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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.
Evermore or nevermore? Memory and identity in Marie Redonnet’s fiction of the s The body of writing produced by Marie Redonnet between and is an unusually coherent one. Settings and characters drawn up in one text are echoed in later works; certain stories and motifs figure again and again; the style of writing rarely changes from one text to the next. This is not to suggest, however, that the work does not evolve over the period. Indeed, while there is a large degree of overlap between the works published in the s and more recent
’s influence once again, but it does so by focusing uniquely on the politics of his late theatre. Unlike those anthologists who continue to define him, erroneously, as an absurdist theatre maker, I intend to argue for Genet as a revolutionary playwright by engaging with, and building on, the uncompromising political readings that have started to emerge in Genet scholarship in France, the UK and the USA in the past decade. 2 Writing at the dawn of the new millennium, the French novelist and critic Marie Redonnet has no doubts about the burning relevance of Genet’s political
providing the first sustained critical evaluations of lesser-known writers like Clotilde Escalle and Louise L. Lambrichs. The volume also includes essays on writers whose work began to gather interest in the preceding decade but who, in the s, were still in the process of becoming firmly established, like Paule Constant, Sylvie Germain, Marie Redonnet and Leïla Sebbar. In her influential book on s and s French women’s writing, one of Elizabeth Fallaize’s stated aims is to make the texts she translates in her volume available to anglophone readers and ‘recognised
relationship is formative – a key player in women’s sense of self, even if, as Christiane Baroche seems to suggest, alternative maternal relationships Conclusion (with ‘surrogate’ mothers) may supplement it. For their part, Marie Redonnet’s motherless characters attempt, with varying degrees of success, to create memory texts in their quest for the grounding and selfrepresentation they lack. Sebbar’s Shérazade reconnects with her mother through identification with a book of photographs of Algerian women, and as such is able to begin to assume an identity of her own
the Semiotics of Performance (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989); and Marie Redonnet, Jean Genet: le poète travesti (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2000). Other critics such as Jeanette Savona, Jean Genet (London: Macmillan, 1983) have paid more attention to its Foucauldian dimension. However, they, too, have neglected to focus on affect. The largely post-structuralist-inspired readings mentioned in the 1960s and 1970s differ, radically, from the existentialist, absurdist and ritualistic readings made by critics like Martin Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd