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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Elgin's "Native Tongue": A "Me Too" Universe?, Amir Barati
Elgin's "Native Tongue": A "Me Too" Universe?, Amir Barati
Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies
Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue (1984) provides a fascinating critique of the ideologies inscribed into patriarchal language and evokes an extremely valuable linguistic and political awareness. This article will examine the liability of the ways the novel revolts against the patriarchal society via the introduction of a gynocentric linguistic intervention. I claim, Elgin’s novel showcases an invaluable instance of how it is possible for women to revolt against the pillars of patriarchy through manipulations at the gestalt and schematic level of language and most specifically, the bodily metaphoric quality of the English. This proposed transformation of the schematic and …
Imagined Locality Of A Girlhood Home: A Performative Reading Of Maxine Hong Kingston’S “White Tigers”, Jing Tan
Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies
Both the locality and the language of Sze Yup are of immense significance to Kingston, as well as to her narrator-protagonist: it is the locus of her mother’s storytelling, the land whence her mother absorbed the incredible power of “talking-story” that has been inherited by Kingston and has permeated her text, the soil whose spirit has been transplanted to her birthplace in America and whose mystery has never ceased to inspire her imagination. Likewise, the Sze Yup dialect is the language that both the writer and her narrator first learned to speak (Jaggi): she “entered school speaking no English” (Talbot …
Éric Touya De Marenne. Simone De Beauvoir: Le Combat Au Féminin. Presses Universitaires De France, 2019., Tessa Ashlin Nunn
Éric Touya De Marenne. Simone De Beauvoir: Le Combat Au Féminin. Presses Universitaires De France, 2019., Tessa Ashlin Nunn
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Éric Touya de Marenne. Simone de Beauvoir: Le combat au féminin. Presses Universitaires de France, 2019. pp. 128.
Christina Gerhardt And Sara Saljoughi, Editors. 1968 And Global Cinema. Wayne State Up, 2018., Anne Cunningham
Christina Gerhardt And Sara Saljoughi, Editors. 1968 And Global Cinema. Wayne State Up, 2018., Anne Cunningham
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi, editors. 1968 and Global Cinema. Wayne State UP, 2018. 422 pp.
Sillage, Trace, Empreinte: La Migrance Ambulatoire De Fatou Diome, Catherine Mazauric
Sillage, Trace, Empreinte: La Migrance Ambulatoire De Fatou Diome, Catherine Mazauric
Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature
From Le ventre de l'Atlantique and Impossible de grandir to Marianne porte plainte!, going as far back as her early poems and short stories published in journals, Fatou Diome uses recurring patterns of wake, trace and footprints as different forms of physical and ethical engagements in the world. In the process of literary creation, such engagement generates a mobile third location, "a space of migrance" where various sets of cultural heritages and ethical values undergo reformulation. This paper argues that it is in such a space that Diome locates the emergence of a powerful feminine subjectivity which gained its autonomy …
#Parlezvousfemme - A One-Woman Show, Victoria G. Lindbergh
#Parlezvousfemme - A One-Woman Show, Victoria G. Lindbergh
Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research
#parlezvousfemme is a one-woman show set in 2018 that reimagines the lives of several infamous French women. Each character approaches modern life differently based on her given circumstances and reveals several universal truths about being a woman in today’s society. The famous military leader Joan of Arc is a 19-year-old youtuber criticizing the far-right for using her as their symbol, while revolutionary Olympe de Gouges is a modern-day women’s rights activist. Marie Antoinette is a housewife being interviewed by Vogue and scientist Marie Curie hosts a PBS telethon and addresses the lack of women in science. Designer Coco Chanel is …
« Les Celles Qui Sont Pas Contentes » : Françoise Durocher, Waitress D’André Brassard Et De Michel Tremblay (1972), Maxime Blanchard
« Les Celles Qui Sont Pas Contentes » : Françoise Durocher, Waitress D’André Brassard Et De Michel Tremblay (1972), Maxime Blanchard
Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature
More relevant than ever, Françoise Durocher, waitress, a 1972 short film directed by André Brassard (based on a screenplay by Michel Tremblay), keeps highlighting the current political alienation of the Québécois people within Canada. By analyzing the main character, Françoise Durocher, this article reveals the contradictions of a cultural, social, and feminist struggle against imperialism and domination.
