Margaret-Anne Hutton

Challenging autobiography: lost object and aesthetic object in Ernaux's Une femme

Neither tentatively acknowledged nor invoked by negation, but simply passed over in silence, one genre is conspicuous by its absence from this list, and that is autobiography. To the reader, such an omission may seem curious, for although Une femme ostensibly charts the life of the author’s mother, it is Ernaux herself who emerges most powerfully as the text’s subject. Yet the absence of any reference to autobiography is symptomatic, for this is a work in which what is unsaid, omitted, elided, plays a crucial part. As we shall see, the emotive charge which gives us such a powerful sense of Ernaux’s presence and subjectivity is, paradoxically, supplied not by the author herself but by the reader. Ernaux’s decision to situate her work between genres ’entre la litt6rature, la sociologie et I’histoire&dquo; is equally telling, for Une femme is a text marked by slippage, a text in which the boundaries between categories more usually thought of as discrete, or indeed antithetical, become blurred: autobiography and biography; self and other; subject(ive) and object(ive); the individual and the collective; process and stasis.

The Janus and the Janissary: Reading into Camus's La Chute and Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form. ―Stendhal, The Red and the Black

From Christ-Killers to Christ-Figures Representations of Jews in post-1980 French Occupation Fiction

This article focuses on contemporary (post-1980) popular French fiction which is set in the Occupation years and combines a war narrative with a romance element. It is suggested that while these texts acknowledge the iniquities of the Vichy regime by representing anti-semitic measures, acts and attitudes carried out at all levels, from state decree to individual prejudice, what is given with one hand might all too easily be taken away with the other. After a discussion of how instances of anti-semitism are represented–are they, and indeed should they be, overtly condemned?–the article suggests that Jewish characters are commonly represented in stereotypical terms, and furthermore routinely narratologically marginalised and instrumentalised. The representations of Jewish characters, the piece concludes, may well relate to perceived threats to the integrity of todays French Republic.

Book Reviews and Short Notices

With its twin emphasis on the aspirational liberationism of the Occupation years and post-war demographic policies, Adler’s book sets out to analyse the intersecting discourses of race, nationality and gender which, she argues, inflected assimilationist projects that themselves cut across any neat attempts at historical periodisation. Liberation, here, is considered in terms of the ‘long liberation’, with Adler’s source material extending to the early 1950s. The first two chapters articulate Adler’s principal aims, provide some historical background and sketch out the key discursive areas under analysis. Whilst these largely introductory chapters suffer from a lack of focus, they nonetheless bring out continuities between the pre-Vichy and Vichy years and provide rich material relating to the complex constructions of Jewish identities in particular, centring on a useful unpicking of the terms ‘Juif ’ and ‘Israélite’ and backed up by a casestudy of the writings of Jewish activist Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar. Chapter 3, comprising an analysis of the clandestine women’s press, both Jewish and non-Jewish, goes some way towards exploring the complexities of nationalist, maternalist and familialist discourses, and is particularly strong in its discussion of gendered codifications: the asexual resister, the prostitute collaborator (deemed unworthy of French status) and the good maternal French woman. Moving on in Chapter 4 to a study of post-war demographic policies—both those agencies involved and some of the key figures who participated in the drawing up of the Code de la Famille and Code de la Nationalité—Adler successfully highlights both the gendered nature of the assimilationist project and the continuities between the pre-Vichy, Vichy and post-Vichy eras, developing these ideas in a case study of Georges Marco in the following chapter. The final chapter, which turns to the reception of resister and demographic discourses amongst a sample of Jewish women interviewed by the author, uncovers especially interesting material which both reveals the multiple identities which emerge from the oral testimonies and deconstructs the complex concept of ‘belonging’ for this group in the context of a universalist project. Adler’s book lacks a degree of cohesion; in addition, the title is somewhat misleading (the case that discourses relating to Jews are representative of discourses of ethnicity and race in general could have been made more convincingly), and issues of gender fade out in various chapters. However, there