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J. Beizer, Thinking Through the Mothers. Reimagining Women's Biographies

J. Beizer, Thinking Through the Mothers. Reimagining Women's Biographies

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la maison d'édition)

BEIZER, Janet, Thinking Through the Mothers. Reimagining Women's Biographie, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2009, 296 p.

ISBN 978-0-8014-3851-6

RÉSUMÉ

If questions of subjectivity and identification are at stake in allbiographical writing, they are particularly trenchant for contemporarywomen biographers of women. Often, their efforts to exhume buried livesin hope of finding spiritual foremothers awaken maternal phantoms thatmust be embraced or confronted. Do women writing in fact have anygreater access to their own mothers' lives than to the lives of otherwomen whose stories have been swept away like dust in the debris of thepast? In Thinking through the Mothers, Janet Beizer surveys modernwomen's biographies and contemplates alternatives to an approach basedin lineage and the form of thought that emphasizes the line, the path,hierarchy, unity, resemblance, reflection, and theaesthetic-mimesis-that depends on these ideas.
Through closereadings of memoirs and fictions about mothers, Beizer explores howbiographers of the women who came before rehearse and rewriterelationships to their own mothers biographically as they seek toappropriate the past in a hybrid genre she calls “bio-autography.”Thinking through the Mothers features the work of George Sand andColette and spans such varied figures as Gustave Flaubert, JulianBarnes, Louise Colet, Eunice Lipton, Vladimir Nabokov, HuguetteBouchardeau, and Christa Wolf. Beizer seeks an alternative to women's“salvation biography” or “resurrection biography” that might resistnostalgia, be attentive to silence, and reinvent the means to representthe lives of precursors without appropriating traditional models ofgenealogy.

BIOGRAPHIE

Janet Beizer is Professor of Romance Languages andLiteratures at Harvard University and the author of VentriloquizedBodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France, also fromCornell, and Family Plots: Balzac's Narrative Generations.