Marguerite Duras Research Articles

Encounters With—and Accounting for—Loss

Loss is problematic: already too much to talk about, it insistently presses upon us the force of its desire. This felt sense of loss, its affective assemblage of the irreducibility of memory and forgetting, attunes us to a deep awareness not of the propriety of our belonging(s) but, rather, to their fragility under the weight of claims to be ours in first place. Loss pulls together scenes, atmospheres, flows, and blockages, liquid assemblages of the individual with queer intersections of time and space. In this sense this article—a mix of literary critique (of Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur), autoethnographic experiment, and photographic practice—is as much a questioning of how loss encodes, in neoliberal society, certain modes of response as sacred, and attempts to find new modes of reframing loss as potency and desire.

Toward a Cinematic Pedagogy: Gilles Deleuze and Manoel de Oliveira

This paper aims to approach cinema, philosophy, and pedagogy from a double Deleuzian perspective: from the work of the Portuguese filmmaker, Manoel de Oliveira, and from the philosophical praxis of Gilles Deleuze. According to Deleuze, there is a principle of affinity between the cinematographic and the philosophical form of thought expression, explored as a peculiar transversal project alongside pure philosophical inquiry. When Oliveira saw the public lecture that Deleuze gave in 1987 at La Femis (“What is the creative act?”), he felt challenged by the philosopher’s words and wrote him a letter in 1991. Furthermore, Deleuze referred to the Portuguese filmmaker’s films as one of the “greatest pedagogies,” along with Roberto Rossellini, Marguerite Duras, or Jean-Luc Godard, for example. Cinema was then seen, for the first time, as a new (possible) cartography to the philosophical plane contributing to a mutually reciprocal movement between cinema and philosophy. In this sense, the encounters between cinema, philosophy, pedagogy, and thought as well as the connection between cinematic images and philosophical concepts, will be the theme of this essay.

Beyond Symbolic Rape: The Insidious Trauma of Conquest in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and Eileen Chang’s “Lust, Caution”

This article contrasts two visions of trauma: a symbolic imaginary on film where women’s violated bodies stand in for philosophical ideas about sex, violence, and politics; and a more complex literary imaginary using what Ann Cvetkovich calls an “archive of trauma.” The starting point for discussion is troubling representations of women on film; The Lover (1992, dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud) and Lust , Caution (2007, dir. Ang Lee) both portray their heroines falling in love with their abusers, men whose shame and vulnerability are expressed through a symbolic rape. Rather than dwelling on this dubious aspect of the films, the main discussion returns to the more nuanced view of trauma in the source texts: The Lover (1984) by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) and “Lust, Caution” (1979) by Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) (1920–1995), neither of which include sexual violence in an obvious way. Duras’s traumatic portrait of French colonialism and Chang’s sinister portrayal of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai refuse symbolic rape as shorthand for conquest. Instead, these stories present an archive of trauma through a series of objects that represent emotional value, and provoke affective responses. Duras and Chang lament what Cvetkovich labels “insidious” or everyday trauma—the impossible histories—carried by women as a result of colonialism and war.

Du souvenir à l’image : enjeux narratifs dans L’Amant

In Marguerite Duras’ works the boundaries between text and image become fluid. This is particularly evident in The Lover, where descriptions of events and characters resemble yellowed photographs, constantly evoking images. The author strives to recreate faithfully certain past incidents, particularly from childhood and youth, such as meeting a Chinese millionaire, which was of paramount importance in her life. However, she is inconsistent in this and does not always follow typical rules of writing a semi-autobiographical work. She attempts to reconstruct the story of her life, emphasising the image in text and its perception by the character and the reader. Breaking of the "autobiographical pact" by blending fact and fiction, truth and falsehood implies a novel narrative technique, visible e.g. in the characteristic duality of the narrator, who is also the protagonist, present in the first and third person, either the subject or an object. This is an intriguing vision of reality, understood as an image locked in memories, created with original narrative solutions, where the reader becomes a spectator.

