FRENCH 319 Women, Language, and Literary Expression

Difference: Fiction by 20th-Century Women Writers in France
Whether in Simone de Beauvoir's inaugural indictment of the patriarchal definition of woman as the Other of Man, Le Deuxième sexe (1949), or in the écriture féminine of more recent writers such as Hélène Cixous, Chantal Chawaf or Marguerite Duras, the issue of difference has been central to the intellectual context and the practice of women's writing in France.  In women's fiction, the affirmation of difference, the voicing of that which has heretofore been repressed, unsettles the very foundations of patriarchy, leading to radically new forms of writing and revolutionary ways of thinking, at the same time transforming our experience as readers.  We will appreciate this process as it develops over the century, beginning with the movement toward a maternal language in Colette.  Then we will examine the impact of difference on form and theme in those contemporary feminist writers and theoreticians associated with écriture féminine, theorized as a specifically "feminine" form of writing, in harmony with the female body and female sexuality, and in those whose feminist literary subversions rest on the belief that to subscribe to the notion of feminine specificity is to fall back on old -- masculine -- stereotypes, the very ones Beauvoir decried as restrictive and oppressive in Le Deuxième sexe.  We will also examine how gender difference as both a personal and literary constraint and a site of dissidence becomes entangled with racial and class differences in colonial and post-colonial settings (Duras, Cixous, Djebar).

Selected readings from feminist theoreticians and references to their intellectual contexts will help us define the social, political, psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic issues involved in women's writing and enhance our appreciation of some extraordinary fiction by twentieth-century women writers in France.

Tentative List:

Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe (excerpts)

Colette, La Naissance du jour

Chantal Chawaf, Le manteau noir

Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères

Marguerite Duras, L'Homme assis dans le couloir, India Song (film), L'Amant

Assia Djebar, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement

Assignments:

One short paper (optional second paper)

One final paper