A. Angelo & E. Fülöp (dir.), Protean Selves: First-Person Voices in Twenty-First-Century French and Francophone Narratives

Protean Selves: First-Person Voices in Twenty-First-Century French and Francophone Narratives

Sous la direction d' Adrienne Angelo and Erika Fülöp

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.

212 pp.,

EAN 9781443860154

Prix £44.99

What does it mean to write “I” in postmodern society, in a world in which technological advances and increased globalization have complicated notions of authenticity, origins, and selfhood? Under what circumstances and to what extent do authors lend their scriptural authority to fictional counterparts? What role does naming, or, conversely, anonymity play vis-à-vis the writing and written “I”? What aspects of identity are subject to (auto)fictional manipulations? And how do these complicated and multilayered narrating selves problematize the reader’s engagement with the text?

Seeking answers to these questions, Protean Selves brings together essays which explore the intricate relations between language, self, identity, otherness, and the world through the analysis of the forms and uses of the first-person voice. Written by specialists of a variety of approaches and authors from across the world, the studies in this volume follow up a number of critical inquiries on the thorny problematic of self-representation and the representation of the self in contemporary French and francophone literatures, and extend the theoretical analysis to narratives and authors who have gained increasing commercial and academic visibility in the twenty-first century.

Contents:

Acknowledgements

Adrienne Angelo and Erika Fülöp: Introduction

Section I: Who Says “I”? Who Is “I”?

Frédérique Chevillot: Le jeu protéen d’Amélie Nothomb dans Une forme de vie ou de l’art de la contre-prétérition

Aimie Shaw: L’Auteur e(s)t moi: Chimeric Narrators in the Works of Éric Chevillard

Dawn M. Cornelio: Elle se nomme Chloé Delaume: un parcours personnel et littéraire

Erika Fülöp: Born in Translation: The Self Which Is Not One in Brice Matthieussent’s Vengeance du traducteur

Section II: The “I” between Fact and Fiction

Natalie Edwards: Autofiction in the Dock: The Case of Christine Angot

Katie Jones: Between témoignage and imposture: Suicide and Bereavement in Contemporary French Literature

France Grenaudier-Klijn: Comment dire “je”?: le “je” féminin dans deux romans de Patrick Modiano

Section III: The Self between Cultures

Samia I. Spencer: Mais qui est donc Chahdortt Djavann?

Julia L. Frengs: “Comment te dire la dualité entre l’une et l’autre moi-même”: The Double “je” of Chantal T. Spitz’s Elles, terre d’enfance, roman à deux encres

Jean Anderson: When the Silenced Speak: Moetai Brotherson’s “jeux du je”

Helen Vassallo: Negotiating Trauma through Self and Story in Darina Al-Joundi’s Le Jour où Nina Simone a cessé de chanter

Section IV: The Self through the Body

Laura Jackson: Purging the Self: Transcribing the Divided, Anorexic Subject in Geneviève Brisac’s Petite and Camille de Peretti’s Thornytorinx

Valérie Hastings: Je mange donc je suis: le dédoublement du “je” dans Le Mangeur de Ying Chen

List of Contributors

Index

Adrienne Angelo is Associate Professor of French at Auburn University, USA. Her research focuses on life-writing narratives and practices in contemporary women’s writing in France and the Francophone world. She has published on authors such as Calixthe Beyala, Clémence Boulouque, Nina Bouraoui, Nathalie Gassel, Camille Laurens, Marie Nimier, Nina Bouraoui, and Nathalie Rheims.

Erika Fülöp is Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Interdiscinplinary Center for Narratology at the University of Hamburg. She has published a monograph entitled Proust, the One, and the Many: Identity and Difference in A la recherche du temps perdu (Oxford: Legenda, 2012) and articles on Proust and on contemporary fiction, including Éric Chevillard and Amélie Nothomb.