OH, A PILOT NOVEL

This study will focused in the narration and all the procediment that are used in the A. Pashku Novel which is the most important in this kind of writing. We also will find procediments and novator ideas like the narrative through the proceedings as “analepsis prolepsis”, or “analepsis within analepsis” creates a kind of transmitting chain, that goes from character to character, and so, of course, from time to time. ANTON PASHKU in this novel’s narration, changes the breath, but not entirely, leaving the historical and biblical one, but also gives a radiant breath into the future, which is understandable only through the analogy. We are focused too in all characters of this novel to see her role determination and all the parallels which are between them and the modern foreign literature, like James Joyce, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Robert Ping, Marguerite Duras, Samuel Beckett etc. With all these kind of perceptions and textstading will se also the nature aekperimentalos this novel which is one of the most original and especial for ideas in the time where has been wrote in Albanian Literature, and for the kind of formal structure of narration which present. Keywords: the narrator, Anton Pashku, the narrative chain, prose, etc.

La Douleur e a Compreensão do Contemporâneo

Neste trabalho, pretendemos analisar brevemente a obra La Douleur de Marguerite Duras principalmente em seu caráter de literatura de testemunho, enquanto uma literatura preocupada com o eu e com o mundo. Para a referida análise, partiremos de uma articulação entre o tratamento que Giorgio Agamben dá ao contemporâneo e aquele que Hannah Arendt dá ao pensar entre o passado e o futuro; em segundo lugar nos questionaremos acerca do tipo de compreensão trazida pela obra sobre o mundo a partir do “eu” que narra suas vivências, e finalmente consideraremos o modo pelo qual a obra alcançaria essa compreensão.

A literatura e suas modalidades de amor: um enfoque psicanalítico

A psicanálise sempre precisou da arte, em especial da literatura, mas também, das artes plásticas e cênicas para revelar o que a teoria não consegue ver, por representar as estruturas e procedimentos do funcionamento psíquico e social. Nestes termos, Lacan vai ler este amor primordial, que é o amor pela própria imagem, sob o signo do mito de Narciso, assim como o amor transferencial, tematizado por Freud, será conjugado sob o signo do Banquete, seja como suposição de saber, que nada sabe além do desejo de Alcebíades por Agatão, seja como discurso do mestre, por alocar o amor philia no lugar do agalmasedutório. A psicanálise, também vai abordar o amor trágico a partir da lição de Antígona, aquela que deu até aquilo que não tinha, em nome da dignidade humana. Já o amor-paixão será articulado sob a rubrica do bovarismo, expressão romântica de uma aspiração amorosa que, em malogro, vai desembocar na melancolia, como antessala da morte. O amor cômico, na pena de Molière, será o amor que rebaixa o Outro, justamente para que o sujeito não se obrigue a morrer de amor. O amor ao pensamento será articulado nos termos daquele que ama o próprio amor, cujo modelo será o amor cortês provençal. Enfim, no derradeiro Lacan, será o amor de Beatriz que iluminará o caminho sublimatório de Dante em direção à significação vazia do amor eterno. Por tudo isto Lacan irá nos lembrar, em sua homenagem a Marguerite Duras, que o artista sempre irá preceder o psicanalista nos trilhamentos do inaudito, tanto no que se refere ao saber, quanto ao amor...

Capitalisme et colonialisme français dans quelques romans Indochinois de Marguerite Duras

Opposing the mythology of the “civilizing mission” of colonial France, Marguerite Duras and some other novelists from French Indochina (Daguerches, Dorgelès, Farrère) show in their works that one of the main aims of colonialism was to develop new areas for expanding capitalism, and then indebted to economic factors. This economic dimension that was deliberately hidden by colonial discourse is made prominent by Un Barrage contre le Pacifique through the extended metaphor of vampirism. The paper aims to examine which literary means are implemented to express the criticism of the spread of western capitalism–arbitrarily regarded as the arising of modernity–within a body of anticolonial works about a former French colony.

