Writing wounds : : the inscription of trauma in post-1968 French women's life-writing / / Kathryn Robson.

• Superior document: GENUS: Gender in Modern Culture ; 4
• VerfasserIn: Robson, Kathryn,
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam, Netherlands ;, Atlanta, Georgia : : Rodopi,, [2004]; ©2004
• Year of Publication: 2004
• Language: English
• Series: GENUS: Gender in Modern Culture ; 4.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource.
• Notes: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

In the last decade, the question of how trauma is remembered and narrated has become increasingly crucial in literary studies and in psychotherapy. Writing Wounds rethinks the relation between trauma, memory and narrative through readings of key fictional, autobiographical and "autofictional" texts by recent French women writers: Marie Cardinal, Chantal Chawaf, Hélène Cixous, Charlotte Delbo, Béatrice de Jurquet and Sarah Kofman. By drawing on and also interrogating recent theories of trauma, this study shows that trauma is inscribed in writing through recurring images of the body and of bodily wounding that mark the limits and possibilities of narrativisation. This book has a double aim: to offer new readings of texts by modern French women writers and to rethink the crucial question of how narratives of trauma are to be read. Writing Wounds will be of interest to researchers working on trauma, modern French literature, women's writing or "life-writing" as well as to a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on trauma and narrative.

Table of Contents

Preface: Writing Wounds -- Introduction: The Story of Trauma in "Trauma Theory" -- Hysterical Heroines: From "Dora" to Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire and Autrement dit -- Writing (through) the body : Hélène Cixous's Dedans and "Stigmata" -- "Perdre pied": The Inscription of Sexual Abuse in Béatrice de Jurquet's Autobiographical Fiction -- Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir : Survival, Departure and Bearing Witness -- Choking on Words : Sarah Kofman's Autobiographical Writings -- Ghost-writing the Holocaust: Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et après -- Conclusion: Re-Reading the Wound -- Works Cited.