Overview
Looking at questions of testimony, confession, trauma,sexuality, and violence in (semi-) autobiographical works, this book explores the co-construction of personal and collectiveidentities by women writers in the age of self-disclosure and mass media. In a time when literature is accused of being self-centeredand overly narcissistic, women's autofiction in France since the turn of the millennium has been received with controversy because it disrupts readily accepted ideas about personal and national identities, gender and race, and fiction versus autobiography. Through the study of polemical writers Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume, and Nelly Arcan, Mercédès Baillargeon contendsthat, by recounting personal stories of trauma and sexuality, and thus opposing themselves in opposition to social convention, and by refusing to dispel doubtsregarding the fictional or factual nature of their texts, autofiction resists and helps redefine categories of literary genreand gender identity. This book analyzes concurrently the textual and sociopolitical implications that underlie the (de)construction of the autofictional subject, and particularly how these writers constantly redefine themselves through performance andself-fashioning made possible by media and technology. Moreover, this workraises important questions relating to the media's complicated relationship with women writers, especially those who discuss themes of trauma, sexuality,and violence, and who also question the distinction between fact and fiction. Proposing a new understanding of autofiction as a form of littérature engagée, this work contributes to a broader understanding of the French publishing establishment and, of the literary field as a cultural institution, as well asnew insight on shifting notions of identity, the Self and nationalism intoday's ever-changing and multicultural French context.
Full Product Details
Author: Mercédès Baillargeon
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Imprint: Purdue University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 1.50cm
, Length: 22.60cm
Weight: 0.368kg
ISBN: 9781557538574
ISBN 10: 1557538573
Pages: 222
Publication Date: 30 April 2019
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Language: French
Reviews
A smart, timely, thoroughly researched, and beautifully written book on how three female writers (Angot, Delaume, and Arcan) negotiate reality and fiction, refusing to give in to a mainstream media conversation about them. Baillargeon allows us to grasp, through a careful reading of the writers' works, the politics of self-writing.
A smart, timely, thoroughly researched, and beautifully written book on how three female writers (Angot, Delaume, and Arcan) negotiate reality and fiction, refusing to give in to a mainstream media conversation about them. Baillargeon allows us to grasp, through a careful reading of the writers' works, the politics of self-writing. --Martine Delvaux, University of Quebec at Montreal
Author Information
Mercédès Baillargeon is an assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century first-person narrative, the intersection between public/private spaces and discourses, and the (de)construction of personal and/or collective identities. She has contributed to several edited volumes, and has published in the journals Québec Studies, Women in French Studies. She is coediting an upcoming special issue of the journal Contemporary French Civilization on “The Transnationalism of Québec Cinema and (New) Media” with Karine Bertrand (Queen’s University). She is also a coeditor for a collection of essays on third-wave feminism in Québec, Remous, ressacs et dérivations autour de la troisième vague féministe, published by Éditions du Remue-ménage in 2011. Her current research explores the question of (post/trans)nationalism in Québec cinema of the new millennium.
