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Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

1990

Identity

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The Writer's Identity As Self-Dismantling Text In Julien Green's Si J'Étais Vous. . ., Robert Ziegler Jun 1990

The Writer's Identity As Self-Dismantling Text In Julien Green's Si J'Étais Vous. . ., Robert Ziegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Written between 1944 and 1946, Julien Green's novel Si j'étais vous . . . is one of the author's most fantastic and enigmatic texts, having generated interpretations ranging from the Freudian to the theological. Yet certain central features of the text have not yet been addressed and may lead to a different approach, one focusing on the problem of the writer's identity in his works. Despite the fact that his literary efforts are unsuccessful, Fabien is shown as being a writer like Green himself, but more importantly, he is a character in another writer's fiction. As metatext, Green's novel describes …


Exile In Language, Peter Baker Jun 1990

Exile In Language, Peter Baker

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Saint-John Perse's poem Exil (1941) represents a deep meditation on the nature of "writing" as subsequent critical theory has developed that term. Though the poem seems to present a "signature" at the end, it may be that the poet through giving in to a radically different signifying practice is in some sense not the signatory of the text. The archaic setting and difficult-to-resolve cultural matrix from this perspective become means of examining the co-originary origins of thought and language. Close analysis of textual patterns reveals a composition practice based on anagrammatic patterning. This kind of questioning of language in the …