Abstract
In 1979, Julia Kristeva caught the excitement of a generation of women confronting collectively, for the first time, the challenge of authorship. In her article ‘Le Temps des femmes’, she wrote of the ‘expectation’ charging the air as women took up their pens: what, people were asking, would they write that was new?1
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Notes
See, for historical and cultural context, Claire Duchen, Feminism in France from May ‘68 to Mitterrand (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986);
Claire Laubier (ed.), The Condition of Women in France: 1945 to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1990);
Evelyne Sullerot, La Presse féminine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1963);
Samra-Martine Bonvoisin and Michele Maignien, La Presse féminine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986). On feminist criticism see
Elissa D. Gelfand and Virginia Thorndike Hughes, French Feminist Criticism: Women, Language and Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (New York and London: Garland, 1985);
Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn (eds), Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1985);
Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985);
Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (eds), Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture (London: Methuen, 1985);
Mary Engleton (ed.), Feminist Literary Criticism (London: Longman 1991). For anthologies see
Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Coutivron, New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Brighton: Harvester, 1981);
Toril Moi (ed.), French Feminist Thought: A Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
See Josyane Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar: l’invention d’une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).
See Mary Evans, Simone de Beauvoir: A Feminist Mandarin (London: Tavistock, 1985);
Claude Francis et Fernande Gontier, Simone de Beauvoir (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1985);
Elizabeth Fallaize, The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir (London: Routledge, 1988);
Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
See Adèle King, French Women Novelists: Defining a Female Style (London: Macmillan, 1989);
Margaret Atack and Phil Powrie (eds), Contemporary French Fiction by Women: Feminist Perspectives (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990). The discussion that follows focuses on women’s prose writing. For women’s drama, see the general section on twentieth-century theatre in Chapter 8. Women’s poetry has been of relatively less importance, and has certainly received less public and critical attention than that of English and American women poets. There is no room to redress that imbalance here, but see the new reader compiled and translated by
Martin Sorrell, Elles: A Bilingual Anthology of Modern French Poetry by Women (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995).
Lucile Cairns, Marie Cardinal: Motherhood and Creativity (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992).
See Diana J. Fuss, Essentially Speaking (London: Routledge, 1990);
Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991).
See, on Kristeva, Toril Moi (intro. and ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986);
John Lechte, Julia Kristeva (London: Routledge, 1990).
Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theorisation of the formation of the human subject and its simultaneous entry into language and gendered self-awareness has been crucial for the development of feminist theory. Toril Moi has offered one of the clearest explanations of how Lacan conceptualises child development as a movement between two orders, the Imaginary and the Symbolic: ‘The Imaginary corresponds to the pre-Oedipal period when the child believes itself to be a part of the mother, and perceives no separation between itself and the world.… The Oedipal crisis represents the entry into the Symbolic Order. This entry is also linked to the acquisition of language. In the Oedipal crisis the father splits up the dyadic unity between mother and child and forbids the child further access to the mother and the mother’s body.… [F]rom now on the desire for the mother or the imaginary unity with her must be repressed. This first repression is what Lacan calls the primary repression and it is this primary repression that opens up the unconscious.… When the child learns to say “I am” and distinguish this from a “you are” or “he is”, this is equivalent to admitting it has taken up its allotted place in the Symbolic Order.… To enter into the Symbolic Order means to accept the phallus as the representation of the Law of the Father. All human culture and all life in society is dominated by the Symbolic Order.…’ (Toril Moi, Sexal/Textual Politics, pp. 99–100). Lacan argued that women have no autonomy as subjects in the masculine Symbolic; feminist thinking on language pursues the consequences of this. See also Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction (London: Macmillan, 1982);
Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990). On Freud and feminism see
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (London: Allen Lane, 1974).
See, on Cixous, Susan Sellers (ed.), Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Hélène Cixous (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988);
Morag Schiach, Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).
