Although more women in France have entered political life than ever before, the fact remains that there are fewer women representatives in the French parliament than there were after the Second World War. In a new and original approach, the author presents an overview and analysis of the emerging body of text by or on women who have held high political office in France. The argument is that writing about women and politics has not just described or reflected women's slow but now substantial entry into political life; it has played a major part in shaping the parity debate and its outcomes. Interviews with political women, such as Huguette Bouchardeau, Simone Veil or Edith Cresson, inserted in the text, demonstrate the emergence and circulation of a new common discourse focused on the issue of whether women in politics make or should make a difference. A close reading of the various texts examined in this book and their connection to new public counter-discourses in France suggest that a re-writing of power is indeed occurring.
Hitherto undiscovered yet fundamental historical and literary texts from the Pacific provide the subject matter of this collection of essays which sets out to explore the new forms of writing and hybrid identities emerging from both past and contemporary cultural contact and exchange in the 'South Seas'. This is also a weaving of the connections between Francophone and Anglophone writers long separated by colonial history. Luis Cardoso, writing in Portuguese from East Timor offers further points of contrast. The places of encounter - the beaches of Tahiti, the retelling of the texts of oral tradition, indigenous mastery of writing and appropriation of Western technology, the construction of contemporary Pacific anthologies or emerging post-colonial writing and translation - are sites of interaction and mixing that also involve negotiations of mana or power. From Pierre Loti's mythical and feminised Tahitians to Déwé Gorodé's silenced women, the outcomes of such negotiations are dynamic and different syncretisms. Two chapters reexamine the theoretical concept of hybridity from these Pacific perspectives. Les articles publiés dans le présent recueil explorent les nouvelles formes d'écriture et les identités hybrides issues du creuset des Mers du Sud. Relativement inconnus, les textes au coeur de ces articles n'en sont pas moins les oeuvres fondatrices de la région du Pacifique Sud dont ils constituent la trame historique et littéraire. Longtemps tenus à l'écart les uns des autres par l'histoire coloniale de la région, les textes d'auteurs francophones et anglophones s'enchevêtrent et se recoupent en de multiples domaines. La reprise des textes de tradition orale, l'appropriation autochtone des technologies occidentales, la création d'anthologies contemporaines et l'émergence d'une littérature postcoloniale, sont autant de sites d'interactions et de convergence qui exigent une négociation permanente entre les pouvoirs et mana en présence. C'est une nouvelle facette du concept d'hybridité que nous proposent ces études de la région Pacifique.
Adds significant new insights into the mental, psychological, and rhetorical laboratory of three major contemporary French novelists. . . . Its rigorous focus on autofictional narratives also reflects the widening of the scope of contemporary critical theory and practice."--Raymond Gay-Crosier, University of Florida Raylene Ramsay explores the significance of the new autobiographical genre--the "autofictions"--that emerged from the nouveau roman in the 1980s in France. She focuses on the work of Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, major figures of French avant-garde writing whose complex autobiographies slide between true and false memories and between fact and fiction, examining the limits imposed by the conventions of the traditional autobiography. While she questions the ability of memory to capture the past and the ability of language to record the experience of an ever-elusive self, Ramsay grounds the three authors in their particular historical, political, and sexual context. In this light she reads Sarraute's negative portrait of her mother, Duras' lyrical evocations of the intensity and pain of desire, and Robbe-Grillet's pirouetting "confession" of his family's anti-Semitism and pro-German feeling during World War II as deriving from the individuated (the "auto" and the "bios") rather than from the collective (the "graphy"), the forms of a shared language. In the final instance, Ramsay claims, the new autobiography, seeking individuated truths, offers the power to rewrite inner life--for example, Sarraute comes to identify with the "feminine" in the self; Duras casts the writing of her relationship with her Chinese lover as a form of liberation; even Robbe-Grillet, staging his predilection for young girls as the most banal of stereotyped sexual impulses, comes closer to self-knowing. She broadens the scope of her study by showing how this new kind of writing reflects contemporary critical movements, such as postmodernism and the scientific theory of "complementarity," as it telescopes the private and the public, the past experience and the present writing. Raylene Ramsay is professor of French at Auckland University in New Zealand. She is the author of Robbe-Grillet and Modernity: Science, Sexuality, and Subversion (UPF, 1992) and of many articles in journals such as French Review, College Literature, Language Quarterly, European Studies Journal, and Literature and History.
Although more women in France have entered political life than ever before, the fact remains that there are fewer women representatives in the French parliament than there were after the Second World War. In a new and original approach, the author presents an overview and analysis of the emerging body of text by or on women who have held high political office in France. The argument is that writing about women and politics has not just described or reflected women's slow but now substantial entry into political life; it has played a major part in shaping the parity debate and its outcomes. Interviews with political women, such as Huguette Bouchardeau, Simone Veil or Edith Cresson, inserted in the text, demonstrate the emergence and circulation of a new common discourse focused on the issue of whether women in politics make or should make a difference. A close reading of the various texts examined in this book and their connection to new public counter-discourses in France suggest that a re-writing of power is indeed occurring.
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