Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women's Autobiography (review)

In recent times, we have seen a profusion of new approaches to the study of life-writing and self-representation, to which Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women's Autobiography makes a significant contribution. Taking as its object the autobiographical writing of Gisèle Halimi, Julia Kristeva, Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous, this volume examines the way in which these writers, in their vastly different and unique ways, articulate nonunitary selfhood by writing "I" as a plural construct. A particular highlight of the book is the discussion of the less documented autobiographical writing of Halimi, better known for her public role as a lawyer and female rights activist. Unlike many scholars in the field, the author resists coining a neologism to denote the innovative subversion of autobiographical norms observed here, instead reclaiming and advocating 'autobiography' as a term that is sufficiently flexible to encapsulate a wide range of autobiographical styles as well as diverse media.

The introduction traces a brief history of women's autobiography and the development of autobiographical theory, and sets the proviso of "literary autobiography" as the subject of this book, an approach that is claimed to offer a creative interrogation of modes of self-representation that more fully engage with the quest to find new ways of inscribing selfhood in narrative. The first chapter focuses on three autobiographical texts by Halimi (1973, 1988, 1999), which dramatise the changing persona of the narrated and the narrating "I"s as Halimi recounts, revisits and rewrites autobiographical incidents in each ensuing volume. In the second chapter, Edwards analyzes Kristeva's 1990 novel to explore how she employs two separate and distinct narratives, with their respective first- and third-person narrators, to examine the ways in which she thus inscribes dual selfhood whilst emphasizing the instability of her self-narrative. Chapter Three deals with the fourth and most autobiographical of Djebar's quartet of autobiographical novels (1995) in which Djebar is claimed to more overtly question the purpose of her characteristically collective 'I'. This chapter presents Djebar's writing as an illustration of the ultimate futility of attempting to align an individual self with a collective other, or of inscribing individual with collective memory. Cixous's autobiographical work of fiction (2000) is the object of the fifth chapter. Edwards points to the originality of Cixous's contribution to autobiographical writing insofar as she rejects both unitary and nonunitary writing by adopting narrative functions that entirely displace the narrating self in a way that renders her partial autobiography irresolutely multivoiced and collective, and her identity ultimately 'unidentifiable'.

The brief fifth and final chapter-also the conclusion-recapitulates the work's overall theory that the enunciation of plural subjectivity in contemporary women's autobiography in French through the construction of a plural "I" is shown, in the works of these four writers, to result not in a more accurate, coherent, or harmonious presentation of self, but in a new space of autobiographical writing through a subject who, neither "I" nor "we", could be considered as "more than me" (25). Edwards demonstrates that the development of the nonunitary speaking "I" that is observed in these texts points not to an emancipatory self-enunciation, but leads to an apparently unresolvable, isolated subject position.

Shifting Subjects assumes a certain degree of knowledge on the part of the reader as texts cited are not always fully, or at least not immediately referenced, and occasional typographical errors and inconsistencies (such as references to Halimi's younger brother's death, which occurred when the writer was 4 years old on p. 42, and when she was 5 years old on p. 48) might have been avoided with more careful editing. One minor limitation of the study is that the titles of the primary works studied might have warranted attention and/or analysis, given the importance of naming with regards the self...