Ecriture Feminine Research Articles

Nature-Function in Caryl Phillips' Cambridge

Abstract: The consensus in ecocriticism today is that deconstructing the human/nonhuman binary is crucial if we want humanity to care for the environment. Indeed, viewing the environment as something to which we are connected is seen as more conducive to producing an environmentalist consciousness than seeing it as something categorically other. By contrast, my ecocritical reading of Caryl Phillips' Cambridge (1991) reveals the extent to which nonhuman landscapes in Caribbean fiction are paradoxically represented as categorically other. In Phillips' novel, this reification of the binary works in tandem with sites of difference such as race and gender to expose how the very category of is constructed through this process of othering. Instead of discussing the environment as backdrop to the human affairs and relations that it may or may not influence, in Cambridge the environment operates as form of nature-function that echoes Michel Foucault's of authorship. For Foucault, the author is not the originator of meaning but function of discourse, of the set of assumptions that govern the production, circulation, classification, and consumption of texts. Similarly, the notion of nature-function challenges approaches that foreground the environment as pre-existing space that evolves outside of the subject and instead sees it as function of discourse. In Phillips' text, this discursively produced environment then goes on to produce the human subject. Keywords: ecocriticism, Caryl Phillips, Cambridge, environment, human ********** At first sight, Caryl Phillips' fiction may not be an obvious candidate for an ecocritical analysis. Indeed, unlike Caribbean writers like Wilson Harris or Derek Walcott, whose work explicitly engages with the environment, (1) Phillips seems interested in it only peripherally or insofar as it helps him provide context for his characters. At recent colloquium in Belgium, he inquired about ecocritical studies in way that revealed his lack of active engagement with the discipline. (2) I argue that an ecocritical study of his work is nonetheless in order in the same way as feminists have shown the study of gender as a social category of analysis (Scott 1053) to be relevant in texts in which gender is not mentioned explicitly. After all, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), classic work of feminist literary criticism, focuses exclusively on male writers who were not priori writing about gender politics, and Helene Cixous identifies her transgressive ecriture feminine as embodied by the writings of male authors such as James Joyce and Jean Genet. Similarly, I argue that Phillips' fiction lends itself to an ecocritical reading not because his texts showcase the environment as motif but because of his noted adeptness at exposing the construction of boundaries between self and other, male and female. Insofar as our understanding of the environment is predicated on culture/nature, human/nonhuman binary and Phillips masterfully deconstructs binaries throughout his work, it is therefore unsurprising that his fiction provides excellent fodder for an ecocritical analysis. Two of ecocriticism's significant impacts have been to show that humans are part and parcel of the very environment from which they had previously seen themselves as separate (3) and that the so-called nonhuman other is always already part of the human body (Timothy Morton's strange strangers and Donna Haraway's companion species, for example). For instance, William Cronon's anthology The Trouble With Wilderness (1995) was instrumental in raising consciousness about humanity's imbrication with the natural world in way that contested the elitist concept of Nature-as-tableau-in-natural-parks-for-the-rich that often defined the nineteenth century's environmentalist movement la John Muir. (4) Similarly, Morton's Ecology Without Nature (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010) emphasize the interdependence of humanity and the environment in order to make people more accountable to an environment that is as much part of them as they are of it. …

Drifting towards Cosmopolis

This is an artist’s text where an experimental filmmaker explores cosmopolitanism in her own work and that of others. Talking about eclectic cosmopolitan theory, this article maps the role of the wanderer in literature and film. Investigating the cross-pollination of image, sound and text in experimental filmmaking, the writer charts her own position as a mediator of cultural elements in a globalised world, and the implications of feminist subjectivity. The article charts the making of the author’s cosmopolitan films made between the late 1980s and 2015, as well as the development of a practice that reflects a transnational consciousness. The text embeds a discussion of diaspora, and of appropriation and citation as the inevitable result of accelerated media profusion. Jewish identity is explored through text, and a dialogue with the world, refracted through subjective bricolage. A contextual introduction to the author’s films, this text explores diaspora, nomadism and Jewish and feminist consciousness in a globalised world. The film draws on eclectic sources to describe an identity in flux and a rhizomatic rather than rootless relation to diaspora. The text references Henry James, Rosi Braidotti, Jacques Derrida, Chris Kraus and others to sketch a transnational vision of twenty-first-century cosmopolitanism and ecriture feminine.

