Louise Dupré: le Québec au féminin by Anne-Marie Jézéquel

Abstract

associated especially with Maurice Blanchot. For Qader, récit is linked to the idea of catastrophe since both notions involve a distancing between the subject (whose experience is not to be discounted) and the story which (s)he is telling, due to the fact that both involve using language a means of both addressing and turning away from a particular event or set of events. In this way, Qader uses the work of Boubacar Boris Diop, Tahar ben Jelloun and Abdelkebir Khatibi to present literature as a space that recounts catastrophic events yet allows for the inevitable silence and uncertainty involved in telling such traumatic tales. The fascinating conclusion of this text parallels the “feminine” as a category of excess with that of the slippery notion of the catastrophic, noting how the two can be associated as radical affirmations of the turn or rupture. In the style of the theoretical texts that underpin this work, the conclusion provides more new openings than closure, and is alone a useful document for use by pedagogues teaching about representations of femininity. Due to its complicated theoretical nature, this text would be most suitable for graduate students and specialists in the areas of literary theory, Francophone/ African studies, and Comparative Literature. The usefulness of this text in the latter area is remarkable, due to the uniqueness of this grouping of authors (especially the little-known corpus of Diop) and the author’s approach, which takes from European as well as African theory. This text insists upon the importance of recognizing Francophone North African countries as part of the continent, with their rich heritage of traditions from the wider Arabic world, of which Qader shows profound knowledge, in her constant references to that favorite of world literature, A Thousand and One Nights. Wagner College (NY) Christopher Hogarth JÉZÉQUEL, ANNE-MARIE. Louise Dupré: le Québec au féminin. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. ISBN 978-2-296-05736-4. Pp. 268. 24,50 a. Louise Dupré has been a central figure in Quebec literature since the 1980s, when she published her first collection of poetry and became an active participant in the theorization of contemporary Quebec women’s writing. A professor of literature at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Dupré published one of the first critical studies of her own generation of Quebec women poets, generously analyzing the work of three of her fellow poets, Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, and France Théoret. Yet, despite her continuing production of prizewinning poetry, it was the publication of her first novel, La Memoria, in 1996, as Anne-Marie Jézéquel points out, that brought her to the attention of a wider public. And the 2006 dramatic production based on Dupré’s poetic text on mothers and daughters, Tout comme elle, featuring fifty of Quebec’s best-known actresses, was a major event of the 2006 theatrical season that made her poetic voice audible to an even broader public (as I can attest from my conversations with audience members at a presentation at the International Francophone Theatre Festival in Quebec City later that year). With the publication of Jézéquel’s Louise Dupré: le Québec au feminin, at long last this important French-language writer has become the central subject of a scholarly study. Jézéquel—a Frenchwoman who moved to Montreal at a moment of great political and literary activity and went on to earn her doctorate in the United Reviews 583 States—is well placed to situate Dupré within the context of the Francophone world, as a writer capable of speaking to readers across cultural boundaries. It is appropriate that her book was published in Paris by the Francophone publisher L’Harmattan . As Jézéquel describes it, Dupré’s writing on love, loss, and memory, the intimate emotions of daily life, reflects a lifetime of experience as daughter, mother, wife, and lover. Although Jézéquel emphasizes the lack of Quebec particularism in Dupré’s use of the French language or in the nature of her poetic vision, her study is attentive to the specificity of Dupré’s coming to maturity at a moment of radical change in...