Embodied Criticism: A French Lesson (original) (raw)
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THE FICTIONAL, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND THE AESTHETIC SELF: PERFORMING FIRST-PERSON DISCOURSE
2016
The Fictional, the Autobiographical and the Aesthetic Self: Performing First-Person Discourse. The paper focuses on the particular self-narrative of first-person dramatic texts, as well as on the ethico-aesthetic reception brought along by the performance of monodrama. Dwelling on the idiosyncratic and often hypertrophic expression of the self in front of a collective or a unique witness, a real or an imaginary beholder, the study points to the enactment of aesthetic singularity and its specific type of discursivity. Over the last decades, the performance of the self has been interpreted mostly through the i d e o l o g i c a l l e n s o f c u l t u r a l s t u d i e s , h i g h l y i n d e b t e d t o t h e m i cro-politics of identity. Still, the politics of the self can reinforce, in its turn, the aesthetic thinking, by recovering a certain anthropological approach on the liminality of artistic condition.
The Fictional, the Autobiographical and the Aesthetic Self: Performing First-Person Discourse. The paper focuses on the particular self-narrative of first-person dramatic texts, as well as on the ethico-aesthetic reception brought along by the performance of monodrama. Dwelling on the idiosyncratic and often hypertrophic expression of the self in front of a collective or a unique witness, a real or an imaginary beholder, the study points to the enactment of aesthetic singularity and its specific type of discursivity. Over the last decades, the performance of the self has been interpreted mostly through the i d e o l o g i c a l l e n s o f c u l t u r a l s t u d i e s , h i g h l y i n d e b t e d t o t h e m i cro-politics of identity. Still, the politics of the self can reinforce, in its turn, the aesthetic thinking, by recovering a certain anthropological approach on the liminality of artistic condition. REZUMAT. Sinele ficţional, sinele autobiografic şi sinele estetic. Performând discursul la persoana întâi. Lucrarea se centrează asupra autonaraţiunii specifice textelor dramatice scrise la persoana întâi, precum şi asupra receptării etico-estetice a unui performance de tip monodramatic. Oprindu-se asupra exprimării idiosincratice şi adeseori hipertrofice a sinelui în faţa unui martor colectiv sau unic, a unui spectator/cititor real sau imaginar, studiul relevă punerea în act a singularităţii estetice şi a tipului de discursivitate specific acesteia. Ȋn ultimele decenii, aşa-numitul performance of the self performarea sinelui/de sine a fost interpretat mai ales prin prisma ideologică a studiilor culturale, adânc ancorate în micropolitica identităţii. Totuşi, " politica sinelui
Protean Selves: First-Person Narrators in Twenty-First-Century French and Francophone Fiction
2014
What does it mean to write “I” in postmodern society, in a world in which technological advances and increased globalization have complicated notions of authenticity, origins, and selfhood? Under what circumstances and to what extent do authors lend their scriptural authority to fictional counterparts? What role does naming, or, conversely, anonymity play vis-à-vis the writing and written “I”? What aspects of identity are subject to (auto)fictional manipulations? And how do these complicated and multilayered narrating selves problematize the reader’s engagement with the text? Seeking answers to these questions, Protean Selves brings together essays which explore the intricate relations between language, self, identity, otherness, and the world through the analysis of the forms and uses of the first-person voice. Written by specialists of a variety of approaches and authors from across the world, the studies in this volume follow up a number of critical inquiries on the thorny problematic of self-representation and the representation of the self in contemporary French and francophone literatures, and extend the theoretical analysis to narratives and authors who have gained increasing commercial and academic visibility in the twenty-first century.
Narrating Selves in Everyday Contexts: Art, the Literary, and Life Experience
Style invites submissions that address questions of style, stylistics, and poetics-as we have traditionally. These submissions may include research and theory in discourse analysis, literary and nonliterary genres, narrative, figuration, metrics, and rhetorical analysis. In addition, Style also now welcomes contributions employing recent developments in several psychologies-cognition, bioevolutionary psychology, family systems, and human development-as those may relate to the study of literature and the humanities. Furthermore, the editors will be pleased to consider submissions on pedagogy generally as such relate to the teaching of literature and the humanities. Contributions may draw from such fields as literary criticism, critical theory, linguistics, philosophy of language, rhetoric, narrative, and composition studies as well as the varieties of psychologies and pedagogies.
