“Cherchez la fiction”: Stories of Self-Realization in Anne Garréta’s Pas un jour and Leïla Slimani’s Sexe et mensonges

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-177
Author(s):  
JOANNE BRUETON
Keyword(s):  
French Literature ◽  
Sexual Experience ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Female Desire ◽  
Female Subjectivities ◽  
Contemporary Writers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Anne Garreta

Faced with the hermetic interiority of post-structuralist narratives, twenty-first-century French literature tends to turn outwards and explore sociohistorical realities as a fertile source of fiction. In this article, I compare two contemporary writers rarely paired together—Anne Garréta and Leïla Slimani—to consider the enduring importance of discursive paradigms in realizing a sense of self. Although Garréta’s mechanised autobiographical aesthetic in Pas un Jour seems to jar with Slimani’s ethnographic journalism in Sexe et mensonges, I argue that both use heuristic narratives to conduct a survey of female desire whose reality is only legible in literature. Intersecting with narrative theories formulated by Barthes, Jameson and Cixous, this article argues that Slimani and Garréta perform their lived sexual experience through a carefully manufactured textual machine that grants them freedom. Only through the straitjacket of a fictional system can the reader glean the reality of female subjectivities so long obscured by myth.

scholarly journals Representing the Twenty-First Century Migrant Experience: Adam and Fleutiaux’s Problematic Empathy

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 65-88
Author(s):  
Marianne Bessy ◽  
Mary Sloan Morris
Keyword(s):  
French Literature ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
First Century ◽  
White Female ◽  
Migrant Background ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Illegal Migrants ◽  
French Woman ◽  
Twenty First Century

In recent years, a trend in French literature has emerged among non-migrant French authors. In her 2018 study, The Migrant Canon in Twenty-First-Century France, Sabo describes this trend as “the emergence of French authors who write about migration” (27). Similarly, Louviot argued that “the drama of migrants dying on Europe’s doorstep has inspired many […] French writers with no postcolonial or (im)migrant background” (6). This article—which focuses on two texts, À l’abri de rien by Olivier Adam (2007) and Destiny by Pierrette Fleutiaux (2016)—examines how non-migrant French authors have attempted to give a voice to illegal migrants in their recent literary works. Each work recounts the story of a French woman who attempts to help one or several migrants as they navigate horrid living conditions (in a Calais-like city in À l’abri de rien and in Paris in Destiny), suffer mental and physical breakdowns, and face French authorities. This study demonstrates that there is an inherent ambivalence at the heart of how these two non-migrant French authors have attempted to voice the plight of today’s illegal migrants in France. While Adam and Fleutiaux’s texts aim to foster empathy toward migrants, they also feature complex altruistic motives that are far from selfless. Adam and Fleutiaux strive to humanize migrants and their trajectories by creating an empathic discourse of care. However, migrant characters are also portrayed as passive objects of fascination becoming pawn-like figures in the lives of the two white female protagonists. The article questions these characters’ altruism by analyzing how their own mental states overpower their empathic drives, thus bringing to light the questionable reasons why these two women become consumed by the need to help migrants. Ultimately, these considerations help build a critique of the problematic empathy Adam and Fleutiaux have constructed and its ethical ramifications.

Clarissa Dalloway’s Global Itinerary: From London to Paris and Sydney

2020 ◽  
pp. 354-370
Author(s):  
Monica Latham
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Writers ◽  
Twenty First Century

Almost a century after its publication, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) continues to endure and influence many international contemporary writers. This chapter focuses on three contemporary women writers who have authored recent novels inspired by Mrs Dalloway and who have revived Dalloway-esque themes within a renewed spectrum of aesthetic, cultural and political contexts. From direct, intended homages to Woof’s Mrs Dalloway to more subtle allusions, Anne Korkeakivi (An Unexpected Guest, 2012), Carole Llewellyn (Une ombre chacun, 2017) and Gail Jones (Five Bells, 2011) have taken their own twenty-first-century Clarissa Dalloway to Paris and Sydney. These cities, with their topographic, historical and cultural specificities, function as the canvas for the contemporary characters’ wanderings. Korkeakivi, Llewellyn and Jones perpetuate Woolf’s Dalloway-isms, but they also make them new by adapting them to contemporary expectations, settings and situations.

The Beauty of the Houri

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nerina Rustomji
Keyword(s):  
French Literature ◽  
September 11 ◽  
First Century ◽  
September 11Th ◽  
Multiple Functions ◽  
Gender Parity ◽  
Feminine Beauty ◽  
Digital Material ◽  
Twenty First Century

The fascination with the houri, the pure female of Islamic paradise, began long before September 11, 2001. The Beauty of the Houri demonstrates how the ambiguous reward of the houri, mentioned in the Qurʾan and developed in Islamic theological writings, has gained a distinctive place in English and French literature from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century and in digital material in the twenty-first century. The houri had multiple functions in Islamic texts that ranged from caretaker to pure companion to entertainment. French, English, and American writers used the houri to critique Islam and Muslim societies while also adopting the houri as a model of feminine beauty. Unlike earlier texts that presented different forms of the houri or universalized the houri for all women, writings about the houri after September 11th offer contradictory messages about Islam. In the twenty-first century, the image of the houri symbolizes a reward for violence and the possibility of gender parity. As a cosmic figure that inspires enduring questions about the promise of paradise and the idealized feminine form, the houri has a singular past and potential for future interpretation.

Contemporary Feminism and Women's Short Stories

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Young
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
First Century ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Comprehensive Introduction ◽  
Contemporary Writers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Zadie Smith ◽  
The Moment

The short story has received renewed attention and notable popular acclaim in the twenty-first century. This book offers a wide-ranging survey of contemporary women’s short stories and introduces a new way of theorising feminism in the genre through the concept of ‘the moment’. By considering the prominent themes of motherhood, marriage, domesticity, sexuality, masculinity and femininity, this work engages with a spectrum of issues that are central to feminism today and, in the process, offers insightful new readings of the contemporary short story. Readers will find new perspectives on both canonical as well as lesser-discussed contemporary writers, including Kate Atkinson, Nicola Barker, A.S. Byatt, Aminatta Forna, Victoria Hislop, Jackie Kay, Andrea Levy, Hilary Mantel, Kate Mosse, Michèle Roberts, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Rose Tremain. While serving as a comprehensive introduction to the central themes of feminist politics, the study shows what makes the short story a desirable literary vehicle for creatively and critically contributing to feminist debates.

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