She reads to write herself/ l`autobiographe en lectrice Abstracts

She reads to write herself/ l`autobiographe en lectrice Abstracts

She reads to write herself/ l’autobiographe en lectrice
Abstracts
Friday September 18th
Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith
Drawn Reading: The Materiality of Literary and Artistic Influence in American
Women’s Graphic Memoirs
Graphic memoir is a productive site for reflecting on reading practices that shape the visual
representation and verbal narratives of coming-of-age for contemporary women. The recently
published memoirs of two American women graphic artists depict in detail the narratives that
shaped their sense of self and their creative processes, and present these texts visually to readers.
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic situates her story of becoming a comics-artist in
conversation with the Modernist master narratives of Proust, Joyce, Fitzgerald and others to situate
her self-discovery within a familial context of repressed sexualities in a mid-twentieth century
context. To these texts she juxtaposes “new” narratives of sexual diversity suggested in works by
Colette, Wilde, Radcliffe Hall, and others that were taken up in the Seventies counter-canon of
“coming-out” stories that enabled her recognition of her own and her father’s sexuality as
something other than “deviant.”Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A
Graphic Memoir incorporates the images and biographical stories of numerous visual artists and
writers, from Leonardo to Virginia Woolf, as mentors for her own exploration of comics forms
and tropes, and uses their life stories to raise questions about the relationship of art and mental
illness. She juxtaposes these embodied stories to the authority of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders--IV), which is concerned with diagnosis and cure. For Forney, reading
rehabilitates her own manic-depressive tendencies. Our analysis explores how “drawn reading”
complicates an understanding of autobiographical acts. In the two memoirs we contrast, the
components of reading include the incorporation of others’ works, and one’s own earlier drawn
and written texts to speculate on the relationship of sexuality, creativity, and artistic coming of age
(Künstlerroman). Both fill their pages with the names and images of other writers and artists, in part
because they suffer from “Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,” thereby linking drawn reading to a
history of sexuality, creativity, and self-concepts.
We raise these questions:
--How is reading drawn? What particulars are focused on in comic boxes and panels?
--What happens when memoirists read themselves? (Forney incorporates her sketchbook,
Bechdel her childhood diaries)
--What happens when memoirists read the texts of others? How does such reading generate a
process of identification that becomes incorporated into reading one’s own life?
--What happens when the narrating I no longer identifies with the interpretative frames on which
earlier versions of herself depended?
Stephanie Genty
Rimbaud's Daughter or Rimbaud’s Son? Patti Smith's literary fathers and mothers in Just
Kids (2010)
The poems of Patti Smith are informed by the work of many male poets, from Arthur
Rimbaud to William Blake and Charles Baudelaire, and developed alongside the
writings of the men she met, such as William Bourroughs, Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard,
Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso. Just Kids (2010), a künstlerroman depicting the years
she spent in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe, is filled with references to the books
that inspired her imagination, her life and her writings. Louisa May Alcott's Little Women
encouraged her to become a writer, yet Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations encouraged her
to go to New York. Jean Genet's novels have been the companions of her urban life.
Selling books helped her pay her rent but the lives and works of her favorite writers
inspired and « nourished » her. The paper will look at the relationship between Patti
Smith and the literary works and writers who inspired her own works. Should we call
Patti Smith "Rimbaud's daughter” (Etienne Ethaire) or Allen Ginsberg's son ? What
literary heritages can one uncover in the autobiographical writing of this avid reader and
self-taught poet?
Laure de Nerveaux
Alice James: portrait of the diarist as a reader
Alice James started writing her diary when she was 41 years old, and an invalid. She started writing
the diary in 1889, and continued to do so until her death in 1892. She adopted the position of an
observer, commenting on what she was witnessing She also wrote down her own thoughts about
the works she was reading, from the « classics » (Shakespeare, Mme de Sévigné) to contemporary
works (Paul Bourget, Jules Lemaître, Dumas Fils, Anatole France, Marie Bashkirtseff) and the
printed press which she read daily. Reading was much more than a way to pass the time for her.
