Écrire dans la langue de l’autre: Assia Djebar et Julia Kristeva par Irène Ivantcheva-Merjanska (review)

Reviews 223 Ivantcheva-Merjanska, Irène. Écrire dans la langue de l’autre: Assia Djebar et Julia Kristeva. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015. ISBN 978-2-343-05875-7. Pp 235. This book is focused on two women authors: an Algerian, Assia Djebar, and a Bulgarian, Julia Kristeva, both of whom have chosen to write in French, a language that is not their native tongue. The juxtaposition of Djebar and Kristeva is unusual, as the author is the first to admit, and it may at first strike the reader as odd. The biographical trajectories of the two writers indeed share a common migration from their native lands to France, and, even later, to the United States for varying periods of time. These trajectories are echoed in the life of the author of the study: Ivantcheva-Merjanska herself migrated from her native Bulgaria to obtain a doctorate in French and Francophone literature and a university teaching career in the United States, making her uniquely qualified to comment on and compare these two writers, certainly among the most important of our time. However, Djebar’s focus on autobiography and history in novels like L’amour, la fantasia, Vaste est la prison, and La disparition de la langue française seems to have little in common with Kristeva’s murder mysteries—or with the theoretical writings that, in the author’s view, stand behind the two volumes of Kristeva’s fictional trilogy that have been chosen for closer analysis: Possessions and Meurtre à Byzance. Ivantcheva-Merjanska’s study of Djebar’s autobiographical fiction is focused on linguistic issues and set in the context of Djebar’s own theoretical writing, as exemplified in her brief essay, Ces voix qui m’assiègent. This critical study is even more illuminating, however, in its insight into the literary writings of Kristeva, placed in the context of Kristeva’s own theoretical texts as well as those of theorists like Foucault, Bourdieu, and many others. By offering a deep reading of some of Kristeva’s little-studied literary works, Ivantcheva-Merjanska’s book suggests a way in which they might usefully be incorporated into a teaching curriculum to spark a discussion of Kristeva’s thought. It also argues implicitly for an expansion of the concept of the Francophone world even beyond the four geographical regions (Maghreb, SubSaharan Africa, Canada, and Caribbean) that seem to dominate our current curricula, a type of expansion of the concept of Francophonie also offered by scholars like Françoise Lionnet. Dartmouth College (NH) Mary Jean Green Kippur, Sara. Writing It Twice: Self-Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8101-3205-4. Pp. 173. A 2007 manifesto published in Le Monde called for the end of the French-Francophone dichotomy in literature and the adoption of a new label, littérature-monde en ...