporary French-Vietnamese author, Linda Lê, and the author's self-chosen precursor, the post-war Austrian poet-turned-writer, Ingeborg Bachmann. It argues that Lê replaces an intratextual paternal reader that haunts her texts with an imaginary literary forebear of the European exile writing tradition. Rereading Lê through the refocused lens of her relations with Bachmann reveals the evolution of a feminist resistance derived from early interpretations of an Antigonean rhetoric in Bachmann's novel-cycle. Concurrently, hybridity discourses in Lê's exile writing open out a third space of enunciation, which resolves issues of female subjectivity in her precursor's texts.

Research Interest

Alex's research interests lie in Comparative and World Literature. In particular she works on Vietnamese diasporic writing from a global perspective, and more broadly on Postcolonial Francophone literature, European exile and Asian migrant writing. She would welcome the opportunity to supervise research projects that relate to any of these fields.