India Song Research Articles

India Song’s politics of sound

ABSTRACT This article approaches questions of race and imperialism in India Song through the film’s strategies of sound. Departing from the notion that Duras’s relegation to the soundtrack of certain aspects of the film’s colonial context might be read as a means to avoid the totalising risks of the image, this article suggests that, in the film, sound is deployed not only as a means of survival for the non-white subject but also as a site of political agency and a space in which to forge tentative forms of community. As the film’s use of language intersects with questions of power and resistance, India Song imagines models of political enunciation which avoid the semiotic privilege of the signifier and thus challenge the violence of hegemonic language in the colonial context. Thus, as the film uses sound to imagine new ways of being public without the risk of visual capture, noise emerges as an opaque site of connection and enunciation beyond the demand for recognition and legibility upon which logos is predicated.

Marguerite Duras: le cinéma

In 2014 the Centre Pompidou mounted the centenary exhibition Duras Song: portrait d'une écriture. In the library, a Duras space was created. Its outside walls were hung with images and texts about her political commitments and historical positioning. The interior featured her literary, theatrical, and cinematic works, with scenes from her films and from interviews projected at intervals on different wall spaces. The exhibition accompanied a retrospective of her films, which opened with a sell-out screening of La Musica (dir. by Duras and Paul Seban, 1967). This new entry into Duras's work, and vivid appreciation of her filmmaking as well as her writing, is marked too in this excellent Études cinématographiques volume. The first pieces, an Introduction and a further essay, ‘Métissage cinémato-graphique’, by Jean Cléder, and an essay of contextual discussion, ‘Marguerite Duras de la littérature au cinéma’, by Claude Murcia, think through some of the questions about the relation between writing and filmmaking for Duras. An essay by Michelle Royer marks a lovely departure, illuminating the sensory experience of becoming immersed in a Duras film such as India Song (1975). Comparisons with the work of Philippe Grandrieux are fascinating, as are references outwards to Richard Cytowic and to Deleuze. For Royer, Duras ‘demande aux spectateurs de renoncer au désir de contrôler l'expérience spectatorielle et de préférer l'intensité de l'émotion à la démarche rationnelle’ (p. 49). Royer's words remind me of the experience of responding to the seemingly unbidden appearance of Duras extracts, followed by intervals of darkness, in Duras Song. Like the exhibition, essays in the volume are interested, in varying ways, in the relation between history, living, and writing. Najet Limam-Tnani's suggestive piece on autobiography juxtaposes a text from Duras about her love for Gérard Jarlot — their days in a hotel on the banks of the Loire; their sorties at night to find a bar — with the encounters in Hiroshima mon amour (dir. by Alain Resnais, 1959). Intimate and public history inform one another here. In an excellent essay on Les Mains négatives (1978), Césarée (1978), and the Aurélia Steiner films (also discussed by Alice Delmotte-Halter), Didier Coureau reminds us that Duras alluded to the drowning of Algerians in the Seine in October 1961 as she described her own obsessive filming of the river in Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne) (1979). These essays dwell on these historical locations and displacements, as they also explore Duras's home spaces, where Sophie Charlin writes about the house at Neauphle-le-Château in Nathalie Granger (1972), and further still on the cinematic spaces of Duras's work. Coureau's piece ends with a section, ‘Vers le noir’, which looks ahead to two final essays, by Laure Bergala and Sébastian Ronceray respectively, on ‘l'image noire’ and the blank/black screen. The latter aligns Duras beautifully with Stan Brakhage. The volume closes with three interviews conducted by Jean Cléder with filmmakers Benoît Jacquot, Bruno Nuytten, and Michelle Porte. There is scant reference to anglophone scholarship on Duras — citation of Leslie Hill, Martin Crowley, Renate Günther, and Laura McMahon would have been welcome — but, this qualm apart, this is a coruscating volume.

