In Memory of Elaine Marks: Life Writing, Writing Death (review)

This gedenkschrift in honour of Elaine Marks is a richly stimulating and moving tribute to a groundbreaking scholar in twentieth-century French studies who died in 2001. It comprises 11 essays by leading scholars working in a range of historical periods and two short pieces by Marks herself. They variously address her broad interests from the modalities of alterity constituted by gender and sexuality, Jewishness and mortality to the ethical engagements of pedagogy, feminism and life writing. Marks is perhaps most well known for her pioneering monographs on Colette, Simone de Beauvoir and Jewish topoi in French literature, inspiring numerous colleagues and students (some of whom are represented here) to engage with the professional and personal contradictions of belonging as they emerge in the dialogue between the poetical and the political. Certain of the essays in this collection address Marks’s life and work directly; others take inspiration from them to explore new terrains in scholarship. All share her abiding interest in autothanatographical and transgressive writing and reading in their critical analyses of works by Beauvoir, Colette, Cixous, Derrida, La Bruyère, Proust, Ronsard, Roth and Saint-Simon. In their reflections on living and dying, fathers, mothers and others, these writers are productively set in dialogue with each other so that, in one case, the mourning of a parent by Beauvoir in Une mort très douce is able to speak to works by Derrida, Ernaux and Roth. Marks’s scholarly nomadism, critique of categorisation and quest for meaning are celebrated throughout this collection which is sensitively concluded by Goodkin’s essay on ‘moribondages’ in La Bruyère and Proust. Here and in the volume as a whole, the importance of mourning well is carefully shown in an analysis of the meaning of human character and existence in life writing and writing death. Offering a rich panorama of readings, the collection is a fitting tribute to an outstanding scholar of her generation and is likely to interest readers in French studies and beyond.