Beyond 'Écriture féminine': Repetition and Transformation in the Prose Writing of Jeanne Hyvrard by Cathy Helen Wardle

Abstract

554 Reviews Beyond 'Ecriture feminine': Repetition and Transformation in theProse Writing of JeanneHyvrard. By CATHY HELEN WARDLE. (MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 69) London: Maney. 2007. I45 pp. 05. ISBN 978-1-904350-63-7. Beyond 'Ecriturefeminine'is the firstfull-length book study on JeanneHyvrard, a cele brated French writer, thinker,and economist, who isnevertheless relativelyneglected in the critical literature. Criticism on Hyvrard has tended to focus on her depic tion of themother-daughter relationship, gender, and madness inorder to categorize her writing in terms of 'ecriture feminine' and to link her with other contemporary French women writers and thinkers, including Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray,Chan talChawaf, and Marguerite Duras. Cathy Helen Wardle's studymoves criticism of Hyvrard 'beyond' thepotentially reductive label of ecriturefeminine, instead explor inghow Hyvrard's (inter)textual repetition and transformationmay be seen to rewrite reductive binary oppositions and creatively open up the realm ofwhat Hyvrard calls la tiercepensee. The aim of the book is twofold: to show how Hyvrard's textual prac tice defies linearity and to rethink the engagement between text and reader that this textual practice invites and demands. Wardle begins by introducing the foundations ofHyvrard's thought and (re)defining key terms as a basis for rereading Hyvrard's ceuvre, exploring the relation between logosand chaos, the (im)possibility ofwriting theother, la tiercepens&e, contrairation, the concentrique, for instance, thatwill enable an alternative reading of her work. The study thenmoves on to consider Hyvrard's earliest works (the so-called 'Jeanne la folle' texts),which have received most critical attention todate, butwhich have almost exclusively been read in termsof the feminine and thematernal. Wardle successfully argues that these texts also productively en gage with wider issues, such as the relation between logosand chaos and the attempt to give voice to the chaotic. Where other critics have tended to read inHyvrard's work a nostalgic desire fora return to thematernal body,Wardle emphasizes thather repeated textual returns in factdeconstruct any such origin, maternal or otherwise. Beyond 'Ecriture feminine' analyses different forms of return and repetition within Hyvrard's work, beginning with textual repetition and moving on to intertextual repetition and autointertextual repetition (effectively intertextual repetition within one writer's ceuvre),which are identified as strategies thatwork to engage the reader actively with the text.The study ends with Hyvrard's autofictional texts,La Jeune morte, CELLLA, and Les Prunes de Cynthere, describing her life-writing as a form of citation that self-consciously (re)produces-rather than represents-the 'origin' (the author), destabilizing any notion of the author as 'creator' or origin' and of the text as stable and discrete entity.As Wardle convincingly argues, this compels the reader tomake connections, orwhat Hyvrard calls 'enceptions' (open-ended, plural connections thatstand incontrastwith logarchic 'concepts'), between the multiple in tertextual repetitions and transformationswithin Hyvrard's ceuvre. Beyond 'Ecriture feminine'fruitfully opens up thekey issues inHyvrardian criticism (gender,madness, mother-daughter relationships) to link themwith wider questions of how we concep tualize and order theworld. This study offersa lucid and compelling interpretation of Hyvrard thatmoves criticism of her work in a productive new direction. Itwill be of undoubted interest to researchers working on Hyvrard's writing and equally to those working in contemporary French (women's) writing and philosophy. As Wardle's conclusion shows, Hyvrard's writing negotiates a shift in theway we conceive of the world and thus potentially incites philosophical and even political change, mediated through shifting connections ('enceptions'), oppositions, and transformations. NEWCASTLEUNIVERSITY KATHRYN ROBSON ...