A Subaltern Performance: Circulations of Gender, Island and Nation in India's Song of Defiance

A Subaltern Performance: Circulations of Gender, Island and Nation in India's Song of Defiance

What Narrative? What Dissent?: Refractive Visions of India in M. Duras’s India Song and M. Padmanabhan’s Harvest

India has been a great pole of attraction for both colonial and postcolonial literature. Postcolonial drama has also shown an equal fascination with this huge and versatile Asiatic land, as reflected in Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1974) and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest (1997). Despite the cultural difference between their authors and the 20-years’ gap in their writing, the two plays are comparable on various thematic and aesthetic issues. They are both narratives of chaos, violence, frustration and despair, dealing with slippery and disembodied subjectivities, which point to mortality and ultimately death. The atmosphere of distancing from reality and the process from gradual disappearance to total absence are achieved through voices off, fictionalization or virtuality, while scopophilia is also enhanced both as a dramatic device and as a trope of audience reception. However, the stance and the mood of the writing are radically different in the two plays: nonchalance, nostalgia and postcolonial melancholia in the French play; biting satire and political urgency in the Indian play. Despite the hybrid identity and the cosmopolitanism of the two women dramatists, it becomes obvious that in the contemporary situation of global politics and transnational capitalism the position of the western writer is still more advantageous for the scope of the writing itself and its reception, whereas the 3rd world writer is still writing under a state of emergency and his/her work is perceived under the same restrictive circumstances.

Visiting Indochina, the imaginary of the French colonial period in today's touristic Việt Nam

Names of Indian towns, rivers, provinces and seas have first and foremost a musical meaning. All references to physical, human or political geography in India Song are incorrect. Marguerite Duras, India Song This paper aims to examine the multiplicity of articulations existing between the imaginary, the production, and the consumption of touristic places in a post-colonial context. Using the approach of cultural geography, I want to study the role of the French colonial period (1887–1954) in the construction of Việt Nam as a touristic destination. Within that specific context, interconnection of times and spaces contributes to building a new type of otherness. Indeed, touristic spots serve a past that is over, but revived by tourists as a source of exoticism. The French colonial imaginary influences touristic places in four different ways, ranging from the choice of Việt Nam as a destination to the touristic spots themselves. Firstly, it specifies this destination, as if Việt Nam, in its status of former French colony, kept a specific link with France and Europe. Secondly, it creates specific touristic places, like Sa Đéc, the town of Marguerite Duras’ childhood. Thirdly, it complexifies the reading grid of pre-existing touristic places, like in the former colonial centre of main towns. Finally, it influences the ordering of domestic places, like some high-standard hotels, giving them the atmosphere of the ‘Colonial Chic’. In all cases, the colonial imaginary serves as scenery for stories built by tourists in order to give a meaning to their travels. These travels are both through time and space, and it is precisely in that flashback that the pleasure lies.

COMO TRABALHAR O TEXTO LITERÁRIO LEVANDO EM CONSIDERAÇÃO SUAS ESPECIFICIDADES

Neste artigo discuto a forma de trabalhar o texto literário em um curso de Francês Língua Estrangeira. Primeiro trato da definição do texto literário, quais são suas características. O texto literário possui espeficidades que não devem deixar de ser levadas em consideração quando trabalhado na sala de aula. Em seguida analiso duas atividades propostas nos livros didáticos Reflets Méthode de français 3 (2002) e Le Nouveau sans Frontière 4 – Méthode de français (1993) sobre trechos do livro India Song (1975) e L’Amant (1984) de Marguerite Duras. O objetivo foi verificar se as propostas pedagógicas respeitavam as características do texto literário que segundo Amor Séoud (1997) são a polissemia, o prazer e a interculturalidade. No primeiro método os didáticos não levaram em consideração as características do texto literário ao propor perguntas de compreensão escrita, enquanto o segundo método, apesar de pouco profundo, faz perguntas pertinentes levando em conta as particularidades do texto literário. Para terminar proponho sugestões para utilizar poemas com os alunos iniciantes, além de chamar a atenção para que o professor tenha um projeto de leitura antes de iniciar suas aulas.

Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films (review)

Reviewed by: Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films Michael Brian Faucette Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women’s Films. Geetha Ramanathan. New York: Wallflower Press, 2006, 239 pp. Geetha Ramanathan’s newest work draws upon the recent movement by scholars such as Tom Gunning and Joe McElhaney to reexamine and rethink the notion of auteurism as a means of theoretical engagement and as an interpretative tool. However, unlike authors of previous auteur studies that simply argue for the greatness or legitimacy of a director or directors and their work, she adapts the theory to analyze female directors and how they use their abilities as filmmakers to acknowledge or attack cultural factors such as race, class, gender, voyeurism, and the repression of female desire. Furthermore, Ramanathan uses auteurism to examine how a lack of nuanced readings of feminist filmmakers and their films has been possible. In order to make this claim, she first lays out the framework of feminist film criticism both historically and methodologically, thus enabling her to argue that feminist film criticism has been bogged down by the need to legitimate the work of women as worthy of study, even as it forgets that the filmmakers are engaged in a conversation with other women and society at large. She notes that what she is attempting to conduct in this study is the synthesis of the terms “feminist auteurship” and “female authority.” This allows her to “confront the history of aesthetics, and visuality in film,” thereby enabling the reader/viewer to witness the means by which “women filmmakers have succeeded in impressing feminist authority in film, not necessarily or exclusively their own, or even that of the protagonist of the film, but over the representation of women in film in ways that counter prior cinematic renditions” (4). Thus, this study is one that, while drawing on the traditions of prior feminist criticism, as Ramanathan acknowledges in her references to Laura Mulvey, Judith Mayne, and Teresa de Lauretis, attempts to illustrate that the notion of the female form and authority onscreen is in fact more complex and contradictory than previously established. In order to support the idea of female authority onscreen she draws from films that have become canonized within feminist film criticism. In the first chapter she explores the notion of aesthetics and the female form through an insightful analysis of Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls, Aparna Sen’s Parama, Nelly Kaplan’s A Very Curious Girl, and Agnes Varda’s Vagabond. Building upon each of these films, Ramanathan makes the case that in the hands of female directors, the weakness or objectification of the female form can in effect become a powerful tool used to critique patriarchal society. In addition to this strategy, she connects the thematics of these films to one another, demonstrating that it is in fact possible for female directors to use their work to converse and argue about the nature of the female form in cinematic discourse. One of the strengths of this chapter lies in her critique and problematization of the notion of females as unwilling or unknowing commodities. This notion of the commodity or objectification is carried over in the second chapter, which looks at how women of color are projected onscreen. Ramanathan begins her analysis with an in-depth exploration of Julie Dash’s Illusions, a short film about the relationship of race to power. In keeping with the spirit of feminist critics who have long since argued that feminism has forgotten or misused the political struggle of women of color, Ramanathan attempts to engage in this debate by demonstrating that it has been possible for female directors to use their power to discuss the idea of race and womanhood in films such as Cheryl Dunye’s [End Page 74] Watermelon Woman, Claire Denis’s Chocolat, Marguerite Duras’s India Song, and Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach. Through a reading of each of these films, Ramanathan is able to demonstrate how difficult it is to show women of color onscreen in a favorable and realistic manner, versus the standard practices of mainstream filmmaking that opt for a conservative approach, such as having women of color be surrounded by the accoutrements of consumerism...

Lovers in Touch: Inoperative Community in Nancy, Duras and India Song

This article takes as its point of departure Maurice Blanchot's pairing of Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Nancy in The Unavowable Community, and reads India Song, a film by Duras, through Nancy's work on community. Just as Nancy articulates a thinking of community in terms of touch, so Duras develops her own filmic vocabulary of touch to examine questions of being-with, exposure, love and sacrifice against the background of a negative model of community. The article argues that the figure of touch in India Song, both between bodies onscreen and between viewer and film, becomes central to the film's engagement with issues of community, finitude and the political.

