Through a Textual Glass, Darkly: The Masochistic in the Feminine Self and Marguerite Duras' Emily L.

This paper examines the inversions operated by proliferating specular images in Duras, seeking the meanings of Emily L.'s masochistic sacrifice of her poetry to her love for the "Captain." The Durassian subject takes form in the movement between looking and being looked at. Emily L., in her indecency and closeness to death, embodies the disturbing strangeness of the perverse desire of the watching narrator, Duras. The telescoping of the dichotomies of the fearful states at the origins of writing (self-loss in, or separation from, the other) also involves a movement between a "masculine" position of desire that seeks to kill and a "feminine" position excited by self-dispossession, a position problematically valorized in EmilyCet article examine les inversions opérées dans les images spéculaires qui prolifèrent chez Duras, à la recherche des sens du sacrifice masochiste que fait Emily L. de ses talents de poète à son amour pour le «Capitaine». Le sujet durassien prend forme dans le va-et- vient entre le regard qu'il pose et qui est posé sur lui. Emily L., dans son indécence et sa proximité i la mort, personnifie la troublante étrangeté du désir pervers du narrateur (Duras) qui la regarde. Le mouvement qui téléscope les dichotomies des états de peur à l'origine de l'écriture (la perte de soi dans l'autre ou la séparation d'avec l'autre) implique aussi un mouvement entre une position «masculine» de désir ou l'on cherche à tuer et une position «féminine» où l'on cherche la dépossession, position valorisée de façon problématique dans Emily L

Women Writers in New Caledonia

Defining New Caledonian literature poses a number of questions and, in particular, the question of where and when to begin. In his seminal anthology of this literature, Paroles et Ecritures, Francois Bogliolo includes the considerable corpus constituted by Kanak oral tradition. Women have played a significant role in the transmission of these oral stories, and a number of contemporary written texts have revisited this tradition, for example, the novel by Claudine Jacques, L’Homme-Lézard, which proposes a modern interpretation of the lizard myth, known throughout the many language groups of Grande Terre and transcribed by the ethnologist and pastor, Maurice Leenhardt under the title of Le Maître de Koné

Déwé Gorodé: The Paradoxes of Being a Kanak Woman Writer

During an unpublished interview in December 2002, in the smallish government office of the then Minister for Youth and Culture, in Nouméa, Déwé Gorodé told me she was merely the spokesperson for her group, elected and not appointed, called to power as Vice-President of the Government to serve her party, the PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party). In a first and major interview by Blandine Stefanson for the volume of Notre Librairie devoted to a presentation of New Caledonian literature, the writer claimed she had never made any great effort to be published and still had a pile of stories in a cardboard box lying unread. Her first volume of poems, Under the Ashes of the Conch Shells, poems written from the early seventies onwards, was published in 1985 by Edipop, and only after the then Director of Do-Neva College, Ismet Kurtovitch, made a personal request

Kanak Imaginaries: A Sense of Place in the Work of Déwé Görödé

The study of the Kanak imaginary in the work of the first published Kanak (indigenous) New Caledonian writer shows this to be permeated by a sense of place. Rootedness in, and intense community with the land is not incompatible with the fluidity of ancestral criss-crossing of the Pacific or of constant border-crossing(pathways of exchange between groups) but nonetheless remains central. The ‘hinterland’ constituted by the places of the tribu (customary lands) sets up a challenge to the dominance ofNouméa la blanche and Déwé Görödé’s articulation of places of identity re-negotiate the urban/regional or Noumea/Bush/Tribu nexus to counterbalance or contest national (French) imaginaries. Yet Görödé’s work presents both a return to a Kanak Place to Stand and a critical self in process (the latter situated in a ‘no man’s land’). The places in her work are ultimately ‘cognitively dissonant’: the marginal or hinter-land of Kanak imaginaries (the tribu), can hold (to) their own both outside and inside the city yet also open themselves up internally to multiplicity and critique

La fiction face au passé (histoire, mémoire et espace-remps dans la fiction littéraire océanienne contemporaine)

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