The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French by Amaleena Damlé (review)

involves the slow march through time toward a literature of the Self—with Proust as the greatest model. Brix notes the proliferation of autobiography, memoir, and“autofiction ,”wherein“il est établi que se raconter, c’est non seulement une obligation, mais c’est aussi de l’art: l’écrivain qui se respecte doit mettre en scène son MOI” (355). He leaves us with a provocative question: has this navel-gazing not left French literature bereft of a much-needed return to an other-centeredness? Brix devotes the last few pages to this question, and adds, “Pourquoi lit-on? Pourquoi la littérature existet -elle?” (353). Waxing nostalgic, the enigmatic last line invites the reader to consider that French literature needs to return to a past glory:“On aurait bien besoin,aujourd’hui, d’un nouveau Balzac. Mais si—par bonheur—il existait, qui pourrait l’apercevoir?” (355). Given recent assaults on the humanities, the question concerning the relevance of literature—and his (perhaps provocative) answer regarding the need for a new Balzac—merits debate, one for which Brix has thoroughly prepared us in this comprehensive book. Rider University (NJ) Mary L. Poteau-Tralie Damlé, Amaleena. The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women’s Writing in French. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. ISBN 978-0-7486-6821-2. Pp. 224. £70. This monograph draws on poststructuralist philosophy and feminist criticism in order to focus on female corporeality in the works of a select group of French-speaking women writing in the last two decades. That said, Damlé does not rely on the most customary theoreticians: she eschews the discourse of psychoanalysis with its concepts of lack,negativity,abjection,passivity,etc.and,to a lesser degree,Derridean discourse— in favor of Gilles Deleuze. The author further chooses to study writers who are not in the direct tradition of familiar second-wave French feminist writers (the most-cited triumvirate of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva, for example). One would be hard-pressed to forge a unified feminist agenda based on the authors under scrutiny; their works are intended to appeal to popular audiences, and they tend to have a political slipperiness regarding gender as well as a generic indeterminacy. These very aspects, Damlé argues, give the feminist literary critic much to analyze about “gender, agency, and power” (14) in contemporary culture. The book’s introduction alone provides a useful overview of the political place of women’s writing since the 1970s and traces as well the movement away from representations of a stable,corporeally-based,female subjectivity. The study next moves to a discussion of Deleuzian philosophy (the preferred theoretical reference for the monograph), the critiques brought against Deleuze by feminist thinkers, but also a defense of some of the useful concepts, particularly those that posit a productive, expanding dynamism in relationship to the body (transcendental empiricism, desire, becoming, nomadism—to name a few). These Deleuzian concepts in turn serve the analyses of the writings of four contemporary French authors: Amélie 194 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 195 Nothomb,Ananda Devi, Marie Darrieussecq, and Nina Bouraoui. The Deleuze chapter proves particularly intense, but Damlé helpfully references the pertinent ideas as she engages them in each chapter and, as is often the case in such cross-fertilizations, the literary examples illuminate the philosophical ideas. Nor is her application of Deleuze unquestioning: where the philosophy falls short in imagining the thinking and writing of a less-constrained body, the author reorients the theorization. Nothomb’s autofictions about anorexia, for instance, allow for the re-imagining of the“Body without Organs,” although Nothomb pulls back from what might seem an endorsement of a life-threatening disease. Devi’s characters experience Deleuzian“becoming otherwise,” specifically becoming-animal and thereby transforming their experience of a hyperattuned body. Damlé supplements this concept with Irigaray’s“mutual engenderment of two embodied subjects” (106), both transformed. Darrieussecq’s writing shifts effortlessly from thought to body to world, a phenomenon located at the site of the female body and of female sex. Finally, Bouraoui’s writing demonstrates“nomadism,” which allows the invention of subjectivity beyond the body’s boundaries. This severely short-shrifted version of the monograph’s contents cannot do it...