In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • This "Self" Which Is Not One: Women's Life Writing in French
  • Patrick Saveau
Edwards, Natalie, and Christopher Hogarth, ed. This "Self" Which Is Not One: Women's Life Writing in French. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Pp 167. ISBN 978-1-4438-2079-0. $52.99.

This "Self" Which Is Not Oneis a continuation / prolongement/ extension of the critical studies that have examined women's autobiography since Estelle Jelinek's The Tradition of Women's Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present. In their choice of essays, the editors reinforce and add to what has been theorized in the last 25 years in feminist, then post-feminist thought, pointing out how women autobiographers have recourse to different narrative strategies to explore selfhood, insisting on the hybrid dimension of female identity.

Carmen Cristea demonstrates that Suzanne Lilar's self is dual to the point of obsession: whether it concerns enunciation, themes or characters, Lilar's texts are haunted by duality. Studying Nina Bouraoui's Garçon manqué, Ann-Sofie Persson shows that Bouraoui's self is plural and fragmented. However, while plurality is considered in a positive light, fragmentation connotes a lack of coherence, a sense of loss. Leïla Sebbar's self, on the other hand, is not so much fragmented as it is divided, a division she nourishes in order to write; examining Sebbar along with Marie Cardinal and Hélène Cixous, Amy L. Hubbell shows how each one of these writers negotiates their belonging to two different cultures, Algeria and France, in very different ways.

Erica L. Johnson uses shame theory to explore Marguerite Duras' L'Amant. When in the presence of both her family and lover, the young girl is made to feel intersubjective shame, a shame that turns out to be false as it is based on colonial and racist ideologies she does not share. Imposed from the outside, intersubjective shame disappears when the young girl is in the sole company of her lover, enabling her to fully express her desires. In the same spirit of the condemnation of colonialism and racism, Lisa A. Connell demonstrates how Maryse Condé resisted pedagogy used as a tool to maintain and strengthen existing ideologies and embraced instead dissident literature to understand the world, acquire knowledge and forge her own identity and writing practice.

Christopher Hogarth and Mark D. Lee bring different perspectives in their essays in the sense that the former demonstrates how essentialist narratives are necessary to identity formation in order to build one's consciousness, one's vision, something the main character of Ken's Bugul's Le Baobab fouwas unable to do. The latter shows how the media constructed Amélie Nothomb's identity, one totally unknown to the public when she published Hygiène de l'assassin. Natalie Edwards' essay on Christine Angot presents the idea that the self is constructed through different discourses. Examining Sujet Angot, the critic points out how the writer warns us about the difficulties of knowing the self when reading an autobiography.

Finally, an essay on Assia Djebar seems to explode any limits that autobiography, life writing or self-narrative may have, since the three works Nevine El-Nossery considers are either novels or a film, where the "I" is either absent or drowned in a polyphony of voices. Although the critic's thesis is the intertwining of the collective and the individual in the feminine self, the paradoxical prevalence of the former over the latter within women's identity [End Page 138]leaves the reader wondering how to receive and read these texts within the writing of the self.

In This "Self" Which Is Not One, the reader is exposed to the many different ways women in Francophone literature have explored their own subjectivity, asserting the impossibility of a traditionally stable and linear self. However, one may wonder whether this positioning towards the traditional self is still worth mentioning nowadays when hybridity, a characteristic that prevails in this book but also in our lives, has superseded the singular, unitary self of yesteryears for quite some time now, whether in women's or men's life writing.

Patrick Saveau
Franklin College Switzerland

pdf

Share