Feminist Fiction Research Articles

Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim

Reviewed by: Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim Raquelle K. Bostow (bio) Annabel L. Kim. Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions. The Ohio State UP, 2018. 263 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1384-1. Annabel Kim’s book Unbecoming Language breathes new life into French feminist theory and fiction. While labeling the book as “theory” is a misnomer, Kim’s argument that the writers and novels studied present a poetics of “unbecoming” not only re-endows literary narrative with the stimulating power to generate theoretical ideas, but also allows literature to energize French feminism and theory with the politicized charge of “anti-difference,” long neglected in American studies of these traditions and movements. Kim defines “anti-difference French feminism” as a rejection of the idea of sexual difference as essential and argues instead that such difference is constructed (2). While some strands of differentialist French feminism also argue that difference is constructed, Kim’s anti-difference French feminism imagines the possibility of leaving the idea of “difference” behind altogether. In Unbecoming Language, Kim unveils anti-differentialist thought that presents subjectivity without subjecthood, what Kim calls unbecoming, by reading together for the first time the works of Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta. Collectively, Kim claims that their works “hollow out difference and rework our subjectivity” by resisting the literary fabrication of identity (4). This process of unbecoming is stimulated by these authors’ common belief in “language’s potential to transform a reality marked by compulsory identification and seemingly inescapable difference” (84). Kim establishes an anti-differentialist feminist poetics through this thorough study and places it firmly on par with differentialist French feminism. Unbecoming Language makes a valuable contribution to the field of French Studies, and to its branches of French feminisms and contemporary French fiction, but also to the study of contemporary literature more broadly. The book’s introduction provides a presentation of the main argument as well as a helpful biography of each writer studied before moving on to definitions of terms and methodology. Working with the claim that difference is built on sameness––that is, that identity categories require collectives of “sameness” that bind individuals within an identity category––Kim argues that Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta instead forego the idea of difference, which, the author powerfully asserts, has practical applications. In the introduction and elsewhere, Kim interrogates the ways in which engaging with “unbecoming language” might influence the way we unknow ourselves and thus others. This becomes an underlying goal of the book: to propose a radical disarmament that makes “difference” easier to bear, or at the very least, to remember that our world based on difference is a fictive fabrication. The project is admittedly utopian (34), but refreshing and welcomed. The introduction presents ample evidence to demonstrate the relationship between these three authors and the book’s organization and methodology are major strengths. Unbecoming Language is organized into four chapters: the first three examine each writer’s corpus independently through the lens of “unbecoming language,” [End Page 996] while tending to their overlaps, and the fourth constructs a feminist poetics inspired by the combined study of Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta. Another strength in Kim’s approach is the choice to read these authors outside of a theoretical framework. While the reader may expect to engage with “French theory” or “queer theory” in a book that argues for the disintegration of identity, Kim’s work insists rather on these novels’ capacity to fashion theory on their own, thereby resisting the division between “narrativity” (or literature) and “theory.” This approach seems appropriate given that reading these authors through a pre-existing theoretical framework would not correspond with the book’s project to shed identity labels, as Kim explains. Instead, these authors generate a new relationship with language that allows for a “subjectivity without subjecthood,” or “a non-delineated subjectivity” (32) . . . a framework that could very well become a “theory” itself. In Chapter 1, “Sarraute’s Indeterminacy,” Kim rejects the traditional reading that categorizes Sarraute as a New Novelist or as a woman writer. Instead, Kim asks about the possibilities that arise when Sarraute is read alongside Wittig and Garr...

Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me

Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me Nicole Graev Lipson (bio) My mother smoked before she had us. In a sepia polaroid from the early seventies, she holds a cigarette between two lacquered fingertips. She wears, impossibly, a catsuit, and hair falls over her shoulders in glossy waves as she leans into my father, squeezing his cheeks and grinning. He is in trouble—oh, is he in trouble. Alone in the house as a teenager, I would rummage under silk scarves and lint brushes to get to this photo at the bottom of my mother’s drawer. It was the sole window into a side of her I didn’t know—the side that lounged on loveseats and took long drags from skinny cigarettes, smoke plunging deep as her neckline. The mother I knew taught elementary school. She wore Nina Ricci perfume and houndstooth blazers and combs in her hair. She drank orange juice and sprinkled her food with lecithin. She most certainly did not smoke. Except when she did. One cigarette a day, 365 days a year, for the twenty-four years she was married to my father. One cigarette, slipped under her sleeve before the dog’s evening walk, a secret that smoldered on her fingers and lips as she circled our block in the dark. My father didn’t know. My brother didn’t know. None of us would know until years later—after an even bigger secret burned to the surface, blazing through our lives like a five-alarm fire. [End Page 121] ________ My freshman year in college, I read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening for a Feminist Fictions course. There are books that seem to glide into our lives at a particular time as if by design, finishing thoughts just partially formed in our mind. I remember feeling this way as I read The Awakening, rooting at every step for heroine Edna Pontellier, the fin-de-siècle wife and mother who breaks from social convention to explore the creative and sensual parts of her being. Edna rejects her staid marriage and pursues an affair. She moves out of her marital home, with its schedules and servants, and into a small cottage, drawing and dreaming of her lover. Do all good girls edging toward womanhood fall in love with Edna? Maybe so, but in my own private falling, I was thrillingly alone. Away from home for the first time, free for the first time to consider what rules I wanted to live by, I read the whole novella in one sitting. In Edna’s stirrings, I came face-to-face with my own. During the day, I attended classes, wrote outlines, made the dean’s list. At night, I pressed myself into strangers, cracking through the walls of my body and all that had ever defined me. Twenty-five years later, I still have my Penguin Classics edition of The Awakening and Selected Stories. It lives on a bookshelf outside my youngest daughter’s room, a bookshelf crammed full floor to ceiling. There are my pedagogy books from graduate school and my Shakespeare plays from teaching; there are my husband Paul’s business school textbooks and Latin American guidebooks and Jonathan Franzen novels; there are What to Expect When You’re Expecting and How to Raise a Jewish Child. It’s an unlikely library, the kind only marriage can create, two readers conjoined on the shelves as one. As I carried my daughter to bed a few months ago, my eye fell on the Chopin book. I lingered for a moment, her three-year-old legs dangling over my hips, and pulled it from the shelf. Later, the three kids asleep, Paul at his computer, I lay on the couch and opened its yellowing pages. There were notes all over the margins, written in purple pen—the scrawled insights of a girl I’d long ago outgrown. Must listen to own desires, she wrote. Strength in solitude, she wrote. How strange it was to discover this person was still with me—that she’d been with me, still and patient, all along. ________ In October, Paul and I will celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. We’ve...

Unbecoming Language. Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim

Unbecoming Language. Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim

Neo-Victorian Materialisms in John Fowles’s The Collector

While John Fowles’s (1926-2005) The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) is studied frequently as a neo-Victorian novel, his first published novel, The Collector (1963), is ignored in the critical analyses of neo-Victorian studies. This is mostly due to the fact that The Collector is neither a re-writing of a Victorian novel nor sets in the nineteenth century. However, a critical reading of the novel demonstrates how Fowles explicitly manifests the continuation of the Victorian materialist obsession in this particular novel. In other words, albeit the contemporary setting of the novel and the critical appreciation of it as a feminist fiction, the protagonist, Clegg’s obsession with the material objects echoes Victorian cultural materialisation in a way that leads him to collect butterflies and women. Drawing an analogy between these two collections, it is mostly argued by the critics that Fowles discusses the issues of gender in this particular novel. From a different perspective, it will be argued in this study that Fowles actually illustrates the obsession with the material objects with respect to both the dead butterfly collection and also to the commodification of the female body as the material object. From this vantage point, the aim of this study is to analyse The Collector as a neo-Victorian novel revisiting the material culture of the Victorian period and the repercussions of the traumatic relationship between the human and the object in the twentieth century.