As Alice James was suffering from an illness which no doctor could diagnose, she found solace in
the power of thoughts, as conveyed by books (Alice James wrote that books clarify the density and
shape the formless mass within » (J 113) and reading was for her a means to « nourish » her analytic
mind. She commented on the news, cutting and pasting news item in her diary. Doing so, she also
claimed the right to express her opinion about a typically male domain, politics, and to participate
in the political debates she was excluded from. An avid reader of works by playwrights, she wrote
a diary which looks like a human comedy, which she staged in the diary.
Elisabeth Lamothe
“The only thing to call my own”: reading and food in Stealing Buddha's Dinner de Bich
Minh Nguyen
Bich Minh Nguyen, a Vietnamese- American writer from the so called 1.5 generation published
her memoir, entitled Stealing Buddha's Dinner in 2007, a first book which inaugurated her literary
career. In this paper, I will first look at food, an obvious theme in this work, which also informs
the very design of the book. American or Vietnamese dishes provide the title for each chapter of
the memoir, a device which conveys and epitomizes the writer's feelings of being torn between her
origins and her desire to become American. Reading, however, proves just as central, as Nguyen
details how literature played a key role for her as an immigrant. Reading in English first meant
identification with the USA, as it enabled her to learn about the history and mores of her adopted
country, but reading in English also resulted in the loss of her mother tongue and loss of identity.
Nguyen calls reading “my way of dealing with my self-consciousness as a 'foreigner’”, adding, “I
vowed I would 'deforeignize' myself through English.” However, Nguyen also claims that reading
nourished her imagination and her desire to become a writer. In this paper, I will show how Nguyen
used literary Anglo-Saxon models before freeing herself from them. We will compare her strategies
to other autobiographical works by Vietnamese-American writers.
Virginia Sherman
Homemade tales of homespun lives: the shared search for identity in culinary memoirs
Culinary memoirs offer their authors a space in which to (re)define home and identity. As
autobiographical narratives they invite the reader to share in the recollection of memories that
weave the narrative structure. In this participative role the reader traces her own life. In effect she
reads to write herself while the author writes to read herself. Culinary memoirs propose a formula
for creating order within memories, reinforced by recipes that structure the story and offer
ingredients for living. The works stage their own reception through the weaving of
autobiographical fragments around recipes, inviting the reader to participate in creating and
consuming. We will discuss the evolution of a non-subordinate relationship between author and
reader in this emerging genre. The reader is invited into the writer’s kitchen where the author shares
life learnings. Kindling mutual nostalgia, the reader enables the author to grasp ‘horizons of
understanding’ concealed in textual blind spots Culinary memoirs unite reading, writing, tasting
and savouring in a creative performance between author and reader, in which reading is represented
by the trope of food. An authentic narrative between fiction and reality is forged between the
author’s artistic input and the reader’s aesthetic reception. Two such memoirs offer insight into the
tradition of female culinary transmission wherein stories of origins are woven together with food
tales. Joyce Zonana in Dream Homes turned away from the kitchen, born in an age when women
had to challenge their mothers’ domestically defined lives, while in Molly Wizenberg’s A Homemade
Life feminist advances had reclaimed the kitchen as worthy territory for creativity. For Zonana, a
university English professor, books and writing represent a form of liberation from the traditional
role of womanhood, offering a source of meanings and linguistic nuances key to her identity. She
shares with the reader her expectation that books – including the one she offers her reader –
provide meaning and salvation. For Wizenberg, the author of an award-winning food blog, writing
is an informal expression evoking personal enterprise and self-realisation. Her memoir, written in
the same familiar style as her blog, invites dialogue and suggests the possibility of sharing
experiences. As with all ‘homemade’ projects, the implication is that one can reproduce the
endeavours oneself. The homemade life is accessible to the reader and is equated with moral and
emotional integrity and stability.
The reader’s horizon of expectation is largely determined by intimate paratexts in which an implicit
contract is negotiated with the reader. Explicitly acknowledged by the author as a collective effort,
the reader is drawn into the author’s circle of complicity. The memoir is announced as a shared
project between women around memories and food. In offering recipes and kitchen secrets the
author makes the reader not only an equal but also a trusted friend and within this trust lays the
freedom to imagine her own story.