O (Meta)Andamento de <i>India Song</i>: reflexões sobre a lentidão

O livro India Song de Marguerite Duras, designado como “texto teatro filme” e, portanto, caracterizado por sua pluralidade semiótica, apresenta várias estratégias de agenciamento temporal, que podem ser comparadas a estratégias típicas do universo da composição musical. Nesse contexto, é pertinente estabelecer um paralelo, no campo verbal, com a noção musical de andamento. O andamento dominante é lento. Nesta análise, a lentidão é abordada em três níveis complementares: figurativo (a figura do ventilador como índice de um meta-andamento); simbólico (a constituição do lugar como espaço simbólico de representação); e gerativo (o ralentamento como processo gerativo da obra).
 
 Palavras-chave: Marguerite Duras. Literatura Francesa Século XX. Literatura e Música.

Marguerite Duras's Aural World : A study of the mise-en-son of India Song

This essay examines Duras's use of the soundtrack in India Song, and proposes a new term under which, the author hopes, its innovative complexity and also its primordial importance in regards to authorial intention can be better illustrated. The term 'mise-en-son,' borrowed from theatre, not only evokes the notion of cinematic sound as a human endeavour, premeditated orchestration, but may shed new light on our understanding of Duras's multi-disciplinary oeuvre in general. The author also offers a new explanation of the voix off and connects it to a pre-diegetic space, a fourth space distinct from those traditionally analysed in film theory (on-screen space, diegetic space, and the spectator's space). This fourth space, it is argued, corresponds to Duras's radical gesture of voice-centred narrative that brings the fictional characters and the film spectator together.

British and German Cartoons as Weapons in World War I: Invectives and Ideology of Political Cartoons. A Cognitive Linguistics Approach by Wolfgang K. Hünig (review)

858 Reviews whereas Forster 'discovered' India. The geographical point of intersection that exerted fascination on both writers was India. Calcutta, which Duras firstvisited aged seventeen en route to France, helped lay the imaginative foundations for her India cycle, referred to by Yves Clavaron as 'la "constellation" India Song' (p. 41). But if the India that absorbed her, as she asserts in Les Parleuses, was not the land of the maharajas but Tlndepresque caricaturale de la lepre et de la faim' (p. 139), Forster's contacts were different.He firstwent to India as the guest of Syed Ross Masood, the dedicatee of A Passage to India who belonged to the Muslim elite, and returned later at the invitation of a Hindu maharaja. These strong, instructive contrasts provide Clavaron with the infrastructure for a lucid comparative study that connects intelligently with contemporary postcolo? nial debate about colonial literature and its legacy. His methodological premiss is to explore the fictional production of that era historically. Within the geopolitical and cultural frameworks that he recontructs, he singles out Forster's uneasiness working on A Passage to India, citing a letter to Masood in which he protests: 'When I began the book I thought of it as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West, but [. . .] my sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable' (p. 48). Troubled by this complex cultural encounter, Forster works to distance himself from his contempo? raries' politicized readings of his novel. Hence the appeal in The Hill of Devi to a universalist discourse that privileges the Indian earth and sky. 'The Life to Come' admittedly provides Forster with the opportunity to criticize what he sees as an arrogant Catholic Church pursuing its own branch ofthe civilizing mission. Yet Clavaron skilfully shows Forster's European humanism as itself failing ultimately to allow Indian culture its alterity by adhering to Western aesthetics. If Forster's preferred route is irony in the face of what he frequently labels 'muddle' in A Passage to India, Duras regularly opts for violent satire. Thus the world of finance is denounced in Un barrage contre le Pacifique as 'la crapule de cette engeance blanche de la colonie' (P- 75) and colonial Saigon houses the Mecca for colonial financiers. Clavaron also deftlyexplores the motifs of misogyny, sexuality, the family narrative, and the missing father in relation to his two colonial authors. Royal Holloway, University of London Edward Hughes British and German Cartoons as Weapons in World War I: Invectives and Ideology of Political Cartoons. A Cognitive Linguistics Approach. By Wolfgang K. Hunig. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. 2003. 242 pp. ?23. ISBN 3-631-50211-7 (pbk). Punch and Simplicissimus, best known for their debunking of social behaviour, also included trenchant political cartoons, especially during the First World War. Wolf? gang Hiinig examines 325 examples to reveal parallels in invective against the enemy. Through the interplay of the sketches, the headings, and the captions, differentpat? terns of humour, irony,and sarcasm emerge that either support or contradict prejudices and stereotypes. Using the methods of cognitive linguistics, Hiinig focuses on the condensation ofcomplex ideas into a single image and into a related metaphor. The abstract or unfamiliar is made both visually and verbally concrete, often by reference to well-known cultural examples. Figures such as John Bull or Kaiser Bill become metonymies when they represent nations; emblems such as the British Lion or the German Eagle provide rich sources forthe use of discourse spoken by commentators to express invective or ridicule. Hiinig develops a convincing theory of mental spaces and blends. These interconnect and create an artificial world where the viewer or reader is fascinated and then manipulated to accept its premisses. The cartoonist strikes a balance between MLRy 99.3, 2004 859 'downright aggression and humorous insinuation' (p. 26) in order to appeal to feel? ings of superiority, relief, or incongruity. The scenarios may become totally absurd, but they provide the necessary distance to make the propaganda acceptable. Hiinig differentiates between scenes that are everyday, non-combatant military, war, counterfactual , or metonymic, and further subdivides these as communicative situations, internal interactions between sketch and caption, and communicative situations that interact with the captions. Such categorization and the...