On the Record: Time and The Self as Data in Contemporary Autofiction

Contemporary autofiction is a genre that is inescapably concerned with the recording, and re-recording of the self. In Ben Lerners autofictional 10:04, for instance, time becomes centred. The protagonist of 10:04 engages with Christian Marclays 24-hour video installation The Clock, which records the passing of time as portrayed in film, and is inspired to use the data of his own life to contextualise himself within a fictional world of his own creation. In this way, autofiction and the digital landscape share the same impulses. Through apps and smart watches we monitor and measure the self sleep, health (mental and physical), productivity and re-productivity and this data then becomes used to contextualise the self within a broader narrative. Is the presentation of the data we collect through these methods inherently autofictional in nature? This article will closely consider the portrayal of time and the way in which time is recorded in autofictional texts such as 10:04. It will also take the form of creative practice, as I concern myself with the recording of my own experiences watching The Clock over several different sessions at ACMI, as well as other ways of recording my 'self' through apps and a smart watch. By examining how the 'self' is commodified as data within the genre of autofiction, and this article will argue that the desire to monitor oneself and to view life as data to be collected speaks to a broader anxiety about the way we see ourselves

The drip, drip, drip of dystopia: The Handmaid’s Tale, temporal boundaries, and affective investment

ABSTRACT Critical dystopian narratives provide a captivating examination into bleak, futuristic societies, while simultaneously encouraging their audiences to draw comparisons between the fictional dystopian world and the societies in which the audiences live. This essay engages with viewers of the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to investigate the relationship between feminist dystopian fiction and affect. We posit that negative emotions drive viewer engagement with the text. Reactions of anxiety, fear, and anger ground participants’ reading of the series, and encourage them to critically interrogate the contemporary political environment through the lens of The Handmaid’s Tale’s Gilead. While feminist dystopian works are products of a particular political time and space, the ambiguous features of critical feminist dystopias are at once reflections of the specific cultural milieu in which they were originally conceptualized, as well as meditations on societal constructions that come before and after the production of those texts. Ultimately, we argue that feminist dystopian narratives are at once affective and analytical. These texts both necessitate critical engagement of women’s lives and transcend temporal boundaries to engage with the anxiety, fear, and anger of marginalized groups as a felt permanent condition.

Subversive Sisterhood

Abstract This article examines the Arabic fiction of ʿAfifa Karam (1883–1924), an overlooked contributor to the nahda, or the Arabic cultural renaissance of the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in Mount Lebanon, Karam became a novelist, journalist, and translator in the North American mahjar (Arab diaspora). A discussion of Karam’s novel, Fatima al-Badawiyya (Fatima the Bedouin), published in New York City in 1909, explores the author’s engagement with gender politics within a hybridized cultural space. Such attention also reveals the transnational character of nahda literary culture, as readers and writers scattered across four continents interacted in the textual “spaces” of the rapidly expanding print culture in the Arabic-speaking world. As a single player within an international network of Syro-Lebanese women writers, Karam’s foundational feminist fiction reveals her cosmopolitan female subjectivity, offering a radical vision of global sisterhood that transcends geographic, political, and religious boundaries.

Illicit Motherhood: Recrafting Postcolonial Feminist Resistance in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven

Cultural constructions of passive motherhood, especially within domestic spaces, gained currency in India and Ireland due to their shared colonial history, as well as the influence of anti-colonial masculinist nationalism on the social imaginary of these two nations. However, beginning from the latter half of the nineteenth century, postcolonial literary voices have not only challenged the traditional gendering of public and private spaces but also interrogated docile constructions of womanhood, particularly essentialized representations of maternity. Domestic spaces have been critical narrative motifs in these postcolonial texts through simultaneously embodying patriarchal domination but also as sites where feminist resistance can be actualized by “transgress(ing) traditional views of … the home, as a static immobile place of oppression”. This paper, through a comparative analysis of maternal characters in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven, argues that socially disapproved/illicit relationships in these two representative postcolonial Irish and Indian narratives function as matricentric feminist tactics that subvert limiting notions of both domestic spaces and gendered liminal postcolonial subjectivities. I highlight that within the context of male-centered colonial and nationalist literature, the trope of maternity configures the domestic-space as the “rightful place” for the existence of the feminine entity. Thus, when postcolonial feminist fiction reverses this tradition through constructing the “home and the female-body” as sites of possible resistance, it is a counter against dual oppression: both colonialism and patriarchy. My intervention further underscores the need for sustained conversations between the literary output of India and Ireland, within Postcolonial Literary Studies, with a particular acknowledgement for space and gender as pivotal categories in the “cultural analysis of empire”.

TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics by Libe García Zarranz

TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics by Libe García Zarranz

Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim

Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim

Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim

Reviewed by: Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim Lucas Hollister Annabel L. Kim. Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2018. 263pp. When one thinks of French feminist fiction and thought since Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal works, many of the first names that come to mind are those of writers associated with psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and écriture féminine: Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva. In Unbecoming [End Page 339] Language, Annabel L. Kim argues that this differentialist tradition has overshadowed the rich contributions of anti-difference, anti-identitarian, “unbecoming” French feminist writers like Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne F. Garréta. Kim defines “unbecoming” as a relationship with language that breaks down heteropatriarchal identity categories and allows one to experience “subjectivity without subjecthood—where one is fully in oneself but free, fluid, unfixed, potential” (6). Kim’s exploration of the literary strategies angled at such experiences is a significant contribution to scholarship on French feminism and fiction, and should be of broad interest to scholars working across a variety of humanities disciplines. One of the great strengths of Unbecoming Language is the coherence of its corpus and the specificity of its focus. The book is divided into four chapters: three in-depth author studies and a final chapter that synthesizes those studies and provides a concluding reading of each author. While Unbecoming language at first appears to trace a linear narrative of influence—in which Sarraute’s experiments with tropismes set the stage for the pronoun work of Wittig’s radical revolutionary feminist texts, which in turn give way to Garréta’s more elegiac and playful Oulipian fictions—Kim insists on contiguity and proximity rather than linear continuity (82). Indeed, throughout her close readings, Kim always privileges dialogic and relational gestures and never allows one writer—not even Wittig, who supplies so much of Kim’s analytical framework—to occupy a truly central or authoritative position in relation to the others. This mode of reading is perfectly in keeping with Kim’s conviction that language is a radically open and free space, that there are “as many types of relationships to language . . . as there are subjectivities” (232), and hence that there are multiple ways to use language to combat oppressive categories and reductive identities. Clearly, as the book acknowledges (34), instituting the free and fluid subjectivity of unbecoming is a utopian project, one that seeks a “paradise” of words or of “freed language” (100, 114, 122, 123, 191) outside the discursive categories that undergird society as we know it. However, Kim refuses to place unbecoming at a safe remove from the present, as a horizon or ideal that texts could prefigure but not enact. Instead, Kim holds to the idea that unbecoming can be directly and presently experienced through contact with a language that, in distinction to socially imposed “discourse” (120–1), is “vital” (102), “living” (181), “vibrant” (234), “raw” (209), and materially embodied (194, 235). The gambit of Unbecoming Language is thus to posit that the experience of “self-decomposure” (30) is concretely available to readers who engage deeply with a particular kind of fiction. [End Page 340] This line of argument exposes Unbecoming Language to critique from those who, faithful to Derridean and poststructuralist conceptions of literary meaning, reject the premise of language’s self-presence to itself or indeed of any full presence or “plenitude” (34). For those who are receptive to the book’s founding premise, however, Kim’s detailed readings offer ample examples of how writers and readers might construct an “affective and corporeal relationship” with the “embodied and vital entity” that is language (235). As this overview suggests, Unbecoming Language puts forth an ambitious argument about what literary language can do and, just as importantly, undo. Unbecoming Language is a book that points to fruitful new avenues for analyzing unbecoming poetics across a broad spectrum of literary movements, and many aesthetic associations could be envisioned on the basis of Kim’s readings. There are nevertheless places where the book’s singular focus, the pains it takes to “loosen each writer’s anchoring” in groups and literary categories (2), and...

