Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions

by Annabel L. Kim

In  Unbecoming Language , Annabel L. Kim examines a corpus of French writing against difference. Inaugurated by Nathalie Sarraute and sustained in the work of Monique Wittig and Anne Garréta, this corpus highlights three generations of the twentieth and recent twenty-first centuries and the direct chain of influence between them. Kim considers these writers, and the story of literature’s political potential, as a way of rereading and reinterpreting each writer’s individual corpus—rearticulating the strain of anti-difference feminist thought that has been largely forgotten in our (Anglo-American) histories of French feminisms.
 
Kim’s close readings ultimately enliven the current conversation in French studies by serving as a provocation to return to reading literary texts deeply and closely, without subordinating literature to a pre-existing ideological framework—to let literature speak, to let it theorize. Tracking the influence of these writers on each other, Kim provides a new, original French feminist poetics and demonstrates that Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta’s work allows for a hollowing out of difference from within, allowing writers and readers to unbecome—to break free of identity and exist as subjectivities without subjecthood. In looking at these writers together, Kim provides a defense of literature as liberatory— capable of effecting personal and political change—and gives readers an experience of literature’s revolutionary possibilities.
 

272 pages, Hardcover

Published November 14, 2018

Reviews

[Colette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un livre vraiment très intéressant pour entrer dans les écritures de Sarraute, Wittig et Garréta, et évaluer le rapport qu'entretiennent leurs poétiques respectives. Mais au-delà, c'est aussi un livre qui prend pour ambition, dans un contexte anglophone où on associe très vite l'idée de littératures féministes à la "french theory" et au "french feminism" (c'est-à-dire en gros ce qui se rapproche des courants différentialistes et de "l'écriture féminine"), de raconter une autre histoire du féminisme en littérature française : celle du matérialisme (ou de l'anti-différentialisme). Donc un livre qui montre les poétiques spécifiques de ce courant, qui propose un corpus, de la matière, pour pouvoir parler autrement des littératures féministes. Cela implique aussi une investigation de la construction du concept de "genre" dans son intrication linguistique, sociale et littéraire ; et cela permet aussi d'interroger les rapports entre littératures féministes, lesbiennes et queer. Vraiment très intéressant !

[Madelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The foundation for this unbecoming poetics is the affective and corporeal relationship they have with language, itself an embodied and vital entity. Their embodied, sensuous encounter with language’s body forces a confrontation with the deadened and mortified language of a social and political order that has used language to build structures of inequality through the construction of identity categories.”

I read the introduction, ch. 4, and conclusion