Jeanne Hyvrard, Wounded Witness; The Body Politic and the Illness Narrative

ISBN-13: 9783039110179 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 243 str.

Vassallo, Helen

Opis

Critical responses to Jeanne Hyvrard have generally categorised her as a writer of ecriture feminine and/or autobiography, due to salient features of her uvre such as the use of first-person narrative, a cyclic writing style, and the quest for a female language. Within these broader considerations, however, a recurrent motif throughout Hyvrard s writing is that of the body, specifically the female body, represented as suffering from different forms of physical/mental illness and emotional/social malaise. It is this primordial aspect of Hyvrard s work, on which surprisingly little critical analysis has been written, that this monograph explores.
It has been demonstrated that Hyvrard s works can be studied as a unity as well as individually, given that all of her texts form part of her wider theory. While this theory is often referred to in abstract terms as pensee ronde, pensee globale or pensee-femme, this study shows that it can be more specifically highlighted as a theory of dis(-)ease (i.e. the intertwining of physical malady and social malaise, medical terms and metaphor), and, particularly, as a social theory of the dis(-)eased female body."

Spis treści

Contents: 'Je ne suis ni noire, ni antillaise': Jeanne Hyvrard and the French Literary Tradition - The Metaphors of Dis(-)ease - The (Female or Feminist?) Subject of Dis(-)ease: Representations of Maternal Dis(-)ease - Healing Maternal Dis(-)ease - The Language of Dis(-)ease - Jeanne Hyvrard and Dis(-)ease: A Legacy of Overcoming.

O autorze

The Author: Helen Vassallo is Lecturer in French at the University of Exeter (UK). In 1999 she graduated from the University of Liverpool with a first class honours degree in French and Hispanic Studies. She then took an M.A. in Literary Translation at the University of Exeter, followed by a Ph.D. in 2004.