“Knowledge and taste go together”: Postdramatic Theatre, Écriture Féminine, and Feminist Politics

This article contributes to the emerging field of feminist approaches to postdramatic theatre. Through documenting and discussing my practice-as-research performance Rings, I suggest that there is an analogous relationship between postdramatic poetics and Helene Cixous’s ecriture feminine in regard to how both reformulate masculine-coded paradigms of knowledge. Rings is the result of a practical research process that adapted Cixous’s articulations on prose writing into theatre. The source material for this was her turn towards thingness and Heideggerian phenomenology following her experience of Clarice Lispector’s work in 1978. The outcomes of the practical research indicate that through producing an experience of an object’s thingness or being-in-the-world, theatre, like Cixous’s prose, is able to envision an alternative, feminine epistemological approach. By testing the practical findings against theories of the postdramatic, I go on to propose that postdramatic practices too have the potential to produce this kind of knowing. As such, this article argues that postdramatic theatre might have a particular appeal for feminist theatre makers and scholars, while also demonstrating that Cixous’s theories are of continuing relevance to feminist theatre studies.

English

Shahrnush Parsipur (1946) is a celebrated and courageous Iranian novelist. This study deals with her controversial, epic novel Touba and the Meaning of Night (1989). The novel is analyzed based on Lacanian theory of subject formation and Cixousian concept of ‘ecriture feminine. In this essay a psychoanalytic-feminist discourse is used to intervene between a phallogocentric discourse and a feminist discourse. The pivotal aims of the study are to deconstruct Lacan’s concept of phallogocentrism, to redefine the concept of womanhood and to reconstruct feminine identity. According to the French psychoanalyst, Jacque Lacan, it is language that ultimately structures our conscious and unconscious mind and our identity. He introduced a tripartite scheme of psychic development: imaginary, symbolic and real. The symbolic order and its accompanying concept of phallogocentrism is the main focus of this study. By deconstructing symbolic phallus as the transcendental signified which signifies everything including female identity, the researcher’s aim is to focus on the need for a female framework and a feminine discourse free from male assumptions in order to reconstruct feminine identity. Helene Cixous, in her essay The Laugh of Medusa (1975), introduces a particular kind of female writing and tries to reconstruct the women’s shattered, colonized and marginalized identities in order to deconstruct the dominant symbolic order and phallocentric discourse. The task of this studyis to deal with and to follow the trace of masculine ideology and discourse in women’s identity in the novel Touba and the Meaning of Night . The study also, inspired by Helene Cixous’sprophecy of women’s experience of writing in a male dominated atmosphere claims that through deconstruction and break down of phallogocentrism, female subjects are constructed and a new discourse for women is established based on which they can reconstruct and forge their new identities.

Feminism, Nationalism, Separatism? The Case of Alice Stopford Green

Alice Stopford Green, widow of proto-social and Teutonic nationalist historian J.R. Green, who went on to become an Irish nationalist historian and campaigner, complicates our view of fin-de-siecle women writers. Surprisingly for an amateur historian in an age of professionalization, she took a consciously separatist position, privileging the particular over the general, and defining her writing as both female and Irish.This article focuses on Stopford Green's 1915 epilogue to her husband's Short History of the English People (1874), and her startlingly anguished periodical article of 1897 from Nineteenth Century, to demonstrate a separatism both bold and self-aware.‘Woman's Place in the World of Letters’ (1897) prefigures Cixous in its call for an ecriture feminine. It views women as utterly alien to the established order of this world. Stopford Green at once acquiesces with female essentialisation – ‘woman’ comes in the singular – and undermines it by insisting that woman's true nature is almost never s...