Libération Sexuelle Ou Aliénation Textuelle : La Subalterne Peut-Elle Parler De Son Corps ?, Carla Calargé, Alexandra Gueydan-Turek
Libération Sexuelle Ou Aliénation Textuelle : La Subalterne Peut-Elle Parler De Son Corps ?, Carla Calargé, Alexandra Gueydan-Turek
Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature
This article analyzes two erotic works : L’amande and La traversée des sens. It aims to look at whether the sexual liberation of the female protagonists succeeds in defining a subversive discourse which allows Arab women to escape binary representations made of them or whether, on the contrary the author reproduces such representations. After a quick overview of the difficult situation in which Arab feminists often find themselves both the East and the West, this study examines if Nedjma’s two novels adopt a feminist posture or if they fail to reach the objectives that critics have attributed to them.
Eric Touya De Marenne. Francophone Women Writers: Feminisms, Postcolonialisms, Cross-Cultures. Lanham, Md: Lexington, 2013. 195 Pp., Nancy E. Wardle
Eric Touya De Marenne. Francophone Women Writers: Feminisms, Postcolonialisms, Cross-Cultures. Lanham, Md: Lexington, 2013. 195 Pp., Nancy E. Wardle
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Eric Touya De Marenne. Francophone Women Writers: Feminisms, Postcolonialisms, Cross-Cultures. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013. 195 pp.
Touria Khannous. African Pasts, Presents, And Futures. Generational Shifts In African Women’S Literature, Film, And Internet Discourse. Lanham: Lexington, 2013. Xxv + 203 Pp., Marzia Caporale
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Touria Khannous. African Pasts, Presents, and Futures. Generational Shifts in African Women’s Literature, Film, and Internet Discourse. Lanham: Lexington, 2013. xxv + 203 pp.
Complicating Eroticism And The Male Gaze: Feminism And Georges Bataille’S Story Of The Eye, Chris Vanderwees
Complicating Eroticism And The Male Gaze: Feminism And Georges Bataille’S Story Of The Eye, Chris Vanderwees
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This article explores the relationship between feminist criticism and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. Much of the critical work on Bataille assimilates his psychosocial theories in Erotism with the manifestation of those theories in his fiction without acknowledging potential contradictions between the two bodies of work. The conflation of important distinctions between representations of sex and death in Story of the Eye and the writings of Erotism forecloses the possibility of reading Bataille’s novel as a critique of gender relations. This article unravels some of the distinctions between Erotism and Story of the Eye in order to complicate …
Femmes Arabes Au Harem : La Magie Et Le Pouvoir De L’Oralité Dans L’Écriture De Fatima Mernissi, Samira Farhoud
Femmes Arabes Au Harem : La Magie Et Le Pouvoir De L’Oralité Dans L’Écriture De Fatima Mernissi, Samira Farhoud
Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature
This article examines the polysemy of the word harem in several of Fatima Mernissi’s texts. Moreover, it considers the role of orality in the form of “oral archives” that were nurtured, maintained and passed on from mother to daughter. The related issue of Mernissi’s feminist activism is also analyzed. Women in Mernissi’s harem constructed complex narratives and “stories” that incorporated many fragments of “professional” or “national” histories, including the “official” history of Morocco’s attainment of independence in 1956. Accounts of femininist movements in the Middle East and Morocco, including the al-Safaa Akhwat or Sisters of Purity (1946) and the group’s …
“Knaller-Sex Für Alle”: Popfeminist Body Politics In Lady Bitch Ray, Charlotte Roche, And Sarah Kuttner, Carrie Smith-Prei
“Knaller-Sex Für Alle”: Popfeminist Body Politics In Lady Bitch Ray, Charlotte Roche, And Sarah Kuttner, Carrie Smith-Prei
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Germany has seen a recent upsurge in publications proclaiming that feminism is again an urgent matter for a new generation of women. Faced with the reactionary demography debate and the hegemony of second-wave feminism, young writers, musicians, journalists, and critics call for new models of feminism relevant to women today. As one of these viable models, popfeminism draws on dominant trends in mass culture, on pop’s forty-year history as a cultural prefix in Germany, and on traditional feminism in order to create a new, ostensibly apolitical, feminist subculture based in self-stylization and individual autonomy. Shared by many popfeminist sources is …
