’ Edited by GILL RYE and MICHAEL WORTON Women’s writing in contemporary France New writers, new literatures in the s Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Copyright © Manchester University Press While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors. This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/3.0/ Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M NR, UK and Room , Fifth Avenue, New York, ,USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for hardback paperback First published Typeset in ./pt Bulmer by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn Contributors vii Acknowledgements x Introduction Gill Rye and Michael Worton I Rewriting the past Louise L. Lambrichs: trauma, dream and narrative Victoria Best Evermore or nevermore? Memory and identity in Marie Redonnet’s fiction of the s Aine Smith The female vampire: Chantal Chawaf’s melancholic autofiction Kathryn Robson Lost and found: mother–daughter relations in Paule Constant’s fiction Gill Rye Puzzling out the fathers: Sibylle Lacan’s Un père: puzzle Elizabeth Fallaize II Writing the dynamics of identity Anatomical writing: Blasons d’un corps masculin, L’Ecrivaillon and La Ligne âpre by Régine Detambel Marie-Claire Barnet ‘On ne s’entendait plus et c’était parfait ainsi’ (They could no longer hear each other and it was just fine that way): misunderstandings in the novels of Agnès Desarthe Sarah Alyn Stacey Textual mirrors and uncertain reflections: gender and narrative in L’Hiver de beauté, Les Ports du silence and La Rage au bois dormant by Christiane Baroche Gill Rye The articulation of beur female identity in the works of Farida Belghoul, Ferrudja Kessas and Soraya Nini Siobhán McIlvanney vi Contents Saying the unsayable: identities in crisis in the early novels of Marie Darrieussecq Shirley Jordan III Transgressions and transformation Experiment and experience in the phototextual projects of Sophie Calle Johnnie Gratton Christine Angot’s autofictions: literature and/or reality? Marion Sadoux ‘Il n’y a pas de troisième voie’ (There is no third way): Sylvie Germain and the generic problems of the Christian novel Margaret-Anne Hutton The subversion of the gaze: Shérazade and other women in the work of Leïla Sebbar Margaret A. Majumdar Unnatural women and uncomfortable readers? Clotilde Escalle’s tales of transgression Michael Worton Conclusion Gill Rye and Michael Worton Individual author bibliography General bibliography Index is Lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin. Her main research and publishing area is French Renaissance literature. She is author of the forthcoming Marc-Claude de Buttet: étude historique (Slatkine) and editor of Marc-Claude de Buttet’s Amalthée () (Slatkine) and Heroism in Sport: Ireland and France (Mellen) both forthcoming in . - is Lecturer in French at the University of Durham. Her research interests are in surrealism, autobiography,visual arts, feminist theory and psychoanalysis.Author of La Femme cent sexes ou les genres communicants (Peter Lang, ), she has published articles on Derrida, Cixous, Duras and Sarraute, Leiris and Ponge, Desnos, surrealist reviews and book illustrations. She is currrently working on contemporary French fiction and the representa- tion of parents and childhood memory in texts and visual arts. is Lecturer in French at St John’s College, Cambridge. She is a specialist in modern French literature with a particular interest in the links between identity and narrative, and has published widely on Colette, Duras and Julia Kristeva. Her latest publication is An Introduction to Twentieth- Century French Literature (Duckworth, ). is Professor of French at Oxford University where she also teaches women’s studies. Her recent publications include French Women’s Writing: Recent Fiction (Macmillan, ), Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader (Routledge, ), and, with Colin Davis, French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years (Oxford University Press, ). is Professor of French at Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of Expressivism: The Vicissitudes of a Theory in the Writing of Proust and Barthes (Legenda, ), and co-editor of Modern French Short Fiction (Manchester University Press, ), La Nouvelle hier et aujourd’hui (L’Harmattan, ) and Subject Matters: Subject and Self in French Literature from Descartes to the Present (Rodopi, ). His articles include studies of Barthes, Breton, Colette, Foucault, Proust, Sarraute and Jean-Loup Trassard. - , Senior Lecturer in the French Department at Nottingham University, is the author of Countering the Culture: The Novels of Christiane Rochefort (University of Exeter Press, ), Michel Tournier’s Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (Glasgow University French and German Publications, ) and editor of Text(e)/Image (Durham Modern Languages Series, ). She is currently working on a monograph on French female deportees’ testimonial accounts of their deportation to, and incarceration in, Nazi concentration camps, and has edited a volume of Nottingham French Studies entitled ‘French Fiction in the s’ (spring ). viii Contributors is Senior Lecturer in French at Oxford Brookes University. She publishes on Francis Ponge, on French women’s writing and on ethnog- raphy. Her recent projects have focused on Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes and Amélie Nothomb and she is currently writing a monograph on six contemporary French women writers. . has taught at the Universities of Westminster and, most recently,as Professor of French and francophone studies at the University of Glamorgan. She has published in the area of French political philosophy (including Althusser and the End of Leninism? (Pluto Press, )), Franco- Maghrebian relations and Maghrebian thought and literature, including the work of Leïla Sebbar. She was a founding editor of the Bulletin of Francophone Africa and is currently editing Francophone Studies: The Essential Glossary. is Lecturer in French at King’s College London. Her teaching and research interests lie in beur women’s writing and contemporary French women’s writing generally.She has recently published a book on Annie Ernaux, entitled Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins (Liverpool University Press, ). has recently submitted her doctoral thesis on contemporary French women’s writing at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and is now Lecturer in French at the University of Newcastle. She is co-editor, with Emily Butterworth, of Shifting Borders: Theory and Identity in French Literature (Peter Lang, ). is Lecturer in French at the Institute of Romance Studies, University of London. She publishes widely on contemporary French women’s writing; co-editor (with Julia Dobson) of a special issue of Paragraph on Cixous (), she is author of Reading for Change: Interactions between Text and Identity in Contemporary French Women’s Writing (Baroche, Cixous, Constant) (Peter Lang, ). teaches French language at UCL Language Centre. She has published articles on epistolary writing and on Marie Darrieussecq. completed a Ph.D. on identity in the works of Annie Ernaux and Marie Redonnet in . She has taught at the Universities of Lancaster, Durham, Lille III and Rennes II. is Vice-Provost and Fielden Professor of French Language and Literature at UCL. He has written extensively on modern French litera- ture and on issues in critical theory and gender theory. His publications include Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, co-edited with Judith Still (Manchester University Press, ), Michel Tournier Contributors ix (Longman,) and Typical Men (Djanogly Art Gallery,; catalogue of the exhibition ‘Typical Men: Recent Photography of the Male Body by Men’, co- curated with Judith Still; venues: Nottingham, Colchester and Glasgow, March – January ). We would like to thank Nicola Cotton for the background research she did for this volume, for her important contribution to the copy-editing of the essays and for the compilation of the Index. Introduction The s proved to be an exciting period for women’s writing in France. It was a decade in which publishers and the media celebrated a ‘new gen- eration’ of writers, and writing produced by women assumed its place at the forefront of what is new – and sometimes controversial – on the French literary scene. Paperback publishers J’ai lu and Pocket both launched new series (Nouvelle génération and Nouvelles voix respectively) devoted to new names, among them many new women authors. Thus, a wide-ranging readership was introduced to the work of writers such as Christine Angot, Virginie Despentes,Linda Lê and Lorette Nobécourt at the very same time that these authors were still in the process of establishing their names.1 On the cusp of a new century and, of course, a new millennium, it is both time and timely to publish this collection of