'Écriture féminine, écriture traumatique': Reinscribing the Wounded (Female) Body in 'The Ravishing of Lol Stein'

Marguerite Duras’ novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, is considered an exemplary novel of ecriture feminine which breaks through the patriarchal discourse by portraying a woman who is dealing with psychological damage caused by her fiance’s betrayal. This novel has been regarded as an important work in world literature as well as in feminist studies, but the insights that the novel provides into the human – especially feminine – psyche deserve more attention. The Ravishing of Lol Stein was even praised by the celebrated French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, as grasping his teachings without needing his help. Accordingly, this novel contains elements that are crucial to gender studies as well as to psychoanalysis. This leads to the question: what is the relationship between the two disciplines and how does the celebrated novel use psychological wounds as a vehicle through which to link gender issues, physical and psychological trauma, and the potential for empowerment of a woman who experienced a psychologically damaging experience? In this study, I analyze how the violent language of trauma serves as a crucial point of intersection for ecriture feminine and psychoanalysis in the case of The Ravishing of Lol Stein . Coetaneous psychoanalytic terms refer to trauma as the repression caused by an encounter with the Real which is manifested as a disruption in language (Jacques Lacan). Both ecriture feminine and trauma become acts of textual violence that defy language, causing narratives to challenge conventional language, structure, and form. This textual violence permeates the The Ravishing of Lol Stein and I will demonstrate how it occurs on various levels such as narration, structure, form, and – of course – language and content itself.

The Study of The Works of Haegue Yang : An Approach through Marguerite Duras and ecriture feminine’

양혜규는 최근 프랑스의 여성 소설가 마르그리트 뒤라스에 대한 관심을 전시와 번역서 출간, 연극, 영화제 개최 등 다양한 방식으로 드러내고 있다. 또한 양혜규는 뒤라스를 여성주의로 해석한 줄리아 크리스테바(Julia Kristeva)를 자신의 출판물에서 자주 인용하고 있는데, 크리스테바는 남성과는 다른 여성성을 인정해야 한다는 차이의 페미니즘을 주장한 프랑스 페미니스트들 중 한사람이다. 프랑스의 페미니스트들은 여성의 차이를 드러내기 위한 방법으로서의 ‘여성적 글쓰기(ecriture feminine)’를 주장하며, 뒤라스를 여성적 글쓰기를 하는 유일한 프랑스 작가로 손꼽기도 했다. 따라서 본 논문은 뒤라스의 글쓰기, 그리고 그것을 여성적 글쓰기로 정의한 차이의 페미니즘, 그리고 양혜규의 작업이 갖는 관계를 탐구해보고자 한다. Ⅱ 장에서는 마르그리트와 뒤라스와 여성적 글쓰기가 어떻게 연결되는지를 탐구해보고자 한다. 뒤라스는 프랑스 식민지였던 베트남에서 보낸 유년시절을 자신의 소설 속에서 다양하게 변주한다. 프랑스의 페미니스트들은 뒤라스를 여성적 글쓰기 작가로 지목하는 것 역시 뒤라스의 무의식을 지배하는 이 유년 시절의 상징성과 기억의 잔상을 고스란히 전달하는 감각적 글쓰기의 방식 때문이다. 뒤라스와 차이의 페미니즘은 여성의 신체가 가진 타자적 특성을 드러내는 글쓰기를 지향하고자 하는데, 구체적으로는 이성과 연관되는 시각보다는 청각이나 촉각적 감각을 중시하는 공감각성을 강조해 여성 신체의 타자성을 드러내고자 하며, 여성을 억압하는 이분법적 구조를 자유롭게 위반하는 글쓰기를 시도하고자 한다. Ⅲ 장에서는 뒤라스와 여성적 글쓰기가 공유하는 이러한 특성을 양혜규가 자신의 작업에서 어떻게 재현하고 있는지를 살펴보고자 한다. 첫 번째로, 양혜규는 뒤라스와 여성적 글쓰기의 공감각적 텍스트를 블라인드와 함께 가습기, 적외선 히터, 향 분사기 등 여러 가지 감각기계들을 사용함으로써 재현해낸다. 두 번째로 양혜규는 뒤라스와 여성적 글쓰기가 위반하고자 하는 이분법 구조를, ‘쌍’과 ‘짝’, ‘삼각형’과 같은 개념을 사용해 번역하고 있다. 양혜규의 ‘쌍’이나 ‘짝’이라는 개념은 서로 적대적이고 위계 관계를 갖는 대립적 요소로서의 남성적 이분법이 아닌 서로의 차이를 인정하고 공존하고 경계를 위반하는 것이 가능한 여성적 글쓰기의 이분법 개념과 연계된다. ‘삼각형’ 역시 대립적이고 공존하기 어려운 이분법적 쌍이 하나 더 추가된 이분법의 확장된 개념이자 이분법의 경계가 무너진 상태로도 볼 수 있을 것이다. 세 번째로 양혜규는 타자들이 공존하는 공간을 글쓰기를 통해 창출하고자 했던 뒤라스와 여성적 글쓰기를 ‘집’과 ‘집 없음’이라는 개념과 연관해 번역한다. 뒤라스에게 집은 가정과 모국이라는 두 가지 의미를 갖는데, 양혜규에게 가정은 부엌이나 가전기구와 같은 오브제들과 연관되어 집의 개념으로 작품화되고, 모국은 노마드나 디아스포라(diaspora) 등의 개념과 연결되어 ‘집 없음’의 개념과 연결되어 드러난다. 최근에는 집과도 같은 자신의 작품에 집 없는 사람들, 특히 역사적 디아스포라와 연결된 인물들을 불러오는 작업들을 보여주고 있다. 양혜규와 뒤라스의 ‘집’과 ‘집 없음’은 단순히 대비되는 짝을 이루는 것에서 그치지 않고, 집이 결국 모국이나 집을 잃어버린 디아스포라들을 위한 공간이 되도록 한다는 점에서 양혜규-뒤라스-차이의 페미니즘(여성적 글쓰기)라는 삼각형은 양혜규-뒤라스-탈식민성의 삼각형을 형성할 수 있는 가능성을 보여주는 것이라고도 할 수 있을 것이다. 뒤라스는 여성적 글쓰기와 차이의 페미니즘 그리고 탈식민주의 논의의 교집합에 위치시킬 수 있는 작가이며, 양혜규는 뒤라스를 번역하면서도 보다 확장된 탈식민성에 관심을 보인다는 점에서 역시 그 두 담론의 교집합과 연계될 수 있는 작가이다. 뒤라스와 여성적 글쓰기의 관계를 통해 양혜규의 작업을 보고자 하는 것은 그녀의 작업을 단순히 페미니즘 논의로 한정시키려는 시도라기보다는 탈식민주의 연구와의 접목을 통해 보다 확장된 최근의 페미니즘 논의로 연결시키고자 하는 것이라고 할 수 있다.

