Sharon Willis: Marguerite Duras, Writing on the body

Boekinfo

Titel: Marguerite Duras, Writing on the body, 1987
Uitgever: University of Illinois
ISBN-10: 0-252-01335-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-252-01335-50252013352 / 9780252013355

Flaptekst

For more than forty years Marguerite Duras has maintained - as novelist, playwright, and filmmaker - an international reputation as one of the most provocative of modern authors. Best known in this country for her filmscript for Hiroshima, Mon Amour and for her prize-winning novel The Lover, Duras continues to dazzle the critics and to attract an increasingly large readership. Willis's penetrating study, the first to treat Duras's literary and cinematic production together, shows us why.

Through close readings based in discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, Willis focuses on the repetitions and displacements that interconnect Duras's varied narratives, provides a lucid analysis of the construction of narrative subjectivity and the textual mapping of reader positions in Duras's work, and examines the author's intense appeal to feminist critics in France, the United States, and Great Britain. While traditional Freudian psychoanalytic interpretations of film are relatively common, Willis reveals the Lacanian psychoanalytic subtext that pervades Duras's novels. Duras was psychoanalyzed by Jacques Lacan, whose therapy made a profound impact on her novels.

"A crossroads book that debates issues which will be fought out in interdisciplinary arenas for the next decade or more. Well written, unified, and strongly argued from beginning to end, this book will be readily accessible to anyone with some awareness of con temporary issues in literary theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis as these bear on literature and film." - Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, author of Jacques Lacan and the Pbilosopby of Psychoanalysis.

"A significant contribution to the scholarship on Marguerite Duras. lts line of questioning, clearly and exhaustively presented, goes to the center of the 'Duras problem.' ... Of interest to people in French departments and women's studies programs. Film scholars will also find it extremely useful since Duras's narrative strategies in her novels are so similar to what she does in film." - Constance Penley, co-editor of Camera Obscura: A Journalof Fem¬inism and Film Theory.

SHARON WILLIS is a member of the French department at the University of Rochester and has published articles in journals such as Romanic Review and Diacritics.