Shifting subjects : plural subjectivity in contemporary francophone women's autobiography / Natalie Edwards.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Edwards, Natalie.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French literature--20th century--History and criticism.

French literature.

Autobiography--Women authors--History and criticism.

Autobiography.

French literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

French literature--Women authors.

Autobiography--Authorship.

Self in literature.

Autobiography--Women authors.

Physical Description:

171 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Newark : University of Delaware Press, [2011]

Summary:

There are many different ways to say ôI.ö This book examines the ways in which four contemporary women writers (Helene Cixous, Assia Djebar, Gisele Halimi, and Julia Kristeva) have written their autobiography ôIö as a plural concept. These women refuse the individual ôIö of traditional autobiography by developing narrative strategies that multiply the voices in their texts. They similarly cast doubt upon current theorizations of the female self in autobiography by questioning the possibility of plural selfhood in narrative and its seemingly cathartic effects. Each writer approaches autobiography as a site of catharsis for a specific trauma and each tells her story through multiple narrative voices in order to find atonement. The women's experiments with narrative voice are designed to render the female self accurately in narrative, but they simultaneously expose the difficulties inherent in writing the self plurally.

Taken together, the women who form the corpus of this book move beyond critics' current understandings of textual representations of selfhood. Informed by postcolonial and feminist approaches to selfhood, this book charts the history of theories of autobiography and plots new ways of imagining this genre. This cross-section of international writers calls for a new understanding of the inscription of female identity in narrative, not as a binary of individual versus plural selfhood, but as a cluster of categories of identify beyond ôIö and ôwe.ö Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: From the individual "I" to the non-unitary self

Gisèle Halimi's self-(re)writing project

Fictional doubles in Julia Kristeva's Les samouraïs

Archive and autobiography in Assia Djebar's Vaste est la prison

The displaced autobiographical subject in Hélène Cixous's Les reveries de la femme sauvage

Conclusion: New textual identities.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611490305

1611490308

9781611490312

1611490316

OCLC:

709890468