Critical Subjectivities : Identity and Narrative in the Work of Colette and Marguerite Duras

Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose formal experiments and revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of literary forms. The series publishes studies of individual authors and artists, comparative studies and interdisciplinary projects.

This comparative study of the work of Colette and Marguerite Duras analyses the complex and intricate links between identity and narrative, and challenges recent theoretical discussion in both literary and psychoanalytic domains. Exploring the textual preoccupations that Colette and Duras shared – in particular their concerns with gender relations, with the genesis of the woman writer, and with the fraught but fascinating bonds between mothers and daughters and lovers – this analysis highlights how the profoundly different perspectives of Colette and Duras mark out space for a new interrelation of self and other; an interrelation that emphasises the enigmatic territories of consciousness such as fantasy and memory, and the significant collision of subjectivities in erotic, desiring and familial relations. Working with the most recent and innovative developments in performative theory and Kristevan psychoanalysis, this book offers a new reading of subjectivity through the creative interplay of theory and text.