Artist-Author in Action and Reflection
Phenomenology & Practice, 2022
The question of conjoined artistic- and phenomenological research practice is explored through two realizations of a drawing-based practice, complemented with a language-based practice that includes transcriptions of a spoken monologue while and about drawing. Through adapting the sense that the monologue’s addressee is an apparently other person, and narrating this situation, the author expresses through the article that the experiential process of drawing is automatically phenomenological. In turn, the article is a presentation of how phenomenological reflection is implicit in the practice. The artist- referenced in the article is termed the artist-author, declared as such to the reader, and is thereafter suggested as split into an apparently more reflexively inclined artist and a more reflectively inclined author/interlocutor. The hypothesis that both artistic- and phenomenological research can manifest as a single practice is embedded in the article’s manner of presentation, the reader of which is almost in the same interlocutory position as the author-, of the artist-author, in being able to notice this. The article’s actual author, however, refers to himself as a homunculus, in effect the hyphen of artist-author, that enables him to detach sufficiently from what can be read and seen to format the article in such terms as enable the reader to critically reflect on its hypothesis. The role of the camera itself, considered as a metaphor for interaction between the reflexive event and its subsequent language-based reflection, is also acknowledged, especially in the context of the artist-’s referencing in the drawing and in his speech how the camera both aids and obfuscates the process, and linking this to theory. The transcript conveys spoken enunciation, especially through its grammatically formatted disfluency and extended pauses, and the author’s personal declaration and observation of himself – reminding the reader that the article’s content is after all about its narrator – is italicized.
WRITING ACROSS THE BORDERS OF THE SELF
European Journal of Women's Studies, 2009
ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to demonstrate a methodology that ‘writes across’ the separation (border?) between theory and practice. It refers to the French feminist writers of the 1970s and 1980s often categorized under the heading of ‘écriture féminine’, who were concerned with how language operates and with the relationship between language and the formation of the self. The article consists of a short preface introducing a piece of autobiographical writing 'driving home'. The piece brings into collision incidents, objects and time frames in an attempt to dissolve the borders between fact and fiction, personal and impersonal, private and public, poetic writing and analysis. In the act of writing 'driving home' the author also attempts to generate knowledge. 'driving home' searches within the anecdotal and autobiographical for methodological indicators. The how and why of the author’s writing practice run across, over and around each other, acting asshort and inconclusive pathways within the investigative structure of the whole.
From Antihumanism to Cognitive Literary Studies Until quite recently, appeals to human nature were more likely to be met with skepticism, caution, or even cynicism on the part of many literary theorists, rather than with enthusiasm, fascination, or assent, though this trend is clearly reversing in some quarters. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the humanities, and literary studies in particular, were the site of a pronounced antihumanist discourse-i.e., a sustained critique of notions and ideals concerning human identity that were often associated with the Enlightenment and the so-called 'project of modernity.' Antihumanism was one of the overarching themes of post-1968 French philosophy, including that of Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Its roots and antecedents could be traced even further back to the philosophies of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Husserl, and Heidegger-each of whom had challenged and critiqued prevailing ideologies of the human, and of political, social, and psychic life as they had been previously understood. As the contemporary political theorist Diana Coole explains, stressing the influence of phenomenologists Husserl and Heidegger, antihumanist thinkers maintained that humanism is itself implicated in an aggressive subjectivist culture that reproduces the hubris and existential impoverishment of the modern age, in which normativity as such succumbs to positivism and nihilism, and Western norms translate into imperialism and colonialism (2007, 28). Coole makes it clear that antihumanist thought, so prominent in the late twentieth century, and associated most strongly with French neo-Marxism, poststructuralism, and Foucaultian genealogical theory, had its roots in earlier nineteenth-and twentieth-century critiques. Those earlier challenges were, however, given new force by the May uprisings in 1968, both in Paris and in other parts of the world, and by events leading up to that watershed moment, as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut have persuasively argued (1990, xvii ff.). Post-'68 Marxists (including Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu) aligned the traditional discourse of humanism with bourgeois ideology, positivism, and the failures and catastrophes of modernity. Meanwhile poststructuralists such as Derrida and Foucault, who constructed their philosophies upon a Nietzschean and Heideggerian framework, folded Marx's view of man's potential mastery of nature and his political environment into their far-reaching critiques of humanist thought. 