Female Figurations in Kiarostami’s the Wind Will Carry Us

L’essai qui suit met en lumière l’importance de la représentation des femmes dans le film The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) du réalisateur Iranien Abbas Kiarostami. L’étude soutient l’idée que les personnages féminins, peu nombreux, ont un impact sur la transformation du personnage principal, Behzad, que l’on nomme, avec déférence, “l’ingénieur”. Dans son affection pour la poésie, il manifeste déjà une ouverture pour l’adoption de nouvelles perspectives face à la vie. De surcroît, le film fait un tableau de l’écriture féminine dans sa circularité, dans sa répugnance à l’achèvement, son accentuation de la beauté de la vie. La poésie, disséminée dans le récit, souligne l’importance de “l’écriture féminine” qui, avec l’accent qu’elle met sur la vie, mène Behzad, qui était initialement obsédé par la mort, à recouvrer l’appréciation de ses beautés multiformes.

Ecriture Féminine dans L’amour , la Fantasia D’assia Djebar

In women’s writing, Assia Djebar raises questions about the feminine condition in Algeria, in the different historical, social, political contexts. As the first lady to have introduced “insurrection” in her writing about Algeria, she creates words of liberation to substantiate Algerian women’s experience, so that in their turn, they might bring about a new generation of free and solidary women as the fictional world of Djebar does not cease to claim. This article examines Assia Djebar’s novel, L’Amour, la Fantasia (1985) from the perspective of the feminine thought elaborated in Helene Cixous’ article The Laugh of the Medusa (1975). Djebar incarnates the model of ecriture feminine , and incorporates its practices in her narrative, in the way Cixous considers them in her article.

