Writing to exist: Humanity and survival in two fin de siècle novels in French (Harpman, Darrieussecq)

Esprit Createur

Volumn 45, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 59-66

  Sauble Otto, Lorie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249296280     PISSN: 00140767     EISSN: 19310234     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/esp.2010.0482     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. Justine Larbalestier, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U P, 2002), 13.
2. Anne Cranny-Francis, Feminist Fiction: Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction (New York: St. Martin's P, 1990), 39.
3. For exemples of the separatist utopia or dystopia in English see Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
4. and Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines.
5. In French, see Elisabeth Vonarburg's Le Silence de la cité and Chroniques des pays des mères.
6. Jacqueline Harpman, Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes (Paris: Stock, 1995).
7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 202-03.
8. Both novels discussed in this article were translated into English soon after being published in French. The translation of Truismes appears as Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation, Linda Coverdale, trans. (New York: New Press, 1997).
9. Ros Schwartz translated Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes as I Who Have Never Known Men (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997).
10. Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (New York: Oxford U P, 2002), 209.
11. Marie Darrieussecq, Truismes (Paris: P.O.L., 1996), 93.
12. For further discussion of women's justifiable rage, see Emily Martin's The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon P, 1987) 136. Martin provides a cultural anthropological analysis of anger as illness and suggests a revisionist approach: "To see anger as a blessing instead of as an illness, it may be necessary for women to feel that their rage is legitimate. To feel that their rage is legitimate, it may be necessary for women to understand their structural position in society, and this in turn may entail consciousness of themselves as members of a group that is denied full membership in society simply on the basis of gender" (135).
13. Rosi Braidotti, "Mothers, Monsters, and Machines," in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury, eds. (New York: Columbia U P, 1997), 59-79.
14. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2.
15. Butler, 2, 17.
16. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993), 116.
17. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon P, 1992), 80.
18. Moira Gatens, "Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic," in Writing on the Body, 84-85.
19. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 175.
20. Harraway, 150, 173.