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The 1990s witnessed an explosion in women's writing in France, with a particularly exciting new generation of writer's coming to the fore, such as Christine Angot, Marie Darrieussecq and Regine Detambel. This book introduces an analysis of new women's writing in contemporary France, including both new writers of the 1990s and their more established counter-parts. The 1990s was an exciting period for women's writing in France. The novels of Louise Lambrichs are brilliant but troubling psychological dramas focusing on the traumas that inhabit the family romance: incest, sterility, the death those we love and the terrible legacy of mourning. The body of writing produced by Marie Redonnet between 1985 and 2000 is an unusually coherent one. The book explores the possibility of writing 'de la mélancolie' through focusing on the work of Chantal Chawaf, whose writing may be described as 'melancholic autofiction', melancholic autobiographical fiction. It places Confidence pour confidence within Constant's oeuvre as a whole, and argues for a more positive reading of the novel, a reading that throws light on the trajectory of mother-daughter relations in her fiction. Christiane Baroche was acclaimed in France first as a short-story writer. Unable to experience the freedom of their brothers and fathers, beur female protagonists are shown to experience it vicariously through the reading, and the writing of, narratives. Clotilde Escalle's private worlds of sex and violence, whose transgressions are part of real lives, shock precisely because they are brought into the public sphere, expressed in and through writing.
The female vampire: Chantal Chawaf ’s melancholic autofiction Julia Kristeva opens her text, Soleil noir: dépression et mélancolie, with the claim that ‘Ecrire sur la mélancolie n’aurait de sens, pour ceux que la mélancolie ravage, que si l’écrit même venait de la mélancolie’ (‘For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia’).1 This chapter explores the possibility of writing ‘de la mélancolie’ through focusing on the work of Chantal Chawaf, whose writing may be
the case of Chantal Chawaf, contamination. Alternatively, loss can take the form of a more conscious attempt to convey its effects and be traceable in the aesthetics of a text, surfacing in motifs, in metaphors, or in form, as for example, in the works of Paule Constant or Sibylle Lacan. Our internal selves are also manifest in other ways. Fears and fantasies are given material reality in Marie Darrieussecq’s novels of women in crisis, in the literalisation of metaphors pertaining to women’s bodies, in the undercurrents of presence and absence, in the void at the
notion of deconstruction to use female imagination (and body) to challenge the ‘male’ symbolic through jouissance . 20 (Roland Barthes's reading of plaisir vs. jouissance in his 1973 Le plaisir du texte is also formative to this reading experience.) Diverse authors with differing styles are considered as typifying women's writing practice. They include Marie Cardinal, Chantal Chawaf, Andrée Chedid, Hélène Cixous, Dominique Desanti, Marguerite Duras, Françoise d’Eaubonne, Viviane Forrester, Jocelyne François
Funded in part by the immense wealth of the Schlumberger family inherited by Sylvina Boissonnas, the group founded the publishing house des femmes in 1974. It published works by Hélène Cixous, Chantal Chawaf, Julia Kristeva, Juliet Mitchell (in translation), Xavière Gauthier, Igrecque [Yolaine Simha], Victoria Thérame, Françoise d’Eaubonne, Benoîte et Flora Groult, Evelyne Le Garrec and others. In addition it ran a bookstore, Librairie des femmes, produced magazines such as Le Quotidien des Femmes (1974–1976) and Des femmes en mouvements (1977–1979; 1979–1982) and
. Indeed, if trauma is literally unspeakable – if it cannot be narrated – then the reader must locate it in the gaps, in the ellipses, in the metaphors and images, rather than in the story that is being told. In this volume, Kathryn Robson shows how the figure of the female vampire in Chantal Chawaf ’s Vers la lumière gives voice to the unspeakable loss of the narrator’s mother as, elsewhere, she reads the trauma of childhood sexual abuse in the fragmentary aesthetics of Introduction Béatrice de Jurquet’s writing.37 Literary testimonies can challenge the limits of
‘French feminist’ scene and its performative nature is underscored by Alice Jardine and Anne M. Menke in their Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-68 France (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1991), which opens with a quote by artist Nancy Spero and provides interviews with a number of significant women writers in French – including Chantal Chawaf, Catherine Clément, Hélène Cixous, Jeanne Hyvard, Sarah Kofman, Luce Irigaray, Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, Julia Kristeva, Michèle Montrelay, Monique Wittig and others – whose