„Nie ma nic lepszego niż teoria.” Kilka uwag o praktyce teoretycznej współczesnych awangardowych pisarek amerykańskich (Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Carla Harryman)

The essay discusses theoretical practices of three major American experimental women writers associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and Carla Harryman, who played a crucial role in shaping the present-day critical and theoretical literary debate regarding the status of formally radical literature engaged in questions of feminist epistemology and written by women. Devoted to language and its ideological dimension, their work is based on a wager that poetic practice is a socially engaged strategy of intervention (Harryman), and as such functions as a language-oriented feminist epistemology. Hejinian, Scalapino, and Harryman created a significant literary and theoretical body of work that includes complex genre-bending hybrid texts deeply rooted in contemporary feminist discourses and preoccupied with such issues as production of knowledge, meaning, identity, gender, and sexuality, hidden ideological mechanisms of the conventional narrative, and the imperative of its constant refiguration. The article is also an attempt to see their work in a broader context of feminist thought, ranging from ecriture feminine, through Judith Butler’s and Denise Riley’s critiques of identity politics, to the posthumanist horizon of Donna Haraway’s cyborg writing.

L'écriture romanesque au Maroc ou le paradigme de la diversité

The novelistic genre in Morocco is becoming a space marked by a poetics of movement and diversity. A new aesthetic and a plurality of meanings and signifiers have given Moroccan novels written in French their place in contemporary literarature. Indeed, diversity relates, in the first place, to literary genre, given the choice of auto-fiction as a veritable textual space for hybridisation, allowing, as it does, a certain degree of (con)fusion within a single genre. Diversity is then the result of the dialogue between orality and literarity present in several novels featuring a host of carnivalistic techniques intended to defend a culture's oral heritage while simultaneously preserving its popular essence. Finally, diversity is impossible in the absence of ecriture feminine, which seeks to legitimise its own identity and establish another culture, demanding equality while defending the right to difference. In short, the originality and heterogeneity of Morocco's literary and cultural scene are accentuating ...

Feminist Stylistics: A Lexico-grammatical Study of the Female Sentence in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Hume-Sotomi’s The General’s Wife

This paper is a stylistic study of the major aspects of lexis and grammar which exemplify the dialectics of genderlectal linguistics in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Hume-Sotomi’s The General’s Wife. Both texts are separated in period and culture by about a hundred and seventy eight years as well as sub genre, the former being explicitly fictional whereas the latter belongs to the genre of faction. Employing the postulations of feminine stylisticians such as Virginia Woolf, Sara Mills, Deidre Burton as well as those of French feminists such as Jacques Lacan, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, supported by Halliday’s scale and category grammar as its theoretical basis, the study appraises the major lexical and grammatical components of the ‘female sentence’ or ‘ecriture feminine’. In doing this, the research attempts to discover whether it is indeed the case that women’s writing is stylistically unique or just a deviation from men’s writing considered as the norm. On the evidence in both texts, the research concludes affirmatively that ‘ecriture feminine’ is at once unique and androgynous.

A viva evocacao da impossibilidade: Uma analise pos-modernista de Agua viva de Clarice Lispector

This article analyzes the novel Agua viva by Clarice Lispector in light of the main postmodernist theories of the second half of the twentieth century. This approach examines the Claricean text as ecriture , in which there is no communication of a moral or cognitive message, but the representation of the unrepresentable or the ineffable. The narrator expresses emotions and feelings, as well as corporal sensations through the own materiality of the signifier without the presence of a transcendental signified. The analysis focuses on concepts such as the pleasure of the text or jouissance (Barthes), ecriture feminine (Cixous), sublime/ differend (Lyotard), and arche-ecriture/differance (Derrida). It also uses Foucault's concept of the reorganization of historical discourse and McHale's dominant. This study challenges the argument that the text fails in the act of expression or communication by trying to reach an absolute plenitude through the use of arbitrary signs that do not succeed in representing reality. However, this interpretation comes from a mimetic conception of language, in which language is considered as an agent of signification or transmission of a message. The postmodern art of Lispector does not look for an absolute representation, but renounces it with the purpose of representing (intensively) the unrepresentable through a new aesthetics of language. The success of Agua viva lies in a Claricean plenitude of the ineffable, where there is an auto-reflexive movement of implosion into the subject/text, as well as an ontological search of a unique universe ruled by its own norms. linguagem e o meu esforco humano. Por destino volto com as maos vazias. Mas —volto com o indizivel (Clarice Lispector, A paixao segundo G.H.)