Emma Bovari’s sisters: doctors’ wives in the Victorian female prose

«Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Язык и литература» — научно-теоретический журнал, публикующий научно-исследовательские статьи и критические научные рецензии на русском и английском языках, призванные отразить актуальную проблематику современной лингвистики, литературоведения и междисциплинарных гуманитарных исследований, а также представить многообразие существующих здесь подходов и плюрализм мнений исследователей.

Is this just a story? Friendships and fictions for speculative alliances. The Yugantar film collective (1980–83)

Abstract Idhi Katha Matramena/Is this just a story? (1983) is one of three short films made by the feminist film collective Yugantar (1980–83). Through a collaborative process with members of the activist and research collective Stree Shakhti Sanghatana, the film developed into an improvised fiction. The collective’s self-reflective debates, or activist ‘study’ (Harney and Moten 2013) on the manifold layers and subtlety of physical and emotional violence within the family, including their own hitherto unspoken experiences, brought forth novel aesthetic vocabularies affording new female subjectivities on-screen. Those in turn offered a new political language that entered the autonomous women’s movement in India, off-screen. I argue for the political as constituted in the interstices between activism, research and the creative collective process of film-making, rather than political film as either advocacy for a set political agenda or a position of autonomous creative/artistic practice and thought. I particularly stress legacies of feminist fiction’s ‘passionate constructions’ (Haraway 1988), i.e., experimental film practice that is specifically cultivated out of collective study and the complexities of feminist friendship, forging a process of collective imagination as speculative politics. Thinking from Yugantar’s contextually situated practice as an expansion of the possible, I join arguments for fiction and speculation as modes of feminist intervention in South Asian film, activism and discourse. Rather than stressing an authentically Indian legacy of feminist film, however, this exploration of Idhi Katha Matramena highlights collective aesthetic practices that build solidarities within the context of India, and through speculative cinematic friendships across space/time localities of radical change. The text thus probes Yugantar’s past practice as a pertinent spectre for our present future.

TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics

TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics

The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White

Reviewed by: The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White Karen Coats White, Kiersten The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein. Delacorte, 2018 [304p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-525-57797-3 $28.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-525-57794-2 $24.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-525-57795-9 $11.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 By situating Elizabeth Lavenza, the orphaned ward of the Frankenstein family who later weds the doctor, at the heart of this retelling of Mary Shelley's tale, White moves the locus of power to a teenage girl, as Shelley herself was. In White's account, Elizabeth is rescued out of an abusive situation by Victor's mother to be a companion for a son she has already learned to fear. Young Victor is clearly a sociopath, but Elizabeth, rather than being a moral compass that would reorient his conscience, is herself a master strategist. She teaches him tricks she herself deploys to ensure her continued presence in the Frankenstein household, namely, how to soothe situations and cover over antisocial impulses with the right kind of words and smiles. [End Page 99] Unable to truly love her, Victor nonetheless becomes dependent on Elizabeth as well as wildly possessive; Elizabeth, for her part, believes that she needs to keep his worst instincts and habits from being discovered if she wants to secure her financial future. When she seeks him out in Ingolstadt, she uncovers the gruesome truth of what he has accomplished and inadvertently sets his creation free, and here the tale, while mostly adhering to the events of the original plot, changes Victor and Elizabeth's motivations and sources completely. Shelley herself appears as Mary, a bookseller who becomes an ally of Elizabeth, and poor Henry Clerval … well, to reveal his fate would spoil an ingenious twist. While most readers will have at least some familiarity with the cultural mythology of Frankenstein, those who know the original more intimately will appreciate this most fully; nonetheless, anyone who enjoys psychologically dark feminist fiction will find this compelling. KC Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

From A Woman’s Right to Choose to ‘A Woman’s Right to Shoes’: The Commodification of Feminism and the Politics of Choice from Fear of Flying to Bridget Jones’ Diary

