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Rye161 Weavingthe reader into text: the authority and generosity ofmodernwomen writers With readingfiguredas a dialogue between textandreader, this essayaddresses the still problematical post-Barthesian issue ofthe authority ofwomen writers. In very diverse post-1 980fiction by French writers Christiane Barock. Hélène Cixous, and Paule Constant, textual strategies which convey the authority ofthe author are foundto co-exist with those which encourage the creativity ofthe individual reader. Authority is thus mitigated with generosity to make reading into a meaningful and liberating dialogue. The ongoing dilemma created by the dissolution ofthe author's authority following Barthes's essay, "La Mort de l'Auteur", is neatly summarized by Maurice Biriotti in his Introduction to What is an author!. The death of the author as authority over the text is liberating because it calls into question the notion of a single authority, and because it challenges the authority (and the authoritarianism) of the literary canon. Barthes's contention is also restrictive, however, because paradoxically it thus gives no authority to marginal authors, to, for example, women writers, who still retain their marginal position in relation to the central monolith of the male-dominated literary canon. Not withstanding the fact that Barthes's own authority in respect of this particular essay remains considerable, the irony of his killing off of the authority ofthe author cannot be lost on the large number ofwomen writers whose work is now being published.' Indeed, it is with the knotty question ofthe authority ofwomen writers that this article is concerned. To this end, both the character of authority and its effect on the reader will be considered in the fiction texts ofsuch diverse contemporary French writers as Christiane Baroche, Hélène Cixous, and Paule Constant.2 Barthes's essay has spawned many responses: Foucault, identifying writing as "a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears" posits the change from writing-as-immortality to writing-as-sacrifice, but he suggests nonetheless that some classificatory authority remains attached to the author's name (142). Foucault's formulation is a worrying response for modern women writers who have finally found their voices and are making them heard. Is their work, therefore, to be, ultimately, only a reinforcement of, or a route back into, the stereotypically feminine state ofself-sacrifice? Hélène Cixous's polemical and poetical essays ofthe 1970s, "Sorties" and "Le Rire de la Méduse", project a more positive formulation ofwriting for women, calling for women to write themselves, and to find through writing new forms of, and relationships to, female subjectivity. In "Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing and the Reader", Nancy Miller defends the subjectivity of women writers against a loss of authority which they have never had, in the hope that, carefully negotiating the relations between collectivity and fragmentation, feminism can produce through writing 1 62Women in French Studies and reading, "a new social subject" (36). The authority ofthe author continues to be a sticky problem for feminism, since, on the one hand, there is a reluctance on the part of many women to assume (even if they could) the mantle of stereotypical masculine authority, while, on the other hand, there is a desire to attach some sense ofauthority to women as writers oftexts.1 Miller raises the question ofwhat authority should mean for women, not only as writers but also as readers.4 Since authority is so closely interwoven with masculinity, however, it is desirable (ifsomewhat difficult) to imagine alternative formulations divorced from connotations of authoritarianism and even perhaps of authoritativeness which might be more acceptable to, and more readily associated with women. Barthes deems that "la mort de l'Auteur" is necessary to make way for "la naissance du lecteur" (67), and modern reading theories indeed posit reading as a relationship between the reader and the text, rather than between the writer and the reader by way of the text.5 A text needs its readers to make it mean, yet, as Norman Holland shows in 5 Readers Reading, the subjective baggage that any reader brings to reading means that each individual reader reads and interprets a text in a different way. On the other hand, while, in theoretical terms, the authority...

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