Evolution of Écriture Féminine in Contemporary Francophone Literature
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Date
2024
Authors
Coles, Mira
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
In 2022 Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her story La Place (A Man’s Place), the story of her father, his life, and their relationship. This grand honor came as a shock to those who for years had deemed her work as depressing and populist, dismissing her previous pieces as shameless in their brutally frank depictions of life. Ernaux straddles memoir, auto-writing, and fiction, against the insults of sexist critics referring to her as “Madame Ovary.” Undeterred, Ernaux writes the effaced, representing the disenfranchised in meticulous vignettes highlighting gender and class in postwar France. Hélène Cixous, a French feminist author, argues in her essay “Le Rire de la Méduse,” (The Laugh of the Medusa) that women must not only write, as empowerment comes through expression, but must write through their bodies. This notion of embodied writing offers empowerment and reclamation, a different horizon for the phallocentric landscape of literature and, fundamentally, language itself. With lucid awareness and consideration of its controversiality, this thesis works to uncover a mode in which Cixous’ essay— impassioned, dynamic, singularly influential—may nonetheless dialogue with broader contemporary Francophone cultural and linguistic discourses, as instantiated by many other prominent female authors. These writers include Assia Djebar, Marie NDiaye, and Nina Bouraoui. Through their works, this research explores how the concepts of Cixous have manifested in literature today. These novelists all articulate their experiences and identities through subversions of the memoir form to tell their stories, with particular emphasis on the corporeality of women and demonstrative efforts to reclaim the body through their writing even within the confines of the gender-marked French language.
Description
47 pages
Keywords
feminism, French, literature, Cixous, Algeria