Delphine Louis-Dimitrov
Reading as emancipation : Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Ann Jacobs
Harriet Ann Jacobs published her autobiography in 1861, using the name Linda Bret. Her
autobiography is a slave narrative, in which reading plays a critical role. The mere fact of being able
to read (thanks to her first slave-owner, a benevolent woman) became synonymous with resistance,
subversion and emancipation when she found herself under the control of a cruel master who
relentlessly tried to force himself upon her. Being able to read enabled the slave to liberate herself
from the ignorance she was condemned to, to read the Bible and newspapers, and to write letters,
actions which were subversive by nature for a slave. Reading, which is often associated to sewing
in the autobiography, weaves links, becomes a connective tissue, creating meaning and human
relations. It opens a spiritual, political and sentimental space that is no longer under the control of
a master. It is also a dangerous weapon which the master uses to harass his slave. The tiny attic in
which Jacob lived for 7 years becomes the metonymical representation of the private and secret
space offered by reading and sewing, which were all she could do for seven years. She eventually
fled to the North, which, a contrario, stands for a free and public space where reading and writing
can be combined. The final stage in Jacob's journey towards emancipation takes place not in the
text, but in an anti-slavery reading room in Rochester (New York).
Josette Spartacus
She reads to write herself to mean that she is well read … and not a slave: The
Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts
The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts is a fictionalized autobiography thought to be the first
autobiographical novel written by an African American woman and the only known novel written
by a fugitive slave. It was edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. who bought the manuscript in 2001, in
2002; it is unclear why the manuscript was not published when it was written or even when Craft
was alive. Speaking from the silenced space of this unpublished autobiography, Craft urges other
female writers to use the genre of the autobiography and the canon to express themselves and let
their silenced voices be heard—a call that writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison,
Alice Walker, and Jamaica Kincaid will hear and expand on the 'novel' form.". Female
autobiographies, although they were considered not as relevant as autobiographies by male writers,
spring from the same intertextual origins, the quest to write about oneself in relation to and
“against” previous texts. Craft’s rhetoric rests on three axes—the need to write from the point of
view of a black women, to express herself as a “nigger” (Cesaire); her desire to address herself to a
white readership, in the hope of being read, and finally, the need to write for herself. As in many
other contemporary female autobiographical texts, the question of the body is central. Violence
against the body, which was also depicted in male autobiographies (Frederick Douglas), goes hand
in hand with more intimate violence, namely, the writer’s silenced voice. One can compare and
contrast Craft’s attempt to the narrative “written” by Sojourner Truth, who “wrote” as a free black
woman, although she could neither read nor write. Craft’s text includes countless references to
other texts and paratexts which may further complexify the question of where the voice is coming
from, and who writes. Craft, however, did try to speak and to write, to show that she could write,
and read, to show that she was well-read, in other words, to show that she, a black woman, was
not a slave.
Nicolas Pierre Boileau
Reading as Self-Exposure in Woolf’s Autobiographical Texts
When asked to lecture on WOMEN AND FICTION, Woolf asserted that “one must strain off
what was personal and accidental in all these impressions and so reach the pure fluid, the essential
oil of truth.” The statement may shock those vaguely familiar with Woolf’s writing style, which
often foregrounds the personal. To achieve this, she wanted to enter the Oxbridge library, and
other places of knowledge, in order to pursue an investigation that was doomed to fail: when it
came to the History of women, there was no truth to be found, but only layers of fiction. A similar
conclusion was to be drawn concerning the representation of lives, and hers in particular. Her
multi-volume diary and autobiographical fragments reveal a similar approach to truth, which
materialises in the reading of books and fiction, and especially the fiction of others (either the one
she reads or the one she writes, such as Roger Fry, Flush – Barrett Browning’s dog – or Orlando – a
thinly veiled portrait of her lover, Vita Sackville-West). These writings should not mislead us into
thinking that they are the only autobiographical texts, for Woolf’s “critical essays” also serve to
construct her image. Woolf writes about reading as much as she reads about writing, because it is
in reading that she finds the truth that goes missing in the very places where it should belong.
Reading exposes her to the complexity of her being and the constraints of her art but also exposes
what kind of writer she is. The link between Woolf’s writing and her reading has been stressed by
many (genetic) critics, who looked at the importance of intertextual references in her work.
However, what remains to be seen is that the act of reading is not only an act of discovering
patterns (because Woolf repeatedly found flaws in the texts she read), it is also a way of being, a
means for her to access the truth of things. This paper will seek to show how Woolf’s constant
oscillation between the act of reading and the act of writing was part and parcel of an attempt at
exploring different ways of sustaining a portrait of herself as artist.
Nicoleta Alexoae- Zagni
Writing Herself as/in Reading the Others in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
In the tradition of the memoir-cum-novel inaugurated by Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman
Warrior, the most recent work of the Japanese-American writer Ruth Ozeki, the 2013 Man Bookershortlisted A Tale For the Time Being engages with the reality of self-writing as container of individual
and collective memories. Deliberate formal and aesthetic choices gesture to a dialogue with
established cultural forms and pose a challenge to configurations and enactments pertaining to
autoreferentiality. Ozeki’s book develops its own formal universe crisscrossing areas defined by
genetic configurations and develops its critical relationship to patterns of thought and
representation of the subject offered by literary history. Product of a specific mental literary
geography and cultural geology, it conveys its conception of writing and of existence: being both
here and elsewhere, negotiating palimpsestic layers of location, belonging, identification and selfinscription.
My paper aims at discussing this double-voiced, hybrid post-Fukushima narrative as enactment of
the reading-writing process, troubling, subverting and ultimately transforming common
understandings of relational and intersecting lives and representations.
samedi 19 septembre
Anne-Claire Marpeau
Bad Girl, L'autobiographie buissonnière
Bien que le sous-titre du dernier livre de l’écrivaine bilingue et franco-canadienne Nancy Huston,
intitulé Bad Girl, classes de littératures, annonce en toutes lettres la naissance d’une écrivaine, et
prévienne ainsi le lecteur que le livre portera sur la genèse d’une vocation, le récit reste presque vide
de figures littéraires tutélaires, de scènes de lecture initiatiques, d’une bibliothèque fondatrice.
L’ouvrage le plus autobiographique de Nancy Huston se présente sous la forme de courts chapitres,
semblables à des vignettes intercalées dans lesquelles l’écrivaine fait le portrait de ses ancêtres, le
récit de sa vie future, et celui, imaginaire, de la grossesse de sa mère. Etrange absence donc, que
celle de références à des ouvrages fondateurs pour l’écrivaine quant on connaît l’œuvre de Nancy
Huston qui regorge par ailleurs de références littéraires et musicales. Parmi le peu d’auteurs cités,
on trouve Roland Barthes et Beckett, mais ce sont leurs idées plutôt que la lecture de leurs ouvrages
qui est mise en avant. Et si les scènes d’initiation à la littérature sont absentes dans le récit, la
protagoniste y a pourtant le nom de Dorrit emprunté à l’héroïne britannique d’un roman de Charles
Dickens.
Bad girl, autobiographie complexe, est un ouvrage dans lequel l’histoire de soi se dit à travers
l’histoire des autres, et où le futur de l’écrivaine ne s’expliquerait pas dans la lecture a priori d’oeuvres
littéraires mais dans la relecture de son enfance. On assisterait donc à un refus de la figure romancée
de l’écrivain qui trouverait sa raison d’être dans les récits des autres. On pourrait aussi émettre
l’hypothèse que Bad Girl renouvèle la question du genre et des exigences du pacte autobiographique,
en faisant des pratiques de lecture de l’écrivaine un objet plus secret que le récit de l’intimité
familiale. Nous explorerons ce paradoxe d’un récit autobiographique où les classes de littérature se
prennent ailleurs que dans une salle de classe ou sur les pages d’un livre, et tenterons de dessiner la
lectrice qui apparaît par contraste dans les non-dits du texte.
