
Shifting Subjects
Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women's Autobiography
Natalie Edwards(Author)
University of Delaware Press
Published on 18. April 2011
Book
Hardback
180 pages
978-1-61149-030-5 (ISBN)
Description
There are many different ways to say "I." This book examines the ways in which four contemporary women writers (Helene Cixous, Assia Djebar, Gisele Halimi, and Julia Kristeva) have written their autobiographical "I" as a plural concept. These women refuse the individual "I" of traditional autobiography by developing narrative strategies that multiply the voices in their texts. They similarly cast doubt upon current theorizations of the female self in autobiography by questioning the possibility of plural selfhood in narrative and its seemingly cathartic effects. Each writer approaches autobiography as a site of catharsis for a specific trauma and each tells her story through multiple narrative voices in order to find atonement. The women's experiments with narrative voice are designed to render the female self accurately in narrative, but they simultaneously expose the difficulties inherent in writing the self plurally. Taken together, the women who form the corpus of this study move beyond critics' current understandings of textual representations of selfhood. Informed by postcolonial and feminist approaches to selfhood, this book charts the history of theories of autobiography and plots new ways of imagining this genre. This cross-section of international writers calls for a new understanding of the inscription of female identity in narrative; not as a binary of individual versus plural selfhood, but as a cluster of categories of identity beyond "I" and "we."
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Laminated cover
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
356 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-61149-030-5 (9781611490305)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Natalie Edwards
Shifting Subjects
Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women's Autobiography
E-Book
04/2011
1st Edition
University of Delaware Press
€86.49
Available for download

Natalie Edwards
Shifting Subjects
Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women's Autobiography
E-Book
04/2011
1st Edition
University of Delaware Press
€86.49
Available for download
Person
Natalie Edwards teaches at Wagner College, New York City.
Content
Chapter 1 Introduction: From the Individual "I" to the Non-Unitary Self Chapter 2 Chapter 1: Gisele Halimi's Self-(Re)Writing Project Chapter 3 Chapter 2: Fictional Doubles in Julia Kristeva'sLes samourais Chapter 4 Chapter 3: Archive and Autobiography in Assia Dejbar's Vaste est la prison Chapter 5 Chapter 4: The Displaced Autobiographical Subject in Helene Cixous's Les reveries de la femme sauvage Chapter 6 Conclusion: New Textual Identities