This essay looks at the transformation of the first-person fiction narratives from the feminist movement in the age of postfeminism. It explores the trajectory from feminism to postfeminism and the shift from a collective to a purely personal understanding of liberation as lifestyle politics, “power” feminism, and individualism gain ground. Central to this transformation is the commodification of the feminism itself as the politics of choice signal a broader shift to neoliberal ideology in which the rhetoric of choice is used to undermine radical demands for rights that emerged from the political movements of the 1960s and 70s. I argue that the triumph of postfeminism has its roots in the contradictions inherent in the personal politics which were dominant within the movement. To explore this trajectory, I look at feminist and post-feminist bestsellers from the 1970s and 1990s as emblematic of the politics of each period. Bridget Jones, in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), is perhaps the post-feminist heroine par excellence. Nonetheless, Bridget Jones is a child of the protagonists of feminist fiction past. I analyse Fear of Flying by Erica Jong as an emblematic (and extremely popular) early feminist text that helped to pave the way from feminism to postfeminism.

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction

Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader. By Alexandra Kurmann

Intertextuality is particularly integral to Linda Lê’s œuvre, and more studies exploring in detail the multidirectional web of influences operating in Lê’s writing are long overdue. Alexandra Kurmann’s contribution focuses closely on what she describes as the ‘conspicuous discursive influence’ (p. 2) or ‘dialogism’ (p. 3) in the intertextual relationship between Linda Lê, a Paris-based contemporary Vietnamese author writing in French, and Austrian post-war writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Kurmann’s research reveals this sororal literary bond to date from as early as 1989, Lê’s intertextual commitment to Bachmann spanning sixteen years in both her fiction and non-fiction. This revision of the timing of Bachmann’s influence to a point when Lê famously rejected her first three texts, and experienced a literary rebirth, underpins Kurmann’s argument for a Bachmann-inspired feminist ethics in Lê’s writing since 1989, focalized around the figure of Antigone: ‘an Antigonean rhetoric in Lê’s œuvre is nourished by her readings of Bachmann’s feminist fiction’ (p. 2). Lê is seen as feeding her own self-creation project through Bachmann’s Antigonean figures, thereby inscribing herself symbolically into Bachmann’s literary community of exilic writers. The influence, however, is not unidirectional, and Kurmann posits that the purpose of Lê’s essay, ‘“J’écris sur la nature du feu”: Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, Requiem pour Fanny Goldman, Franza’ (Critique, 47 (1991), 846–54), is to inhabit the same textual space as her predecessor: ‘Indeed this transitional space of the text is where Lê […] and Bachmann […] may for a short time remain in close contact with one another’ (p. 60). Kurmann thus reveals how a web of women speak to each other through the text, or in the literary space: Antigone; Bachmann; Bachmann’s self-destructive female protagonists; Lê; Lê’s own self-destructive female protagonists; and the many women readers of these writers’ texts. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theories of intertextuality, Kurmann argues for the reciprocal effect of this long-standing relationship. She uses Lê’s critical essays on Bachmann in order to reread Bachmann’s fiction, in particular her novel Malina (1971), and also to argue that Lê rereads (or perhaps rewrites) the Antigonean gesture of suicide to impute agency into this voluntary death that allows the woman to whisper truths from beyond the grave: ‘the ancient voice of a universal female figure’ (p. 69). The voice, as the bond, is one of sorority and resistance, which makes it a shame that Kurmann relies at all on Harold Bloom, given his focus on the Oedipal, as she herself points out, and her use of Kristeva is more convincing. For scholars drawn by the title’s focus on Lê’s work, there may be more (and less) than they bargained for, as the reading of Malina overshadows the analysis of Lê’s fiction, and it is a pity to have foreclosed the parameters of the study at 2005, when texts such as In Memoriam (2007) and Cronos (2010) contain undeniable echoes of both Bachmann’s and Antigone’s voices. Nonetheless, well researched, intelligent, and at times elegant, this book enriches our understanding of these important writers, and takes Lê studies beyond familiar themes of exile, loss, and postcolonialism to a timely recognition of her implicit feminist ethics.

TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics by Libe García Zarranz

Reviewed by: TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics by Libe García Zarranz Nancy Kang Libe García Zarranz. TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross-Border Ethics. McGill-Queen's up, 2017.180 pp. $85.00. With her choice of title for this timely monograph, namely the kinetic prefix "TransCanadian," literary scholar Libe García Zarranz sparks questions: will the work detail how transgender fiction writers create space and place in Canada or interrogate how these feminist artists forge imaginative and activist ties within and across the country through migratory fictions? Neither hits the mark. The study does much more: it discusses fiction (namely novels and short-story collections), but also long poems, memoir, and in the final "coda" chapter, a poetry collection in concert with an iconic 1977 sci-fi horror film. All the analyses transpire against a breathtaking medley of cultural theory, particularly drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and a select cadre of thinkers from multiple disciplines and schools (especial material feminist theory) who scrutinize border-crossings and materialities across human, nonhuman, and more-than-human subjects. "TransCanadian" defines the three main, award-winning Canadian feminist writers under consideration: Dionne Brand, Hiromi Goto, and Emma Donoghue. All were born outside of Canada (in Trinidad and Tobago, Japan, and Ireland, respectively) and identify as lesbians. The border-crossings discerned in their work, described as "malleable, porous, [End Page 188] and viscous," far supersede the realm of the national, bringing to light corporeal, biopolitical, and affective concerns "in a time of global crises" (47, 126). Indeed, these three themes comprise the three main sections of the book, with three chapters (devoted to each of the three writers) contained within each section. As suggested above, García Zarranz's study evocatively discerns "vulnerable subjectivity and embodiment" in a time of "uneasy" and "uneven" globalization (150–2). The post–9/11 era ushered in a prolonged period of fear triggered by "the systematic reconfiguration of corporeal, biopolitical, and affective borders with long-lasting ethical repercussions" (22). Galvanized by that U.S. tragedy and the ensuing implementation of anti-terror regimes and regulating state apparatus, the text interrogates various forms of corporeality in the context of intense historical, technological, biological, and cultural flux. This backdrop is a veritable collage of catalytic experiences: the Syrian civil war and global refugee crisis; contested military action in such locations as Iraq and Afghanistan; economic crises and the worldwide Occupy movement; the Egyptian revolution of 2011, the Arab Spring, and other liberationist uprisings; ongoing territorial disputes in the Middle East and elsewhere; even the destruction of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. This last instance underscores how the ethico-political dimensions of environmental degradation are also within the democratic purview of the text. From start to finish, TransCanadian Feminist Fictions labours to critique the ethical contingencies of global transformation, what the critic cleverly terms a "cross-border ethic." Whether applied to racialized or gendered bodies, the hegemonic power of (usually European-descended) male authority prompts readers to become acutely sensitive to how "circuits of power, knowledge, and capital" give rise to "an archive of instrumentalization and biocapitalization" for so-called second-class populations, including women (78). Using generically diverse literary texts like Brand's long poem Ossuaries and memoir A Map to the Door of No Return, Donoghue's novel Room and short story collection Astray, and Goto's young adult novels The Water of Possibility, Darkest Light, and Half World, García Zarraz's slender volume (re)defines relationalities between bodies of so-called "deviant populations—that is, queer, racialized, poor, migrant"—with the goal of delineating dissident forms of agency and resistance (47). By the end of the hard-hitting monograph, the scholar compels readers to journey beyond human borderlands, envisioning the imaginative possibilities of the posthuman world through an "ethic of dissent." Doing so, she contends, reconstitutes "bodies, materialities, and spaces that [have been] rendered [End Page 189] unrepresentable according to patriarchal, racist, and other hegemonic power structures and ideologies" (142). The diverse, sometimes dizzying, arsenal of terms, paradigms, and catchphrases deployed by García Zarranz attests to the highly interdisciplinary nature of her inquiry. TransCanadian Feminist Fictions stands at the nexus of...

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction by Catherine Romagnolo

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction by Catherine Romagnolo