Womans Reconciliation of Domestic Life and Self Development in Elizabeth Stuart Phelpss the Angel Over the Right Shoulder

Women face an everlasting issue of dividing their time for domestic life and self-development as the work of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Angel Over the Right Shoulder, portrays. It shows that there is inequality between man and woman. The research aims to investigate the main reasons of the problem. It shows that men and women have their own language. This research applies Ecriture Feminine which bases itself on the belief that feminity is qualitatively different from masculinity and it needs an alternative form of language in order to express adequately the difference, something which would benefit both men and women Keywords : system, unity, reconciliation, Feminine Ecriture

All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature (review)

Reviewed by: All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature Capper Nichols All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature. Edited by Brady Harrison. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 271 pages, $50.00. In his introduction to this satisfying collection of literary criticism, Brady Harrison writes, “[Each] of the scholars … engages an abiding issue in western studies: does place or region matter?” (xvi). Though the title and scope of the book suggests it does matter, Harrison is skeptical about the possibility of a coherent, bounded “Montana.” But that’s not the same as saying that boundaries aren’t telling. According to Harrison, “writers and scholars can still explore and argue over the implications and nuances of place, nature, history, memory, self, desire, and more in the lived and imaginative experiences of Montana and the West” (xvii). Harrison describes such engagement as building on the work of previous critics and historians and filling in a “few more pages” on the Montana literary story. But this is too modest. In taking up neglected writers and critical practices and expanding the scholarship on the familiar, this collection serves as a significant contribution to Montana criticism. The twelve essays in the volume are divided into five sections: (1) Does Place Matter? (2) Women Writing Montana (3) Gay and Lesbian Literature under a Big Sky (4) Native Revisions/The Problems of History and (5) Hugo-Land. Harrison’s effective introduction sets the scene, providing a synopsis of previous Montana criticism for the uninitiated, a description of the book’s contents, as well as the analysis of regionalism. One of the book’s best essays is William Bevis’s “Feminism and Post-modernism in the New West: Mary Blew and Montana Women’s Writing since 1990.” Bevis claims that in the 1990s a new sort of western women’s writing began to appear, works by the feminist granddaughters of pioneer women. He concentrates on Blew’s All But the Waltz (1991) and Judy Blunt’s memoir Breaking Clean (2002). The long “suppressed” stories of women offer not only new perspectives (forefronting gender roles, for example, as Blunt does) but do so in a new way—using a fragmented or “quilted” narrative that Bevis cites as a “homespun metaphor for ecriture feminine” (80). Nancy Cook’s essay on the Montana romance novel is an intriguing, if at first blush unlikely companion, to the piece on Blew and Blunt. Karl Olson’s essay on queer ambivalence in Montana literature is another highlight of the collection. Olson is interested in “the tragic consequences of homoerotic desire ... in the western imagination” [End Page 312] (104). He focuses on two novelists, Myron Brinig and Thomas Savage, who “bestow a distinct but subtle queerness ... on more universal forms of tragedy” (104). Olson offers queerness as a metaphor for western ambivalence and alienation—but of a sort that pushes beyond tragedy and nostalgia. “As counterintuitive as it seems,” he writes, queerness might provide an impetus for necessary change, might even lead to the region’s salvation by unraveling, queering Manifest Destiny (113). The subsequent essay, by O. Alan Weltzien, again takes up Savage (who he cites as an inexplicably neglected writer), specifically his novel Power of the Dog (1967), along with Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” (1997). Weltzien’s discussion of these works and the impacts of homophobia complements Olson’s essay. Richard Hugo is a Montana writer who has not lacked critical attention, as Harrison points out in the introduction. But no excuses are necessary for including Steve Davenport’s excellent piece on Hugo’s Montana poems, an essay that addresses “Hugo’s blue-collar worry, the economic and emotional or spiritual poverty of Montana Indians, and the tough style he leavened over time with sentiment” (201). In the following, and last essay, Lois Welch writes a brief history of the University of Montana’s influential writing program, which began in 1919, and which Hugo was a part of from 1964 to 1982. This piece fits well with the Davenport essay and with Harrison’s introduction, filling out the work of contextualizing the collection. There’s plenty more good work in between: Jim Rains’s essay on...