L’Intertextualité Géopolitique Dans Le Petit Chat Est Mort De Fejria Deliba, Sarah B. Buchanan
L’Intertextualité Géopolitique Dans Le Petit Chat Est Mort De Fejria Deliba, Sarah B. Buchanan
Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature
In this article, Buchanan examines how Fejria Deliba’s short film, Le petit chat est mort, questions the ideas that conservative members of North African and French communities mobilize to separate themselves from each other. Using theories of intertextuality and geopolitical conscience, Buchanan illustrates how “imagined communities” are always influenced by other national narrations, and how “home” is never isolated, pure or preserved. On the contrary, Buchanan highlights how Deliba presents the French and North African cultures as spaces of intersection and interface, that is, of intertext.
For-Giving Death: Cixous's Osnabrück And Le Jour Où Je N'Étais Pas Là , Eilene Hoft-March
For-Giving Death: Cixous's Osnabrück And Le Jour Où Je N'Étais Pas Là , Eilene Hoft-March
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In her early writings, Hélène Cixous earned recognition as the feminist proponent of a theory of gift economy that challenges the patriarchal practice of giving. Patriarchal giving, she contended, enacts the master-slave dialectic, maintaining power differentials by indemnifying and reducing the other to the one who gives. Cixous imagined an alternate practice whereby the gift incurs no debts and no death for the other, a giving without expectation of return, a generosity that enriches all who participate. More than two decades after those theoretical essays, Cixous continues to explore in her fiction the relationship to the other as mediated by …
From War Films To Films On War: Gendered Scenarios Of National Identity—The Case Of The Last Metro, Leah D. Hewitt
From War Films To Films On War: Gendered Scenarios Of National Identity—The Case Of The Last Metro, Leah D. Hewitt
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
If France's ongoing struggle for self-definition in the late twentieth century involved new conceptions of citizenship and nationality, in short what it means to be French, this struggle also entailed the search for an accurate portrayal of a past in which France could recognize itself...
Passion Simple And Madame, C'Est À Vous Que J'Écris: "That's My Desire" , Elizabeth Richardson Viti
Passion Simple And Madame, C'Est À Vous Que J'Écris: "That's My Desire" , Elizabeth Richardson Viti
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
No two texts better exemplify the contemporary "he said, she said" phenomenon than Annie Ernaux's Passion simple and Alain Gérard's Madame, c'est à vous que j'écris. Ernaux's book, published in 1991, recounts the author's heretofore hidden affair with a foreign businessman living temporarily in France, and Gérard's, published four years later, is an explicit response in which the writer, dissatisfied with Ernaux's account, assumes the lover's identity and chronicles events from his perspective. The result is a literary "tac à tac" very much in the public eye in which a man and woman both wish to tell their side …
Should Feminists Forget Foucault?, Dominique D. Fisher
Should Feminists Forget Foucault?, Dominique D. Fisher
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Up Against Foucault (1993), a collection of essays edited by Caroline Ramazanoglu, reevaluates Michel Foucault's theories on power and sexuality in regard to feminism from a sociological perspective…
From The Sea Wall To The Lover : Prostitution And Exotic Parody, Pascale Bécel
From The Sea Wall To The Lover : Prostitution And Exotic Parody, Pascale Bécel
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This analysis of the two novels highlights Marguerite Duras' equivocal stance with regard to colonial Indochina where she grew up at the beginning of the century. As The Lover rewrites The Sea Wall in the autobiographical mode, the emphasis shifts from an explicit denunciation of colonialism and an implicit subversion of the Lotilian novel, to a parody of exotic themes and narratives. However, by focusing on the two young protagonists' construction of themselves as femmes fatales and prostitutes, this discussion reveals that the politics of gender and race remain at odds in Duras' fictional autobiographies. The cultural other (qua a …
