Dr. Boriana Alexandrova is a Senior Lecturer at York's Centre for Women’s Studies. She is the author of Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading (Palgrave, 2020) and has published articles on multilingual modernism, disability, trauma, and translation in Joyce Studies Annual, European Joyce Studies, and elsewhere. Her new project, Storytelling the Unspeakable: Trauma's Languages in Modern Literature and Performance, explores new, arts-led methods of both storytelling and reading the “scrappy archive” of trauma histories. Her case studies include contemporary #MeToo memoirs, performance artists such as Johanna Hedva and Marina Abramovic, queer Surrealists and anti-Nazi Resistance fighters Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, and others.
Boriana Alexandrova
Contributions
“A thousand times more painful than death”: Survival and Unspeakability in Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s Post-1945 Unpublished Writings
On June 30, 1945, the Jersey Evening Post on the Channel Island of Jersey ran a story boldly titled “Sentenced to Death by Island Nazis: The Story of Two Gallant Frenchwomen.” It was an interview with French Surrealist photographers, writers, sculptors, political activists, Resistance fighters, and life partners Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), just over a month after their release from Gloucester Street Prison in St. Helier, where they had been serving several sentences (including an imminent death sentence) for their Resistance activities on the island in the early 1940s