Eudora Welty’s “A Curtain of Green”: Overcoming Melancholia through Writing

“A Curtain of Green,” the title story of Eudora Welty’s first collection, may not be one of Welty’s best known short stories, and readers may easily overlook it due to the other more memorable works in Welty’s 1941 collection. Welty admits that the reason the short story was chosen as the title for the book was because it “was the only story that there wasn’t a strong feeling about from everybody” (“Fiction” 18). Yet the story is equally as complex and well written as the others. Welty sets the majority of the stories in A Curtain of Green in the late nineteen-twenties to early nineteenforties South, and the title story is no exception. Scholars who have analyzed the link between Welty and the time period in which she was writing contribute greatly to Welty studies and to the interpretation of “A Curtain of Green.” 1 However, using a different approach and viewing Welty from a feminist perspective, the reader can gain new insight into the actions of Mrs. Larkin, the main character in the story. Mrs. Larkin’s garden-work exemplifies what Helene Cixous calls ecriture feminine. 2 It is through her gardening as ecriture feminine that Mrs. Larkin is able to break through the state of melancholia that has plagued her for over a year. Cixous calls women to writing when she states: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into history—by her own movement” (“Laugh” 2039). The writing that Cixous demands of women should not be limited only to the confines of pen and paper—those are the demands of writing as defined by the patriarchy. Women must find additional ways to write their bodies. Cixous explains, “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist” (2046). Since there is no defined feminine writing, women are able to think outside the restrictions of paper and pen and are free to write creatively through other means. Alice Walker writes in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens of her mother as an artist; she explains that her mother

Mundane Interruptions: The Insignificance of Hélène Cixous’s Le Jour où je n’étais pas là

Although Cixous's writing would certainly not be described as common or ordinary, her theories on writing emphasize the importance of the everyday, the unnoticed instants and passages make up life and are not in fact insignificant simply because they are quotidian in nature. We want to draw the instant, she explains in Stigmata, Escaping Texts, that instant which strikes between two instants, instant which flies into bits under its own blow, which has neither length, nor duration, only its own shattering brilliance, the shock of the passage from night to (Stigmata 29). The instant between main plot points, just before the confession or just after the murder: these are the interest Cixous and make up an essential part of what she considers ecriture feminine. She explains in Photos de racines a story's most intense occur between the scenes: La richesse d'une histoire se situe dans les interstices. Dans le grand theatre, les les plus bouleversants sont toujours les apres ou avants. Avant le crime, apres la trahison, apres la separation (77). These impermanent instances are crucial to ecriture because, like the itself, they are generally repressed or covered over and left unnoticed. Cixous describes in terms similar to those used to describe the passage of the text, as an infinitesimal passage from one moment or being to another. Referring to la sexuelle by its initials (read also la deesse), Cixous explains La >--n'est pas une region, ni une chose, ni un espace precis entre deux, elle est le mouvement meme, le reflechissement [...] l'insaisissable qui me touche, qui venant du plus proche me donne par eclairs a moi-meme l'impossible moi-autre (Contes 56). This imprecise moment of encounter between the masculine and the either within one person or between two people is, she explains, what ecriture attempts to translate into language: C'est ce que l'ecriture essaie de faire : le compte rendu de ces evenements invisibles (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 57). It is these invisible moments of language, emotion, and life, otherwise taken for granted, Cixous unearths in her theory and fiction. In her recent work on these of passage, Cixous has not abandoned the project of ecriture she first proposed in the 1970s. The language of this project has changed somewhat, however, and it is in this light I am approaching this study, as an exploration of Cixous's current discussion of ecriture and its relation to the literature of the twenty first century. In this perspective, I would like first to emphasize an important shift in her vocabulary. While maintaining the fundamental understanding of the as which has been repressed, Cixous tends at present to discuss sexual difference rather than feminine writing, and in place of the disruption of the binary, an effort continually crucial to the project, she seems to concentrate more on the notion of passage. While shifting terms, Cixous insists on the basic goals of her project: to reveal the by unearthing what has been repressed without in turn repressing the masculine, to work on the interaction between the masculine and the in order to allow for exchange rather than a struggle for superiority. In terms of this study, the repressed is approached not in terms of the feminine, but rather as those passages, those off-stage scenes, those in which language and text are seemingly overlooked simply because they are ordinary. In the 1990s, Cixous began to use a term aptly describes this imperceptible moment of passage: the entredeux. She employs this term in her 1998 work, Deluge, a fiction depicting the raw charge of one particular emotion. mourning. She explains the term entredeux in Photos de Racines, an extensive interview with Mireille Calle-Gruber: Le mot > : c'est un mot dont je me suis servie recem ment dans Deluge pour designer veritablement un entredeux--entre une vie qui s'acheve et une vie qui commence. …

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

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 ...

