French Contributions

The past two years have been strong ones for African American studies. The general characteristic of articles is a critical focus on the aesthetic mode of minority discourse as a contentious space that poses a challenge to the idea of monolithic national identity. Meanwhile, a recognition of the alterity of cultural difference and its introduction into the claim for cultural supremacy is the main trend of book-length studies historicizing the struggle against oppression and depersonalization. Significantly, substantial studies testify to the interest of French scholars in literary history from slave narratives to colonial alienation with an exploration of the phenomenological affirmation of self and other. Compelling lines of inquiry can be observed. Several publications commanding attention are centered on contemporary literature with a prevailing move away from one-author studies and the emergence of an interest in sociological observations intercut with literary analysis. Another current in the mainstream of French scholars' contributions can be observed: a striking number of essays pay a growing attention to women's issues, feminism, and gender while addressing societal and aesthetical questions. New trends have been observed involving a growing interest in contemporary American literature including science fiction and the rewriting of utopia as well as narrative craftsmanship and semantic vistas to be extended to a challenging poetic for sociology.

a. African American Literature and Ethnic Writing

Is interrogating identity a way of experiencing the sense of division that prefigures transitional truth? To this loaded question where the splitting of the subject and the construction of otherness are keys to understanding the ambivalence of psychic and cultural identification, the response provided by minority American life writers is mostly driven by aesthetic claims to negotiate relationship to national space. Where better to raise the question of positionality of the self in relation to otherness than in the illuminative collection of essays The Self as Other in Minority American Life Writing, ed. Claudine Raynaud and Nelly Mok (Cambridge Scholars)? Enthusiasts of minority American life writing will appreciate this compelling work whose notable feature is the attempt to revive an interest in aesthetic readings of texts committed to the articulation of racial and cultural difference. The essays in this clearly organized study of nondominant autobiographical discourse participate in a groundbreaking subjective process of vision building. Standing by the principles of aesthetic connoisseurship, each essay offers astute interpretations of manifestations of the self. Drawing from a large corpus of cultural models, a thought-provoking emphasis is laid on the dialectical hinge between ethnic self-consciousness viewed as life-denying when couched in the past and life-affirming when reinvented for the present. In a complementary way, The Self as Other in Minority American Life Writing is a penetrating intertextual study of the modes of representation of racial and cultural otherness. Testifying to the importance of nondominant autobiographical discourse, the set of balanced comparisons established by learned essays constitutes a valuable addendum to a noteworthy analysis of the generic hybridity of minority American life writing. It mirrors what W. E. B. Du Bois defines in terms of the aesthetic dialectic of imitation and originality. In the context of the exploration of the philosophical basis of experiences of otherness, the essays collected by Raynaud and Mok cover an important area, outlining the field of 20th century and contemporary minority American autobiographical writing, and provide welcome insight into the aesthetic and ethical factors informing the author-reader relationship.

This collection of well-researched essays falls into four parts rich in quality and variety confirming the latest trends in intertextuality and culturality. Protesting current trends in criticism and arguing for new approaches to the sense of alienation, the first section explores Native American self-writing. In the authoritative "Un Indien comme un autre: Le travail autobiographique de John Milton Oskison" (pp. 20–40) Lionel Larré dispels common misconceptions while providing the most detailed account of the experience of loss. Elizabeth Bouzonviller's illuminative "Ecriture de soi, écriture tribale, synecdoque de la tribu dans les récits autobiographiques de Louise Erdrich" (pp. 41–65) is predicated on the use of metaphors and their link to autobiographical writings. Featuring two essays worthy of...