Desire, Duplicity And Narratology: Boris Vian's L 'Ecume Des Jours, Charles J. Stivale
Desire, Duplicity And Narratology: Boris Vian's L 'Ecume Des Jours, Charles J. Stivale
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In this examination of Boris Vian's L'Ecume des jours, I call into question the masculinist resistance to criticism of Vian and his works through a critical counter-resistance from a feminist narratological perspective. In order to examine the implications of "narrative desire" for understanding textual and sexual difference, I argue for a narratology that develops the concept of textual "seduction" as a question of narrative duplicity. I undertake this "re-reading" not merely from the perspective of an "ideological unmasking," but also to suggest the possibility of a positive hermeneutic, or more precisely, the limits of such a move given inherent …
Feminism And Islamic Tradition, Winifred Woodhull
Feminism And Islamic Tradition, Winifred Woodhull
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
"Feminism and Islamic Tradition" explores the territory mapped by Fatima Mernissi in Sultanes oublées (1990) and Le Harem politique: Le Prophète et les femmes (1987) in relation to that charted by Assia Djebar in her latest novel Loin de Médine (1991). The aim is to see why Maghrebian feminists as different as Mernissi and Djebar—a liberal democratic sociologist and a postmodern writer—have begun to move into Arab-Islamic cultural-political spaces which, until recently, have been occupied mainly by various Islamic fundamentalist factions and other right-wing groups such as conservative nationalists in the Maghreb. The essay delineates the change between these writers' …
Private Life And Collective Experience In Quebec: The Autobiographical Project Of France Théoret, Mary Jean Green
Private Life And Collective Experience In Quebec: The Autobiographical Project Of France Théoret, Mary Jean Green
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In her study of women's autobiographical writing, Carolyn Heilbrun contends that women's authorship has been most hindered by the lack of narrative structures adequate to the telling of women's experience. She further suggests that female narrative will be found as women talk together, exchange stories, and move toward a collective understanding of self. In recent years, the interplay of women's voices has assumed new importance in women's writing, and specifically in women's life/writing in French. Perhaps beginning with Simone de Beauvoir's feminist classic, The Second Sex, where the words of hundreds of other women are woven into the text …
Genet's Fantastic Voyage In Miracle De La Rose: All At Sea About Maternity, Elizabeth Richardson Viti
Genet's Fantastic Voyage In Miracle De La Rose: All At Sea About Maternity, Elizabeth Richardson Viti
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Together psychoanalytical and feminist criticism appear to uncover the very composition of Jean Genet's inversion. Indeed, in this regard the Miracle de la Rose dream sequence which focuses on an extraordinary voyage through the body of Harcamone, the very imprimatur of bisexuality defined in Cixous' Le rire de la méduse, holds singular importance. Abandoned by his biological mother, Genet sees himself as a "produit synthétique" who has to belong to someone in order to be. Genet simply does not exist unless he can establish, not the Lacanian Name-of-the-Father, but rather the Name-of-the-Mother. The dream reveals a Freudian …
Marguerite Yourcenar And The Phallacy Of Indifference, Linda Klieger Stillman
Marguerite Yourcenar And The Phallacy Of Indifference, Linda Klieger Stillman
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
At first glance, the works of Marguerite Yourcenar seem far removed from any specifically female or feminist preoccupation and the author herself vigorously affirms the universality of her writing. Nevertheless, an intertextual reading of her fiction, autobiography, and interviews reveals that sexual difference is in fact an important aspect ofher texts. An analysis of repetitive lexical and rhetorical patterns clearly articulates Yourcenar's repressed feminine discourse.