British and German Cartoons as Weapons in World War I: Invectives and Ideology of Political Cartoons. A Cognitive Linguistics Approach (review)

858 Reviews whereas Forster 'discovered' India. The geographical point of intersection that exerted fascination on both writers was India. Calcutta, which Duras firstvisited aged seventeen en route to France, helped lay the imaginative foundations for her India cycle, referred to by Yves Clavaron as 'la "constellation" India Song' (p. 41). But if the India that absorbed her, as she asserts in Les Parleuses, was not the land of the maharajas but Tlndepresque caricaturale de la lepre et de la faim' (p. 139), Forster's contacts were different.He firstwent to India as the guest of Syed Ross Masood, the dedicatee of A Passage to India who belonged to the Muslim elite, and returned later at the invitation of a Hindu maharaja. These strong, instructive contrasts provide Clavaron with the infrastructure for a lucid comparative study that connects intelligently with contemporary postcolo? nial debate about colonial literature and its legacy. His methodological premiss is to explore the fictional production of that era historically. Within the geopolitical and cultural frameworks that he recontructs, he singles out Forster's uneasiness working on A Passage to India, citing a letter to Masood in which he protests: 'When I began the book I thought of it as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West, but [. . .] my sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable' (p. 48). Troubled by this complex cultural encounter, Forster works to distance himself from his contempo? raries' politicized readings of his novel. Hence the appeal in The Hill of Devi to a universalist discourse that privileges the Indian earth and sky. 'The Life to Come' admittedly provides Forster with the opportunity to criticize what he sees as an arrogant Catholic Church pursuing its own branch ofthe civilizing mission. Yet Clavaron skilfully shows Forster's European humanism as itself failing ultimately to allow Indian culture its alterity by adhering to Western aesthetics. If Forster's preferred route is irony in the face of what he frequently labels 'muddle' in A Passage to India, Duras regularly opts for violent satire. Thus the world of finance is denounced in Un barrage contre le Pacifique as 'la crapule de cette engeance blanche de la colonie' (P- 75) and colonial Saigon houses the Mecca for colonial financiers. Clavaron also deftlyexplores the motifs of misogyny, sexuality, the family narrative, and the missing father in relation to his two colonial authors. Royal Holloway, University of London Edward Hughes British and German Cartoons as Weapons in World War I: Invectives and Ideology of Political Cartoons. A Cognitive Linguistics Approach. By Wolfgang K. Hunig. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. 2003. 242 pp. ?23. ISBN 3-631-50211-7 (pbk). Punch and Simplicissimus, best known for their debunking of social behaviour, also included trenchant political cartoons, especially during the First World War. Wolf? gang Hiinig examines 325 examples to reveal parallels in invective against the enemy. Through the interplay of the sketches, the headings, and the captions, differentpat? terns of humour, irony,and sarcasm emerge that either support or contradict prejudices and stereotypes. Using the methods of cognitive linguistics, Hiinig focuses on the condensation ofcomplex ideas into a single image and into a related metaphor. The abstract or unfamiliar is made both visually and verbally concrete, often by reference to well-known cultural examples. Figures such as John Bull or Kaiser Bill become metonymies when they represent nations; emblems such as the British Lion or the German Eagle provide rich sources forthe use of discourse spoken by commentators to express invective or ridicule. Hiinig develops a convincing theory of mental spaces and blends. These interconnect and create an artificial world where the viewer or reader is fascinated and then manipulated to accept its premisses. The cartoonist strikes a balance between MLRy 99.3, 2004 859 'downright aggression and humorous insinuation' (p. 26) in order to appeal to feel? ings of superiority, relief, or incongruity. The scenarios may become totally absurd, but they provide the necessary distance to make the propaganda acceptable. Hiinig differentiates between scenes that are everyday, non-combatant military, war, counterfactual , or metonymic, and further subdivides these as communicative situations, internal interactions between sketch and caption, and communicative situations that interact with the captions. Such categorization and the...