Isabelle Matamaros
« Livres des pères, livres des mères : figures parentales et modèles de Lecteurs/trices
dans les autobiographies de femmes au XIXe siècle. »
Le XIXe siècle français repose sur une répartition genrée des rôles et du savoir : aux mères, l’activité
domestique et l’éducation des enfants, aux pères, l’activité professionnelle et citoyenne ; aux
femmes, les livres pieux, les ouvrages pédagogiques et d’économie domestique ; aux hommes, les
ouvrages de philosophie, de sciences, la presse politique. Dans leurs autobiographies, les auteures
que nous étudions insistent sur leur perception des figures maternelle et paternelle dans leur rapport
aux livres et au savoir, et leur impact sur leur devenir de lectrices. Une, proche, qui encadre et
surveille l’accès aux livres : c’est la mère, premier censeur des lectures de sa fille. L’autre, plus
lointaine, lettrée et libre de ses choix, mêlée d’admiration et d’envie : c’est le père. « Les filles
appartiennent à leur mère », écrit Athénaïs Michelet dans ses mémoires (1867), tandis que son père,
qu’elle voyait constamment lire, constituait un « exemple tout puissant pour stimuler son [mon]
esprit ». Les souvenirs de ces deux figures ouvrent alors un questionnement sur les identités
féminine et masculine, à l’intérieur duquel la lecture occupe une place essentielle, limitant et
réprimant dans un cas, ouvrant des perspectives d’avenir dans l’autre. Quelles sont les lectures
autorisées, suggérées ou interdites par l’une et l’autre ? Comment les auteures ont-elles reçues,
quand elles étaient jeunes filles, ces consignes de lecture ? Comment les relient-elles à leur condition
de femme dans une société inégalitaire ? Se jouent ici à la fois la question de l’éducation des filles
et de l’accès au savoir. A partir d’un corpus d’une dizaine de textes autobiographiques de femmes,
nous nous demanderons comment l’opposition de ces deux figures propose rétrospectivement une
clé de compréhension pour les auteures sur leurs choix de lectures, leur devenir professionnel, leur
position sur l’éducation des filles. Les exposer de cette façon, en présentant deux modèles
existentiels, l’un oppositionnel l’autre référentiel, exprime une conscience du rapport inégalitaire au
savoir dans lequel sont maintenues les filles pendant une grande partie du XIXe siècle et, en
filigrane, de la construction des identités genrées qui en découle.
Anicet M'Besso
La lecture dans les œuvres d’Hélène Cixous
L’œuvre à caractère autobiographique d’Hélène Cixous a ceci de caractéristique qu’elle
s’accompagne toujours de ses livres lus. Le fait est que, pour Cixous, « la littérature » « ça ne pense qu’à
ça (…) à remuer les cendres, à refaire avec des mots des phrases inouïes, à ressusciter, à ranimer les feux » ou l’idée
du feu qu’elle a en partage avec ses voyants littéraires. Pour ce faire, la lecture est inévitable et
s’impose comme le point de départ de l’écriture. En outre, la lecture, selon sa conception, est
indissociable de l’écriture littéraire d’autant plus que lire, c’est d’une certaine manière commencer
à écrire et inversement. Mireille Calle-Gruber, à propos des textes de Cixous, faisait justement
remarquer qu’ils ont pour sol et terre « les trésors des livres-autres ». Autrement dit, ils se nourrissent
des lectures d’œuvres des auteurs qui leur font cortège et les portent, si bien que lire une œuvre
cixousienne, c’est parcourir une sorte d’immense forêt bibliothèque. Les œuvres cixousiennes sont,
à ce sujet, convaincantes. Qu’ils s’agissent, en effet, des Rêveries de la femme sauvage ou du Jour où je
n’étais pas là ou encore de Double Oubli de l’Orang-Outang, des autobiographies fictionnelles sur
lesquelles va s’appuyer cette étude, elles ont toutes en commun de procéder non seulement des
lectures de l’écrivaine, mais en plus de les mettre en scène et de transmettre le savoir livresque de
la lectrice. Toutefois, s’il ne fait aucun doute que les œuvres cixousiennes ne vont pas sans lectures,
il importe ici de s’interroger sur les modalités de mise en scène et de transmissions de ses lectures
dans ses œuvres. Il appartiendra aussi à cette étude de mettre en évidence les liens unissant l’écriture
cixousienne aux textes lus.
Sihem Arfaoui
Writing Herself and Resistance in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and
Things I've Been Silent About.
In Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (2003), female teaching, reading and
writing about books are tightly yoked. In its focus on the figures of the woman teacher, reader, and
writer, the considered memoir makes a tight connection between these interrelated roles and
empowerment as inseparable aspects of a woman’s autobiographical tradition. As a highly reflexive
genre, Reading Lolita in Tehran offers a wide space to study reading books and writing about them
and about oneself as an act of resistance or transgression. In this paper, I aim to examine the access
to banned books as a struggle for power by Iranian women. To develop this argument, I shall
analyze Azar Nafisi’s endeavours to engrave reading literature in her female students as one step
toward writing her own story of resistance in contemporary Iran. That is why, each book she
teaches at the university or discusses in her clandestine restrictive class not only opens on endless
possibilities of self-expression for the participants, but also offers the writer weapons of survival,
success and enlightenment in the midst of a hegemonic system. Thus, for Nafisi, reading is about
writing and power.
Ludmila Martanovschi
Reading Culture(s) in American Indian Women Writers’ Autobiographical Essays
This study aims at investigating more than ten women writers’ contributions to the volume Here
First. Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, edited by Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann
(New York: The Modern Library, 2000). The demonstration proves that most autobiographers
strive to achieve a sense of balance between, on the one hand, reading written literature and
acquiring formal education and, on the other hand, “reading” their own tribal culture(s) and
consolidating the Native legacy based on orality. This struggle to attain equilibrium is sounded
clearly in, for example, the essay signed by Luci Tapahonso (Diné): “our success as adults depended
upon formal education, as well as being knowledgeable about Diné family history and culture”
(343). In following the early experiences that shaped them as writers, the current study analyzes
American Indian women’s ways of representing the first contact with school, the discovery of
reading books, the connection to various literary models as well as the significance given to the oral
traditions they inherited and chose to continue through their writing. American Indian women
writers reveal themselves as storytellers, scholars, guides, spokespersons for their communities and
mediators, who capitalize on preserving their respective Native languages, passing on tribal
knowledge, teaching their daughters, contributing to establishing American Indian literatures and
translating Native worldviews for a mainstream audience as proven in contributions by LeAnne
Howe (Choctaw), Kimberly Blaeser (Anishinaabe), Roberta Hill (Oneida), Ofelia Zepeda (Tohono
O’odham), Evelina Zuni Lucero (Isleta/San Juan Pueblo).
Lorenzo Mari
She Hears, Reads and Translates to Write Herself. Margaret Laurence’s Post)Colonial
Autobiographical Writing
This paper focuses on the ways in which Margaret Laurence’s two memoirs – The Prophet’s Camel
Bell (1963) and Dance on the Earth (1989) – heavily rebounded on her own aesthetics, both at the
beginning and towards the end of her literary career. The Prophet’s Camel Bell recounted her stay in
the British Somaliland at the end of the Fifties: whereas this text has been often apprehended in
terms of perception (Vincent 1995), discourse (Richards 1990) or ethics (Bailey 2013), it might be
also understood within the frame of a non-canonical modernist approach to the encounter with
the foreign. By applying the same frame to her own writing, Margaret Laurence produced an
outstanding example of “modernist autobiography” (DiBattista-Wittmann 2014). Within this
encounter, a crucial role was played out by her interest into Somali poems and folktales, which she
had previously translated in A Tree for Poverty (1954). Together with her critical assessment of
Nigerian literature included in Long Drums and Cannons (1968), this triple act of hearing, reading and
translating postcolonial African oral and written literature would have a longstanding influence
upon her subsequent writing. At the same time, however, her often unquestioned exploitation of
native informants (Spivak 1990, 2003) stood as a clear contradiction in the fashioning of her noncanonical modernist and postcolonial aesthetics. Far from being a piece of postcolonial life writing,
according to the most recent developments in this field (e.g. Huddart 2008), The Prophet’s Camel Bell
included some aesthetic and ideological contradictions, which would be amplified in her
subsequent collection of essay, Heart of Stranger (1976), and her memoir Dance on the Earth.
Therefore, her characterization as a “(post)colonial” author might aptly reflect her ambivalent
political position; also her use of modernist narrative techniques would be smoothed, in her later
novels, by an interest into more conventional forms, showing how her return to Canada from
Africa and her participation into Canadian feminist nationalism (Dudek 2005) implied a brusque
re-territorializing closure.
