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132Women in French Studies terns of Exile and Cultural Survival in Gisèle Pineau and Suzanne DraciusPinalie ," locates his discussion in notions ofcultural hybridity as described by Bhaba and in Glissant's theory of antillanité. Co-editor Patrice Proulx revives Françoise Ega's Lettres à une Noire, published posthumously in 1978, in her article "Textualizing the Immigrant Community: Françoise Ega's Lettres à une Noire," thus broadening our horizon of writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe. In the section on the African Diaspora in France, four articles discuss writing and identity in the works of authors originally from subsanaranAfrica . Odile Cazenave's "WritingNew Identities: theAfrican Diaspora in Paris" presents a helpful overview of contemporary writers from Senegal, Cameroon, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, the Congo, and the Republic of Congo now living in Paris. Nicki Hitchcott, in "Migrating Genders in Calixthe Beyala's Fiction," offers a strong analysis ofspace and place in understanding Beyala's female protagonists. The final section turns to Asia, and specifically Vietnamese fiction in French. I have found Ching Selao's article, "Tainted Blood: On Being Impure in Kim Lefèvre's Métisse blanche and Retour à la saison des pluies" to be both relevant and accessible in our advanced undergraduate seminar. Her discussion oímétissage in the context ofboth Vietnamese and French society raises and responds to pertinent questions of identity, gender, and ethnicity. In conclusion, Susan Ireland and Patrice Proulx have assembled an admirable collection of critical articles presenting the different faces ofthe immigrant narrative. Not every essay will interest every reader, but the varied texts included here successfully reflect and evaluate the ever-changing immigrant experience in post-colonial France today. Sara Steinert BorellaPacific University Ann Jefferson. Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory: Questions of Difference. Cambridge Studies in French Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0 521 77211 7. Pp. 230. $53.25. This prestigious volume is intended for literary specialists. Scholars who are familiar with Sarraute's work and versed in gender theory will find this book interesting. Ann Jefferson, co-editor ofthe Pléiade edition of Sarraute's complete works, analyzes complex questions and finds useful answers. Sarraute emphasizes the commonality ofthe experience oitropisms while simultaneously proclaiming difference from what has gone before. It produces an anxiety which comes from the fear of exclusion and rejection, on the one hand, and the fear of assimilation into something alien, on the other. Jefferson correctly situates this paradox at the center of Sarraute's work. In her introduction, Jefferson compares Sarraute's use of difference with the theories ofSaussure, Deleuze, Barthes, Derrida, Volosinov, Bakhtin, Lyotard, Girard, Cixous, Irigaray, Showalter, Guilbert and Gubar, finally proclaiming that difference in Sarraute is "neither a theme nor a theory." For Jefferson, it is a preoccupation which is intimately tied to the question of writing itself. Book Reviews133 She also concludes early on that "difference and sameness never remain where they appear to be found." Jefferson uses the structure of the paradox to analyze differences ofthree types. First, she minutely examines how the paradox ofdifference and sameness works itself out in human relations. According to Jefferson, Sarraute's writing can only exist as difference, while the subjectivity ofher "characters" lacks the boundaries which would make real agency possible. These discussions are illustrated by examples from all periods of Sarraute's works. Then Jefferson shows how difference is the origin of and is transformed into art. Works of art are redemptive to people who respond to them. Sometimes the indefinite boundaries permit a permeation and a type of union with the work of art, yet the writer must constantly be on guard to prevent words from reverting to the difference which makes writing impossible by turning the words into the hard smooth surfaces which she associates with death. In the second part ofthe book, Jefferson addresses the body and sexual difference, which is the domain in which most of the theory of difference has been developed in the past two decades. Jefferson believes that it is in the dimension of intersubjectivity that the body, which had disappeared, makes its return in Sarraute's narratives. The power of the other to determine how the subject perceives him/herself puts the...

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