Product Description

From two world wars to rapid industrialization and population shifts, events of the twentieth century have engendered cultural anxieties to an extent hitherto unseen, particularly in Europe. In Telling Anxiety, Jennifer Willging examines manifestations of such anxiety in the selected narratives of four women writing in French - Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Hébert. Willging demonstrates that the anxieties inherent in these women's works (whether attributed to characters, narrators, or implied authors) are multiple in nature and relate to a general post-Second World War scepticism about the power of language to express non-linguistic phenomena, such as the destruction and loss of life that a large portion of Europe endured during that period.

Willging maintains that, while these women writers are profoundly wary of language and its artificiality, they eschew the radical linguistic skepticism of many post-war male writers and theorists. Rather, Willging argues, the anxieties that these four writers express stem less from a loss of faith in language's referential function than from a culturally ingrained doubt about their own ability, as women, to make language reflect certain realities. Ultimately, Telling Anxiety reveals the crippling obstacles of literary agency for women in the twentieth century from the perspective of those who fully understood the awesome responsibility of their work.

Product Description
Marguerite Duras was one of the twentieth-century's most successful, prolific and challenging authors. In this introduction, Martin Crowley provides a clear, accessible guide to understanding Duras both as an important figure in her own right, and in her artistic, political and philosophical contexts. Duras' major works are considered, along with a number of lesser known texts and key critical approaches to her work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Sea of Troubles
This is a different, American translation of "The Sea Wall", probably one of Duras' best novels, and deals with her the period she spent in North China. The story, similar to that represented in the book and the film "The Lover" deals directly with her affair with the son of a rich Chinese industrialist, and the effects of this relationship upon the entire family ... Read more

Product Description
James Williams explores in this book the work of French writer and film-maker Marguerite Duras. ... Read more

Product Description
Although the storytelling of any time rewrites itself, rewriting became a primary concern in the literature of the twentieth century, an eracharacterized as having quoted, reenacted, cannibalized, revised, redone, refurbished, and outright plagiarized the texts of earlier times. The modern obsession with literary reiteration manifests itself in a rather unique way in the narratives of Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, and Marie Redonnet. These authors systematically and repeatedly rewrite their own texts, and in so doing, give evidence of three of the more salient aspects of twentieth-century French literature: a trend toward the representation of multifaceted selves, a desire to reevaluate the literary paradigm, and an acute concern for the unreliability of language. This book argues that the rewriting performed by Duras, Ernaux, and Redonnet moves beyond the tacit rewriting that occurs in any text toward a renovation of various features of the literary arena within which they circulate. Cathy Jellenik argues that all writing contains rewriting—an argument grounded in the theoretical apparatuses of Saussure, Bakhtin, Benveniste, Barthes, Kristeva, and Derrida. She then examines and interrogates the ways in which Duras, Ernaux, and Redonnet use rewriting to question and rethink the literary traditions they inherit. Jellenik suggests that the rewriting projects of Duras, Ernaux, and Redonnet promise to lead them, and their readers, toward the creation of a new literary aesthetic capable of responding to the questions of our times. ... Read more

Product Description
Four major women's autobiographies of the twentieth century are discussed together here for the first time. ValÉrie BaisnÉe reinterprets the autobiographical writing of Simone De Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite Duras, finding some striking similarities in these women's resistance to a conservative order. Deploying a variety of theoretical approaches, from linguistic to Marxist, BaisnÉe endeavours to break the restrictive patterns of author-centred studies, to go beyond simple oppositions between "truth" and "fiction", and to dispense with the facile interpretation of these texts as confessional.
For ValÉrie BaisnÉe, "Autobiography is meant to represent not the true but the official version of a life, signed by the author herself and revered as hagiography by the public. ... Instead of analysing women's autobiographies as confessional, it is possible to see this mode of discourse as a means to counteract the effect of exposure of women's private lives. By revealing their past, however painful it may be, the four autobiographers studied in this book also enhance their present strength, and therefore underline the political nature of the autobiography."
... Read more