Telling Makes It So: Memory, Narrative, and Identity in Moderato Cantabile

This inter-disciplinary study examines Marguerite Duras’ Moderato Cantabile as a means of exploring the workings of human memory. Pursuing a similar tack to the one undertaken by Suzanne Nalbantian in her Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience, literature here provides access to the ‘workings of the mind’ in order to ‘shed light on the functioning of human memory’ (1). The present research will demonstrate how the Durassian heroine's repeated recollection of an idealized scene of obsession, rapture, and murder ultimately enables her to contrive a memory that she does not possess. This article also highlights several ambiguities of one English translation of the work that have obscured its allegations about the irresistible power of narrative.

Relieving pain in Marguerite Duras’s ‘La douleur’ and ‘Albert des Capitales’

This study will focus on how psychic pain is externalized in two short texts from Marguerite Duras’s La douleur. I will first argue that the collection’s opening work, “La douleur,” may be viewed as a trauma testimony, as a sub-genre of autobiography. Duras the narrator shows us how her psychic pain generates physiological symptoms. In the course of the narrative, we come to understand that her symptoms are the same as the ones she images her husband, Robert L., suffering from in Dachau. Duras also projects her pain onto her surroundings, transforming the Paris of her mind’s eye into the bleak landscape where she believes her husband has perished. In “Albert des Capitales,” we find what amounts to an externalization of psychological suffering through behavior as the protagonist, Therese, transforms herself from victim to victimizer during the interrogation of a “donneur,” a suspected collaborator. Her ordering the torture of the donneur is the result of the psychic pain caused by the uncertainty of her husband’s fate. “La douleur” and “Albert des Capitales,” I will argue, are two sides of the same coin, two different women—both Duras’s avatars—who find themselves in equally stressful circumstances but who unconsciously process their stress in divergent ways.

On Love and Melancholia in Marguerite Duras’s Autofiction

In the Durassian melancholic atmosphere, past and present, fantasy and reality come together as one. This paper addresses the themes of love and destruction in Marguerite Duras’s life that pervade her oeuvre, allowing us to discern a melancholic structure within her autofiction. Writing down her melancholia—the impossible mourning of a loved object—Duras captures nothingness and loss—in order not to die of love. In a constant exchange with her readers, she searches for herself and delivers herself to her readers. This renewable creative process of writing enables her to engage in an ongoing experience of identity reconstruction, in a way similar to the patient in psychoanalysis re-creating his/her life’s fiction.

Attention Duras

In 2015 The Centre Pompidou in Paris celebrated the centenary of Marguerite Duras’s birth with minimal means and quiet panache: an exhibit, “Duras Song,” occupied a corner of the Centre’s public library while a complete retrospective of all her films was shown in the Centre’s movie theatres. Both were well attended, and the films often sold out. This article recounts the author’s experiences with the exhibition vis-a-vis his engagement with Duras’s literary and film work within and beyond the context of the Centre Pompidou centenary.

Collaborative Differences: Marguerite Duras, Eve Sedgwick, and “The Beast in the Jungle”

Marguerite Duras's 1962 theatrical adaptation of Henry James's short story offers a feminist alternative to Eve Sedgwick's famous interpretation. The precise elements that for Duras reveal James's interest in “feminine” forms of expression also are significant for queer theoretical readers, after Sedgwick, who emphasize James's style rather than his biography. However, in none of those recent discussions do notions of temporal or stylistic queerness in James's work resonate with the ideas about gendered time and language that are central to Duras's approach, and to twentieth-century French feminism more generally. Duras's adaptation, grounded in heteronormative assumptions, suffers from a parallel blind spot; James Lord, her collaborator in the project, suggests that she undermined the queer elements in both James's story and his own first draft. This article uses the unexamined resonances between Duras's and Sedgwick's readings to offer a possible counter-narrative to ongoing scholarly divisions among contemporary feminisms and queer theories.

