The transcultural self: mapping a French identity in contemporary Australian women’s travel memoirs

Rare during the twentieth century, at least twenty-nine book-length memoirs of Australians in France have been published since 2000. Unlike their British and American counterparts, these are overwhelmingly written by women, staying as often as not in Paris as in rural France. The relocation inevitably provides the opportunity for reinvention of the self in relation to new surroundings. Striking is the desire among many of these writers to claim a French identity, as evidenced in titles such as: Almost French, How to Be French, My French Life. The paper seeks to understand what enables Frenchness to appear as readily accessible to this group of Australian women and what this version of Frenchness entails. It investigates what constitutes cultural belonging in these memoirs, and the ‘technologies of the self’ by means of which this new identity is crafted, assumed and circulated as a template for others to follow. Curiously, neither a high level of French language proficiency nor long-term residence are considered essential attributes. More often, the authors focus on the availability of alternative forms of female subjectivity, and the invention of a transcultural self is articulated in terms of cultural paradigms of femininity and gender relations

The Seduction of Sarah: travel memoirs and intercultural learning

The paper explores the nexus between intercultural storytelling and intercultural learning. Noting the wide appeal of the travel memoir set in France, it takes as a case study a book that, while positioned within that genre, attempts to shift some predictable patterns: Sarah Turnbull’s best-selling Almost French. Analysis shows that the book in fact participates in a subtle play of genres, whereby the lure of the travel memoir is used to entice readers towards a position where they read the book as a guide to French culture. The particular form of hybridity attempted is, however, a delicate enterprise, as the reception of the book demonstrates, in that the intercultural lessons on offer risk being overshadowed by the expectations readers bring to the genre of the travel memoir. The paper examines the competing seductions operating throughout the text and relates the conditions for taking up the opportunity for intercultural learning to questions of genre. It offers a pedagogical uptake of the textual analysis, thus bridging disciplines in a way that mirrors Turnbull’s bridging of genre

Soi-disant: Writing, Screening, Theorizing the Self in French

This paper explores the construction of identity, particularly with reference to texts (literary, philosophic, popular and cinematic) in French, as an introduction to a volume of papers on the topic. We demonstrate that the papers presented in that collection will show the effects on the reading of the self both of inertia and of deliberate modification with respect to convention. In publishing them as a collection, we make no claims to be unveiling a theoretization of the self, c. 2003, which would rise from the ashes of its predecessors. Rather, and despite the recurrence of certain patterns and concerns, we present a corpus that nuances the story of the fragmentation of the coherent self. What emerges from the juxtaposition of these texts is the importance of genre in determining the version of identity presented. That is to say, the instance of the subject, whether the “je‿ of the text or the focus of narrative identification, is largely determined by generic conventions for writing/producing the self and for formulating identity