Archetypal figures in Marguerite Duras's India Song: a Jungian perspective

This article seeks to extend recent applications of C.G. Jung's theories to Hollywood cinema through a study of archetypal images in Marguerite Duras's film India Song (1974). Drawing on Jung's theory of contrasexual archetypes, the article explores the different representations of the female and the male protagonists of India Song. It examines the triple image of Anne-Marie Stretter as mother, goddess and femme fatale, arguing that while this construction of ‘the feminine’ corresponds to Duras's personal obsessions, the director was nevertheless able to maintain a critical distance from them by both dramatizing and subverting the archetypes she projected on to the film. The article then demonstrates how, by contrast with the hypefemininity of Anne-Marie Stretter, the Vice-Consul is represented as a more integrated figure, capable of combining the psychological functions of animus and anima. In terms of the film's narrative, it is suggested that the patriarchal repression of the female animus is the source of Anne-Marie Stretter's fragmentation and suicide at the end of India Song.

Fluid Boundaries: The Violence of Non-Identity in Marguerite Duras's Representations of Female Relationships

The fictional heroines in the work of Marguerite Duras are typically compelled by their desire to transcend the self and to identify, often to the point of merging, with other female characters, in texts such as Moderato cantabile (1958), Le ravissement de Lol V Stein (1964) (The Ravishing of Lol Stein), India Song (1975) or Ddtruire dit-elle (1969) (Destroy, She Said). This fusional element in her portrayal of relationships, particularly between women, has become a hallmark of Duras's writing, reflected in the frequent mirroring and doubling of female characters and voices. As Raylene Ramsay has remarked, the Durassian heroine is on a journey towards selfdispossession, that is essentially in a relationship of death to self. .. .1 Such self-abandonment is often accompanied by the female character's progressive descent into alcoholism or madness, for example in Le marin de Gibraltar (1952) (The Sailor of Gibraltar), Dix heures et demie du soir en etd (1960) (Half Past Ten in the Evening) and Emily L. (1987). Viewed from the psychoanalytic perspective adopted by French feminist theorists, this aspect of Duras's work can be seen as representing a challenge to the patriarchal construct of the fixed unified self in opposition to an equally immutable and separate other. Within this paradigm the Durassian desire for unity between self and other may thus signify a return to the polymorphous pre-oedipal world of the mother/child dyad, celebrated as synonymous with the feminine in the work of Luce Irigaray, Helkne Cixous and Julia Kristeva. Similarly, the lack of clearly differentiated