See George Stambolian and Elaine Marks, Homosexualities and French Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979);
Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981);
Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
On Colette, see Diana Holmes, Colette (London: Macmillan, 1991); on Leduc, see
Alex Hughes, Violette Leduc: Mothers, Lovers and Language (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1994); see also essays on Colette, Leduc, Wittig, by
Diana Holmes, Alex Hughes and Jennifer Birkett in Alex Hughes and Kate Ince (eds), French Erotic Fiction: Women’s Desiring Writing (Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg, 1996).
First published in Feminist Issues, 5 (2) (Fall 1985); revised for Nancy K. Miller (ed.), The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 63–73. Other essays by Wittig on her own writing are collected in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). For a useful account of the politics of gender, which makes frequent reference to Wittig, see
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).
See Jean-Jacques Luthi, Auguste Viatte and Gaston Zananiri, Dictionnaire général de la francophonie (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1986);
Michel Tétu, La Francophonie: histoire, problématique et perspectives (Paris: Hachette, 1988). I am indebted to Alec Hargreaves for his advice on this section.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’, in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 62. See also
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987), especially ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’ (1981) and ‘Foreword to Mahasweta Devi, Draupadi’ (1981). For general theorisations of the relations of centre and periphery see
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations and Nomadisms, Yale French Studies, No. 82, vol. I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993).
See W. H. New, A History of Canadian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1989);
Maurice Lemire (ed.), Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires du Québec, 2nd edn (Montreal: FIDES, 1980–7);
Réginald Hamel, John Hare and Paul Wyczinski, Dictionnaire des auteurs de la langue française en Amérique du Nord (Montreal: Éditions Fides, 1989).
Sherry Simon, ‘The Language of Cultural Difference’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
See Alain Rouch and Gérard Claveuil (eds), Littératures nationales d’écriture française: Afrique noire/Caraïbes/Océan Indien. Histoire littéraire et anthologie (Paris: Boréas, 1986).
See Dorothy S. Blair, African Literature in French (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). A useful, wide-ranging collection of essays on individual authors is
Mildred Mortimer, Journeys through the French African Novel (Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and London: Heinemann Educational Books and James Currey, 1990).
See Alec G. Hargreaves, The Colonial Experience in French Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1981).
See Manon Brunet, ‘Présence Africaine dans l’institution littéraire africaine contemporaine’. Contemporary French Civilization, VIV, 2 (Summer/Fall 1990), pp. 275–91.
Because of space restrictions, attention here has been limited to Algerian writing. See, for the wider account, Jean Déjeux, Dictionnaire des auteurs maghrébins de langue française (Paris: Karthala, 1984), La Littérature maghrébine d’expression française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992) and Maghreb: Littératures de langue française (Paris: Arcantère Éditions, 1993). Mention should nevertheless be made here of the Tunisian novelist and essayist Albert Memmi (b. 1920) and the Moroccan novelists Driss Chraïbi, Abdelkébir Khatibi and especially Tahar Ben Jelloun (Prix Goncourt, La Nuit sacré, 1987). In France, beur culture (that of second-generation children of Maghrebian origin, born in France) has established its own contestatory space, with its own writing; see
Alec G. Hargreaves, Voices from the North African Immigrant Community in France: Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1991);
and Michel Laronde, Autour du roman beur: Immigration et identité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993).
See Denise Brahimi, ‘Fatima Gallaire, une Algérienne et le théâtre’, in Bulletin of Francophone Africa, vol. 4, no. 7 (London, Spring 1995).
Cit. Denise Brahimi, Appareillages (Paris: Éditions Deuxtemps Tierce, 1991), who gives an important account of gender positions within bilingual writing. See, on
Assia Djebar, Jean Déjeux, Assia Djebar, romancière algérienne et cinéaste arabe (Sherbrooke: Naaman, 1984). See, on women’s writing in the Maghreb,
Winifred Woodhill, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization and Literatures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). For an overview and trans-national anthology of Arab women’s writing, see
Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke (eds), Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (London: Virago, 1990).
On Simone Schwarz-Bart, see Leah D. Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
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© 1997 Jennifer Birkett and James Kearns
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Birkett, J., Kearns, J. (1997). Starting Fresh. In: A Guide to French Literature. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25758-4_10
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