Women And Discourse In The Fiction Of Marguerite Duras

The first comprehensive study of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of all of Marguerite Duras' major works. Through close textual readings with a particular focus on women's access to language, this book shows how Duras critiques and subverts dominant discourse. Duras' textual strategies are described within a discussion of narrativity which also addresses factors of race and class. Cohen demonstrates how Duras achieves the famous ritual atmosphere of her prose through precise techniques which connect to her critique of representation.

A comprehensive study of Marguerite Duras fiction, with a focus on language, representation, and difference, which Duras explores on every structural level.

In the summer of 1973, the journalist Xavi_re Gauthier interviewed the writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras for an article in Le Monde. The meeting began a productive friendship between the two women that included the recording of four more interviews. They spoke of writing, literature, criticism, film, madness, sex, desire, alienation, Marxism, the situation of women, and their "oppression by the phallic class." Published in 1974 in France as Les Parleuses, the book became a classic statement of a positive and politically forceful feminist stance and an influential exploration of how Western culture has constructed gender roles and dealt with sexuality.

The Reader's Guide to Women's Studies is a searching and analytical description of the most prominent and influential works written in the now universal field of women's studies. Some 200 scholars have contributed to the project which adopts a multi-layered approach allowing for comprehensive treatment of its subject matter. Entries range from very broad themes such as "Health: General Works" to entries on specific individuals or more focused topics such as "Doctors."

Four major women's autobiographies of the twentieth century are discussed together here for the first time. Valérie Baisnée reinterprets the autobiographical writing of Simone De Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite Duras, finding some striking similarities in these women's resistance to a conservative order. Deploying a variety of theoretical approaches, from linguistic to Marxist, Baisnée endeavours to break the restrictive patterns of author-centred studies, to go beyond simple oppositions between truth and fiction, and to dispense with the facile interpretation of these texts as confessional. For Valérie Baisnée, Autobiography is meant to represent not the true but the official version of a life, signed by the author herself and revered as hagiography by the public. ... Instead of analysing women's autobiographies as confessional, it is possible to see this mode of discourse as a means to counteract the effect of exposure of women's private lives. By revealing their past, however painful it may be, the four autobiographers studied in this book also enhance their present strength, and therefore underline the political nature of the autobiography.

This is the first collection of essays on Marquerite Duras in English. A broad range of scholars and critics explore Duras' mythologies of desire and loss, the fate of love hostage to time and faltering memory. These inspired readings dramatically show how a geography of the imaginary gives way to writing as the conditional suspension of life itself. Duras is widely known if not well understood. Her vital importance to contemporary textual practice and critical theory is established in these studies. To write with Duras is to discover at the edge of consciousness that the strangeness of words exiles human life in language.

French novels such as "Madame Bovary" and "The Stranger" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This work provides coverage of the French novel since its origins in the 16th century, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization.