Lecture notes
Women's Writing Lecture 7 - Autobiography and French Women's Writing
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- University Of Oxford
Lecture notes introducing women's autobiographical writing as a movement in twentieth-century France.
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Women’s Writing Lecture 7 - Autobiography and French Women’s Writing- Heritage life writing by women through 20C into 21C, focus recent + its place in
French lit. How genres have merged together? How have been criticised by estab-
lishment for nombrillism? Writers using own lives in work for ≠ purposes, life, time,
boundary fact/fiction, consequences making private life public.
- Quote 1 : subject = back, but in more fragmented way bc generations marked by
hist, lit + psycho heritage in culture (≠ Proustian self), French sense of self has been
deconstructed, = ill-defined, won over by madness.
- Quote 2 : no longer distinct genres fiction/autobio, but continuum > spectrum of
truth/invention in different quantities in work.
- Duras, Colette, Ernaux, Sarraute > important figures in autobio/life writing. Colette
emphasis on mother in Sido (mémoire) > bathed in nostalgia bc contrast harsh adult
world, viewpoint adult on child’s world, makes closer to mother. Focus female cen-
tred experience > mothers, sexuality in frank psychological detail > écriture fémi-
nine carries this on.
- Duras : blend with fiction, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique > fictional memoire adoles-
cence + sexual awakening in colonial Vietnam (barren land). Project = revisit same
story, same part life from different angles > different POV, different genres, different
perspectives (L’amant > explicitly as autobiography). Also revisited as fiction on
stage.
- Beauvoir : incontournable, = pre-cursor, model, or someone to react against. Sys-
tematic chronological comprehensive narrative of life, starts beginning and works
her way through : uses for pol + philo > wants use example, explore ? Development
self, interactions people, socio at large, power relations in families, relationships, ≠
social groups, = example of bourgeois woman fighting make own place in the world.
- Cardinal : ≠ approach > auto bio novel illustrates narrative psychoanalytic talking
cure from woman with constant menstrual bleeding, psychoanalyst ignores, wants
repressed trauma manifesting as bleeding (hostile mother) : Les Mots pour le dire >
idealise talking cure, facing up to trauma. Also retrospectively linked écriture fémi-
nine as empowering tool, v taboo busting writing of the body.
- Ernaux : La Femme Gelée > last text that she called novel, then said = autobio,
then all has been autobiographical. Like Beauvoir, serious ambitions for work, not
narcissistic > writes tension class + sex, writes own life + parents, transition work-
ing class to educated middle class, egalitarian upbringing because of working class
obligations, = middle class that reveals sexism, imprisons her. Talks other things >
L’évènement (2000) > illegal abortion. + Les Années > account life from 40s to to-
day, without 1st person, Nous > always her as part of different group of people >
explores 20C through these groups.
- Nothomb > Métaphysique des tubes > autobio of time in womb + time before ver-
bal when was only a “human tube”
- Vigan : autofictional game > fictional tale about consequences of real autobio publi-
cation.
- Formal experiment : mid 20C > post WW2, height point nouveau roman, metafiction
> affects autobio writing at this time, in women’s writing too. Duras + Sarraute. But
Duras distances self schools of writing. Duras experimental writing : repetition with
variations of same story with love affair teenage Duras with Chinese man (UBCLP,
L’A, L’ADLCDN > film script) > goes from telling story to showing, immersion, dis-
tance looking back from old age as different person.
- Sarraute also experimental : Enfance > fragment memory unearthed + picked
apart by two voices, both her, both access memories but ≠ role in text > 1 narra-
tive, other : control (doubt criticism correction), listens (receives + analyses), collab-
orates (helps in joint project accurate resurrection past). = lone woman in high Nou-
veaux Romanciers + Oulipo group. Quote 3 : centres around one single quote, differ-
ent perspectives on it from voices, narrates things happening at edges of our minds
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