Elisabeth Bouzonviller
« Books. Why? » Staging the reading act in Louise Erdrich’s autobiographical texts
Besides her numerous novels, Louise Erdrich has published two autobiographical texts, Blue Jay's
Dance: A Birth Year from 1995, and Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country from 2003. Both texts tackle
the subject of maternity and writing, the former being a maternal adventure at home from
pregnancy to birth and early motherhood, whereas the other deals with a family journey with her
youngest daughter and the father of her child, Tobasonakwut, a renowned Ojibwe elder. During
this family trip, they not only look for signs of early Ojibwe life, but also for an extraordinary library
lost in Ojibwe country, along the Canadian-American border. Whereas Spivak denounces
autobiography as unsuitable for postcolonial female writers, Erdrich manages, in her
autobiographies, as in her fiction, to give a voice to the “subaltern” by subtly relying on her mixedblood origins and mingling orality and writing traditions. We intend therefore to study how, in both
these texts, the many works read by the female narrator offer a mise en abyme of the Indian
genocide, but also stage a mixed-blood multiplicity linking tradition and modernity, which
corresponds to a survival and resistance reaction designated by Gerald Vizenor as “survivance”. If
the narrator of these autobiographies keeps mentioning her reading and its detailed circumstances,
and asserts that wondering about this intellectual activity has “saved” her, she does not restrict
herself to western written literature, but also ponders Native petroglyphs and other Indian
signifiers, in a hybrid manner taking into account all her family influences, thus suggesting the
rhizomic identity, which is typical of composite cultures and was developed by Deleuze and
Glissant. In these texts, reading and writing are intimately linked to the issue of origins, thus
recalling Roland Barthes' words: “Isn't telling stories always a matter of looking for one's origins,
telling about one's problem with the law, getting into the dialectic of love and hate?”
Claire Bazin
Janet Frame : naissance d’une œuvre.
Janet Frame, dont la célébrité est en grande partie due à l’adaptation cinématographique de son
tryptique autobiographique, An Angel at My Table, par Jane Campion, a très tôt manifesté un goût
prononcé pour les mots, les textes, les livres. Dans son autobiographie, elle retrace le parcours qui
a amené la fillette, avide de lecture, à l’écrivaine connue et reconnue qu’elle est devenue. Dans cette
présentation, je me propose de voir comment Frame, fascinée par les mots des autres, donne
ensuite naissance à une oeuvre, tant fictionnelle qu’autobiographique. La lectrice devient artiste
consacrée dans son pays natal, la Nouvelle-Zélande, au terme d’un exil de sept ans qui lui a permis
de se reconstruire, après les années passées en hôpital psychiatrique. Frame se crée et se recrée par
l’écriture et « avec les mots de tout le monde, écrit comme personne » (Gusdorf).
Joan Chiung-huei Chang
Reading Fathers, Writing Self: Examining Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
Maxine Hong Kingston writes her poetry memoir I Love a Broad Margin to My Life to invocate her
biological father and literary father Henry David Thoreau. Firstly, this memoir is a reflection on
the commentary Kingston’s father has written in verse form in the margins of the Chinese editions
of Kingston’s books. By translating father’s Chinese calligraphy into English, speaking to her father
as poet to poet, and responding to his margin writing with her “Margin” memoir, she not only
destigmatizes his identity as a stowaway or coolie, but also reclaims respects for him as a poet and
scholar. Secondly, this memoir is a presentation of homage to Henry Thoreau. The title of ILBM
alludes to his famous line “I love a broad margin to my life” from the chapter “Sounds” in Walden.
As “Sounds” praises beauty of leisure time and enjoyment of idleness, Kingston is seeking freedom
from pressure of time and perpetuity of literature. With this enlightenment, Kingston has dedicated
herself actively to protests against racism and war on Iraq, pursuing liberation in literary form as
well as physical and spiritual liberty for human beings. This paper will examine how Kingston has
juxtaposed the text in the center and that in the margin, the fatherly and the daughterly, and even
the male and female texts, so as to dissolve the centrality of “I” in autobiographical writing and to
bespeak equality, collaboration and affinity for the world.