Territoriality Disputes, Pollution and Abjection in Nathalie Sarraute and Hélène Lenoir

Despite the number of surveys of contemporary French fiction that have appeared in the last decade or so, (1) the emergence of journal series such as Ecritures contemporaines (2) and the publication of journal special numbers devoted to contemporary fiction, (3) the question of Nathalie Sarraute's literary legacy remains largely uncharted territory. In some respects this is not surprising. Notwithstanding the valiant efforts and intelligent readings of critics such as Sarah Barbour and John Philips, (4) Sarraute does not fit comfortably within the category of ecriture feminine, (5) Moreover, the concept of tropismes that is so central to her work and her extension of its application to include human behaviour have perhaps been perceived as too idiosyncratically sarrautian for it to have been taken up by subsequent generations of writers. Of the very few contemporary writers whose names have figured alongside that of Sarraute, Helene Lenoir is one of the more frequently mentioned. In their reviews of Lenoir's Le Repit and Bourrasque, both Celine Geoffroy and Pierre Lepape cite Sarraute as the principal comparator, (6) while Dominique Viart's very useful survey chapter on the contemporary French literary scene identifies Lenoir, Laurent Mauvignier and Gisele Fournier as the most obvious heirs of Sarraute. (7) Lenoir, in one of her infrequent public statements--a short article entitled La Litterature contre la betise--quotes an anecdote told by Sarraute concerning the sense of the title of disent les imbeciles (8). However, these references remain very brief and to date there has been no substantial comparative analysis of the work of the two authors. This article aims to open up a potentially rewarding topic of enquiry through the comparative study of two texts--Sarraute's Vous les entendez? (9) and Lenoir's Bourrasque (10)--which, on detailed analysis, reveal a quite remarkable pattern of thematic and structural correspondences. Here, the application of concepts derived from anthropological and psychoanalytical theory will provide the conceptual framework for the reading of a novel (Bourrasque) that has hitherto received only scant critical attention, and the rereading of another (Vous les entendez?) that has tended to be somewhat eclipsed by the novels that preceded and followed it (Entre la vie et la mort, 1968, and disent les imbeciles, 1976). Thus, in addition to itemising the main similarities between the fictional situations and forms of the two texts, the first part of the article will also examine the ways in which the apparently trivial quarrels over domestic space and privacy and the minor infractions of codes relating, for example, to hospitality, commensality, aggregation, separation, and the crossing of boundaries between public and personal spaces act as pretexts for the exploration of much more serious territorial battles and taboo violations. The second part will focus more precisely on the presence in both texts of a dynamic centred on the relationship between purity anal pollution, between the act of abjecting and the abject state. This section of the article will take its cue from Ann Jefferson's ground-breaking analysis of difference and the denial of difference in Sarraute's work. Here, in two incisive chapters that draw, albeit briefly, on the theory of Mary Douglas and, rather more fully, on that of Julia Kristeva, Jefferson traces the recurrence, across Sarraute's work, of motifs relating to pollution, contamination and abjection in order to demonstrate Sarraute's commitment [...] to [...] indistinction (11) in her depiction of intersubjectivity and to illustrate her conception of the work of art as a means of transcending intersubjective relations through the transformation of difference into sameness. (12) The present study accepts Jefferson's conclusions and will build upon this foundation, but--in addition to extending the models to the study of Lenoir's text--will also argue that the motifs of pollution and abjection are part of a more generalised fascination in Vous les entendez? …

"Treblinka, A Rather Musical Word": Carole Maso's Post-Holocaust Narrative

This paper argues that Carole Maso's novel AVA demands to be read not only as an instance of ecriture feminine but also as a piece of post-Holocaust literature. This reading refocuses attention on one of the novel's major themes and helps to rethink the contested category of post-Holocaust fiction itself. AVA demonstrates the profound effect the Holocaust has had on American art since the end of World War II, illustrating the extent to which the terms "postmodern" and "post-Holocaust" have become synonymous. It also contributes to an understanding of contemporary American cultural production as melancholic.