Orality and Objectification: Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Filmmakers and Translators

Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub are filmmakers of principle. Since the beginning of the 1960s, they have been constructing a highly coherent body of work, based on a certain number of very precise, concrete laws. Some of those rules have changed with time and history; others have remained untouched, rigorously observed from the first until today. They are not an artificial set of constraints, designed to complicate a game that would otherwise be too simple; rather, they define the artist's position in the world, in the historical moment and political situation in which they live and work, the place where they stand. Some of those rules are explicit: for instance, the sound on the has to be the sound produced there and then, when the was shot. There can be no exception. Other rules are less clearly formulated. For example, all Huillet and Straub films originated from a previous work. There is always a text before there is the film, out of which the emerges. Probably not a single line was ever spoken by a character in a by Huillet and Straub that was not a quote. That is not really a law; Daniele Huillet would probably have said that it is basically humility. In any case, it's the way they worked: they needed something to react to, something that would resist them, for which they would feel both broth- erhood and strangeness, admiration and anger. So all their films have been adaptations 1 , in a very specific sense— whether from Heinrich Boll, Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Cesare Pavese, Stephane Mallarme, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Holderlin, Paul Cezanne, Elio Vittorini, etc. In this perspective, one could argue, as Barton Byg did in his 1995 book on Huillet and Straub's work, that it exemplifies a conception of film as translation (Byg 199). And it is true that the two actions of translating a text and of adapting it for share common points and problems. But in fact, Huillet and Straub have had to become translators in the narrowest sense of the word. Because of the place of previous texts in the construction of their films, Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub have had to build, from the very beginning, a cinematic approach to language that would be coherent with their poetics—and politics—as a whole. This implies considering language in all of its material forms and presence within film: as sound

Orality and Objectification: Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Filmmakers and Translators

Orality and Objectification:Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Filmmakers and Translators Benoît Turquety (bio) Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub are filmmakers of principle. Since the beginning of the 1960s, they have been constructing a highly coherent body of work, based on a certain number of very precise, concrete laws. Some of those rules have changed with time and history; others have remained untouched, rigorously observed from the first film until today. They are not an artificial set of constraints, designed to complicate a game that would otherwise be too simple; rather, they define the artist’s position in the world, in the historical moment and political situation in which they live and work, the place where they stand. Some of those rules are explicit: for instance, the sound on the film has to be the sound produced there and then, when the film was shot. There can be no exception. Other rules are less clearly formulated. For example, all Huillet and Straub films originated from a previous work. There is always a text before there is the film, out of which the film emerges. Probably not a single line was ever spoken by a character in a film by Huillet and Straub that was not a quote. That is not really a law; Danièle Huillet would probably have said that it is basically humility. In any case, it’s the way they worked: they needed something to react to, something that would resist them, for which they would feel both brotherhood and strangeness, admiration and anger. So all their films have been adaptations1, in a very specific sense—whether from Heinrich Böll, Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Cesare Pavese, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Cézanne, Elio Vittorini, etc. In this perspective, one could argue, as Barton Byg did in his 1995 book on Huillet and Straub’s work, that it exemplifies a conception of “film as translation” (Byg 199). And it is true that the two actions of translating a text and of adapting it for film share common points and problems. But in fact, Huillet and Straub have had to become translators in the narrowest sense of the word. Because of the place of previous texts in the construction of their films, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub have had to build, from the very beginning, a cinematic approach to language that would be coherent with their poetics—and politics—as a whole. This implies considering language in all of its material forms and presence within film: as sound [End Page 47] and as image, as spoken word and as subtitles. Both are important objects of reflection for Huillet and Straubt, as both crucially engage the artists’ and the spectators’ relations to language as well as to film form in general. In their films, attention to language as sound and meaning involves questions of grammar as well as a precise organization of rhythm and diction; and subtitles involve translation and the configuration of the spectators’ gaze on the screen. In all those dimensions, the basic principle of Huillet and Straub’s approach is the only possible kind of respect to the original work: neither fidelity nor interpretation, but absolute literalness. In that, they are truly Benjaminian filmmakers, though their essays of reference may be more “The Task of the Translator” than “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In fact, as we will see, “The Storyteller” could also be considered a major reference for understanding their conception of cinema as essentially belonging to oral culture. This double aesthetic and political bind to the materiality of language and to orality led the filmmakers to give a very specific role to translation in their work. Dubbing as Murder Huillet and Straub’s particular conception of the place and function of language in film can be perceived through their relations to dubbing and subtitling. They have had many times throughout their career to defend their position on this matter. The first case, and probably the most resounding one, occurred during the post-production of Les Yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer...

Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance

Research Article| January 01 2015 Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance Madeleine Dobie Madeleine Dobie Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Romanic Review (2015) 106 (1-4): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-106.1-4.1 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Madeleine Dobie; Assia Djebar: Patterns of Resistance. Romanic Review 1 January 2015; 106 (1-4): 1–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/26885220-106.1-4.1 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRomanic Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2015 The Trustees of Columbia University2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

English

Shahrnoush Parsipour and Marguerite Duras are both Iranian and French contemporary writers. There are similarities in their works for reasons such as  being a woman, being writer, being intellectual, living in 20th century, being familiar with various approaches of feminism, experiencing Eastern life. The question is, what is the ideological and intellectual coordination that exists in Parsipour and Duras? The premise of this research is based on the attention given to “free love” and “magic realism”; breaking the tradition and rebellion against women's status, challenging superstitious and baseless beliefs, protesting against women owning property, criticizing man-centered governing laws, accepting to be oppressed and humiliated by women in history, prostitution and women's fear and insecurity, encouraging women to acquire various sciences and considering men as a model by women are the same cases in stories of both writers. The titles of both stories reflect concerns over the authors’ minds and explicitly represent feminist thought.   Key words: Feminism, story, Shahrnoosh Parsipoor, Margarit Dorath &nbsp

Ramonismos contemporáneos: la greguería en las obras de Juan Manuel de Prada, Juan Bonilla y Ray Loriga

This essay analyzes the presence of the gregueria in the works of three authors that started to publish in the ’90s, a period in which novels based on a harsh juvenile realism were very widespread. However, in that decade, Ramon Gomez de la Serna surprisingly was taken as a model by Juan Manuel de Prada and Juan Bonilla, while his influence in the texts of Ray Loriga is subtler and not so obvious, because his less exuberant writing tends to combine the gregueria’s perspicacity with the laconicism of song lyrics and the prose of Marguerite Duras. For the first two writers it was a way to rebel against the dominant realism through a caustic or a witty humour, whilst in Loriga that aphoristic style was determined by a personal approach due to his sensibility and his melancholic rebellion against society.

The Ethics of Uncovering Something Else in Histoire(s) du cinema

In lieu of an abstract, here is the essay's opening paragraph:Marguerite Duras prefaces the second edition of Le navire night, from which an excerpt is cited above, by explaining that after writing the story of a man named J.M., everything came too late, including the realization of the film version of Le navire night. Once the event has been written and the common night of history been closed up, did she have the right to flash a light into the darkness to go back and see? The only seeing through cinema that was possible, she continues, was to film the failure, the disaster of the film. But how does one film the failure of realizing a film adaptation of a written text, which itself was transcribed from an oral re-telling of a story, which itself was adapted from memory? The event already took place – writing, “this history here” –, leaving cinema to film what never took place, namely, the film itself. As Jean-Luc Godard confirms in a chapter titled Seul le cinéma in Histoire(s) du cinéma, not only in the form of his project as a whole but also more explicitly in one shot that positions two close-up photographs of his face with the sound of Paul Hindemith’s “Funeral Music” and this text: “Faire une description précise de ce qui n’a jamais eu lieu est le travail de l’historien.” Describing the rise of the film Le navire night from its disastrous death, Duras writes: “On a mis la caméra à l’envers et on a filmé ce qui entrait dedans, de la nuit, de l’air, des projecteurs, des routes, des visages aussi.” The camera turned upside-down, or in the other sense, inside-out, Duras films the entrance of the exterior, a sort of a Levinasian visage. The question no longer is one of having the right but of the duty to re-write history, as is insinuated by the reference to “The Critic as Artist” written across one of the photographs mentioned above, which is again a gesture of Godard’s positioning himself as the critic whose role Oscar Wilde defined: “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”

"Le Vice-consul": escritura especular y destrucción del relato

Le Vice-consul (1965) by Marguerite Duras is a narrative text, included in the Indian Cycle , and characterized by a story within the story told by an intradiegetic narrator. In the present essay we will analyze how–through a specular writing which creates a series of formal and thematic correspondences between both stories–this metanarrative blurs the diegetic borders and destroys the conventional structure of the novel.