On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political, and Literary Essays ed. by Namascar Shaktini (review)

132Women in French Studies approaches to the novel; she is as careful to acknowledge the critics, like Brombert and Hamon, whose work informs her own as she is to situate Hugo's conception of the novel relative to the traditions that influenced him (romance, melodrama, the archetypal hero quest), to his definition of le drame, and to the romantic and realist novels ofhis contemporaries. Roche is on the faculty of Bennington College and her work has appeared in journals such as the French Review and the French Forum. In addition, she has recently published critical editions in English ofboth Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (2004) and Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (2007). This book is based on Roche's 2002 dissertation. Her writing is clear and engaging; her argument accessible and applicable to works by other nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. While the thematic structure of her study results in a certain amount of repetition that can at times be distracting (quotes from secondary sources, for example, may be repeated three to five times throughout the work), it also means that the work can be read productively in sections. This makes the book particularly useful for those who assign critical readings to their undergraduate classes. Amy ReidNew College of Florida Shaktini, Namascar, éd. On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political, and Literary Essays. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Pp. [I]-XVI; 230. $45 cloth, $20 paper. A leading figure at the start of the lesbian and women's liberation movement in France, Monique Wittig, who passed away in 2003, made a notable impact as a social theorist, a prose poet, and a novelist in the seventies and eighties. On Monique Wittig, a collection of essays edited by Namascar Shaktini, is a welcome re-introduction to an American audience of a powerful voice in the feminist movement. The achievement of this book is at least twofold. First, it argues convincingly against the previously dominant reading of Wittig that cast her as an essentialist, a humanist, and a lesbian separatist. Second, it successfully demonstrates that Wittig's subversive writing is fundamentally engaged in a project "to investigate and expose the oppressive relation between gender and subjectivity in our shared language and culture" (xi). Twelve essays compose this series ofreflections on Wittig's theory, politics, and writing. The first three are by Wittig herself and are published here in English for the first time. The manifesto "For a Women's Liberation Movement," which appeared originally in May 1970 in France, is a dazzling analysis and denunciation of the sexual division of labor. In keeping with the genre, this manifesto was meant to provoke discussion and action, and it will continue to do so. Drawing on and superseding Marx in German Ideology and Engels in Origin ofthe Family, Wittig and her associates called for women and minorities to engage in a political takeover by appropriating the universal point Book Reviews133 of view: "like racism, sexism is so well implanted in ruling class ideology that only a radical seizing of power can destroy it . . . we want above all to fight against the ideology that produces male chauvinism and the system that benefits from it." Pushing further Simone de Beauvoir's concept of woman as a cultural construct, Wittig spurred radical feminism by identifying women as a political class. In two essays, Wittig reflects back on her most famous texts: Les Guérillères, an experimental novel honoring female warriors, and The Lesbian Body, one hundred and ten prose poems that have been referred to as the Lesbian Song of Songs. Wittig's commentaries highlight the genealogy of her writing, tracing its roots to the New Novel and to Proust's mapping of love. In terms of technique, Wittig describes her method as a "pitiless collage" that uses what the filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub refers to as "lacunary art," a form of agglomeration that leaves intervals among its constituent parts. Wittig applied this process to her writing by creating strategic intervals, placing holes in sentences at the grammatical level, and destabilizing the conventional order of discourse. Of particular interest is the author's account of her ground-breaking use—as a constituent...