Sound Tracks: the Soundscapes of India Song

In both the play and the film of Marguerite Duras's India Song no verbal exchange is seen to take place on stage or in camera shot and all the dialogue emanates from disembodied voices which reverberate across the filmic or theatrical imagery. The verbal text is woven into a complex, orchestrated soundscape of instrumental music, songs, non-verbal cries and utterances, screams of pain and wretchedness, sound of street shouting, and screeches of exotic birds and animals. These elements together become a score functioning alongside the visual text. In this essay, I want to focus on the composition and the ‘enactment’ of the sound script of India Song and consider the way in which it functions as a stratum of eloquent signifying systems in the performance of this rich and poetic text. My concern will be with the ‘composite’ text of novel/play/ film and the way in which sound is evoked across the spectrum of reader, spectator and auditor, though my intention is not to suggest that the written text, the film and the play performance are interchangeable. I shall refer to the published text, Duras's own 1974 film version, and Theatr Clwyd's performance directed by Annie Castledine and Anabel Arden in 1993.

Imaginary Pictures in Le Vice-consul and India Song

Imaginary Pictures in <i>Le Vice-consul</i> and <i>India Song</i>

Les jeux entre formes dramatiques et formes narratives dans India Song de Duras et Pas de Beckett

Contemporary drama presents us with many cases of discrepancy between the visual and linguistic signs. After the various forms of "gestural" drama there now seems to be a notable comeback of the narrative which, although it dominates is very often badly delimited. What is the bridge between the narrative and dramatic form of this type of drama? Are we to conclude from this that we are witnessing an outburst of drama specificity? In order to answer these questions we shall examine two works which in various degrees are representative of this phenomenon, India Song by Marguerite Duras and Pas (Footfalls in English) by Samuel Beckett, so as to be able to see how certain well-known aspects of the narrative are first deconstructed and then afterwards reconstructed differently, notably: its form (integrated or not in the drama, as in the so called epic form), its functions of "information", "discourse", "designation" of the spatial elements.

Marguerite Duras: fascinating vision and narrative cure

The work of writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras raises theoretical issues of representation and formal issues of cinematic and literary languages. The novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein and the film India Song are examine using a psychoanalytic model of interpretation.

Staging Writing or the Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras's plays have been produced all over the world. She has herself directed many of them and has never ceased writing for the theater. Among the numerous other directors of her theater work. one finds the names of Peter Brook, lean-Louis Barrault and Claude Regy. Her fascination with the theater and the quality of her work are unquestionable. Yet, in her critical essays or in comments to journalists, Duras has often belittled her own stage productions and theater in general. In reference to India Song, which she originally wrote as a stage project for Peter Brook but which she then decided instead to produce as a film, she justified her choice by stating that "film is more flexible (malleable) and less burdened by the weight of the actor." For anyone interested in the relationship between performance and text. however, this very ambivalence is well worth studying and can be most enlightening. It offers a rare opportunity to observe first-hand an unfolding process through which Duras endeavors to resolve a dilemma which is at the core of contemporary reflection on the nature of "representation. Duras's constant movement from one form to another, her shifting back and forth between fiction, theater, film , radio and television, illuminates the direction and evolution of a writer who, beyond the confines of "genre," has played with the given limits of each form and pushed those limits to their extremes. In this respect, she is probably one of the most representative authors of our time, an age characterized by the blurring of clear boundaries among genres.

The Music of India Song

The Music of <i>India Song</i>