2 Within all of these discourses, the very word 'humanist' soon became a shorthand term connoting all things retrograde, totalizing, and/or totalitarian-the very essence of false consciousness. By the 1970s and 80s, antihumanist theories had moved far beyond their original German and French contexts, powerfully influencing academic discourses of the humanities and social sciences throughout Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. By the late 80s, the critique of humanist subjectivity was in full swing. Liberationist movements such as postcolonial and ethnic studies, feminisms, and the more recent gender and queer studies had, to a greater or lesser extent, incorporated various critiques of subjectivity into their own arguments, and, as a consequence, absorbed the rhetoric of antihumanism. Initially some offshoots of these resistance movements (for example, American feminisms and African-American Studies of the 60s, 70s and early 80s) hewed towards older notions of subjectivity and agency as part of an effort to gain political rights that had previously been withheld or denied. Other groups that were strongly informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, by Derridean deconstruction, and by discourses of poststructuralism or post-Marxism questioned the strategic value of claiming liberal humanist subjectivity while, in effect, buying into the illusions and ideologies of modernity that several generations of thinkers had so painstakingly challenged. To imagine for oneself or one's group the possession of that humanist subjectivity was to re-instantiate the hegemonic power relations and oppressive ideologies that each of these critical movements was seeking to dismantle. Literary theorist and deconstructionist Gayatri Spivak, articulating the double-bind of that situation for feminists, theorists of race, and postcolonial critics, suggested a paradoxical solution: namely, taking "the risk of essence" (1989, 129). 3 One could assume a provisional essentialism in order to foster the interests of one's group, while simultaneously acknowledging within one's group and among allies the contingency of identity, whether individual or collective. Other critics, finding such suggestions to be 2 Ferry and Renaut further argue: "[I]t is important to understand that this critique of modern rationality was absolutely inseparable from a critique of the subject (of man) defined as conscience and as will, that is, as man as the author of his acts and ideas. In order to understand this, one must refer back to the considerable trauma represented by the Second World War for European intellectuals. Immediately after the war, in fact, it is no exaggeration to say that 'civilized societies,' that is the entire Western world, could legitimately be accused of having engendered, or at least of having been unable to stop, two of the greatest political catastrophes of this century: colonialist imperialism and Nazism" (xii-xiii). 3 Spivak's proposal, initially offered at a 1982 Modern Language Association meeting in Los Angeles, would become a touchstone for many theorists at that time.
The article addresses the peculiarities of figural voice in consciousness representation and the disruptive effect that this voice has on our narratological readings of minds and of narrative transmission. Instead of taking the natural narrative as my starting point, I base my arguments on a diachronic reconsideration of figural voices in literary fiction. First, I will argue that the seeds of the unnaturalness of figural voice are already planted in epistolary narration. The psychologically natural (mimetic) reading of fictional minds favored by both classical and cognitive narratology will be shown to foreground the unrestrained expression of thought and emotion via figural voice. Yet the conventions of consciousness representation bear in themselves the traces of mediacy ( diegesis ): conventional frames of verbalization; intentional structure; communicative features. I will continue by tracing the evolution of this charged relationship between mediacy and immediacy in the third person narrative context and in instances of focalization and stylistically unmarked free indirect discourse. The key argument of this article concerns both narrative as well as thematic conventions. Characters who master their own interiority by appropriating narratorial conventions form a recurrent motive in the development of the modern novel. This literary convention is and at the same time, peculiarly, is not in contradiction with the hierarchization and the naturalization of literary discourse prevalent in narratology. The narrativizing focalizers and the like also issue a threat to the currently much favoured rhetorical approaches to narrative fiction, since verbalized fictional minds highlight the nature of consciousness representation as incommunicable communication. Finally, encouraged by the epistolary digression, The Princess of Clèves, Madame Bovary and Coetzee s Disgrace, I wish to set forth a narratological take on consciousness representation as a 204 Maria Mäkelä derivative of, not speech, but writing (with a faint nod towards Bakhtin and Derrida).