N. Edwards, A. Hubbell, A. Miller, Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography

Natalie Edwards, Amy Hubbell and Ann Miller, Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography

University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

288 p. - 25 $

EAN13 : 9780803236318

Autobiography in France has taken a decidedly visual turn in recent years: photographs, shown or withheld, become evidence of what was, might have been, or cannot be said; photographers, filmmakers, and cartoonists undertake projects that explore issues of identity. Textual and Visual Selves investigates, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, the ways in which the textual and the visual combine in certain French works to reconfigure ideas—and images—of self-representation.

Surprisingly, what these accounts reveal is that photography or film does not necessarily serve to shore up the referentiality of the autobiographical account: on the contrary, the inclusion of visual material can even increase indeterminacy and ambiguity. Far from offering documentary evidence of an extratextual self coincident with the “I” of the text, these images testify only to absence, loss, evasiveness, and the desire to avoid objectification. However, where Roland Barthes famously saw the photograph as a prefiguration of death, in this volume we see how the textual strategies deployed by these writers and artists result in work that is ultimately life-affirming.

Authors/Editors

Natalie Edwards is an assistant professor of French at Wagner College and coeditor of This Self Which Is Not One: Women’s Life Writing in French. Amy L. Hubbell is an associate professor of French at Kansas State University, lecturer in French at the University of Queensland, and the author of À la recherche d’un emploi: Business French in a Communicative Context. Ann Miller is a university fellow at the University of Leicester and the author of Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip.

Table of Contents

1. Beyond Autobiography, Véronique Montémont 

2. Chronicles of Intimacy: Photography in Autobiographical Projects, Shirley Jordan 

3. The Absent Body: Photography and Autobiography in Hélène Cixous's Photos de racinesand Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie's L'Usage de la photo, Natalie Edwards 

4. The Photobiographical Today: Signs of an Identity Crisis? Floriane Place-Verghnes 

5. Reclaiming the Void: The Cinematographic Aesthetic of Marguerite Duras's Autobiographical Novels, Erica L. Johnson 

6. Illustration Revisited: Photo-textual Phototextual Exchange and Resistance in Sophie Calle's Suite vénitienne, Johnnie Gratton 

7. Viewing the Past through a "Nostalgeric" Lens: Pied-Noir Photo-documentaries Photodocumentaries, Amy L. Hubbell 

8. Georges Perec, Memory, and Photography, Peter Wagstaff 

9. The Self-Portrait in French Cinema: Reflections on Theory and on Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse, Agnès Calatayud 

10. Autobiography in Bande Dessinée, Ann Miller 

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