• Marie Darrieussecq’s Clèves: A Wittigian Rewriting of Adolescence

    Author(s):
    Annabel Kim (see profile)
    Date:
    2016
    Group(s):
    LLC 20th- and 21st-Century French, TC Women’s and Gender Studies, TM Literary Criticism
    Subject(s):
    French literature, Literature, Romance-language literature
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    21st Century Literature, contemporary fiction, gender, feminist studies, Romance literature
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6XG70
    Abstract:
    Marie Darrieussecq's Clèves (2011) shocked readers with the vulgarity of its language and spurred controversy over its status as a literary text. In this article, I show how the novel's "bad" language is a foil for Darrieussecq's larger project of rewriting the adolescent female body, removing it from the sexualized and objectified optic through which it is usually viewed in order to stage it instead as a body in process, as a situation. For this body in process, gender and sexuality are not givens, but deeply unfamiliar experiences that resist the social order’s dominant framing narratives, its scripts for normal and normative subjectivation. The novel, through a Wittigian universalization of the particular point of view of the female adolescent, gives readers access to the experience and the knowledge provided by her body in process.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1849
    Publisher:
    New Prairie Press
    Pub. Date:
    2016-3-11
    Journal:
    Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
    Volume:
    40
    Issue:
    1
    ISSN:
    2334-4415
    Status:
    Published
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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