Natalie Edwards

Autobiography in the Language Classroom

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways that autobiography can be used across language curricula. It begins by presenting ways that autobiography can be manipulated in a beginning language course to further students’ reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. It then presents an upper-level course in autobiography, detailing the course content, philosophy, and assessment materials.

The Bilingual Cockatoo: Writing Italian Australian Lives

How do the stories of individuals who are persecuted, vilified or denigrated gain legitimacy? How do stories function as a means of forging identity within marginalised communities? How do texts of...

Deliberately barren?: The rejection of motherhood in contemporary French women's life writing

This article compares the representation of voluntary childlessness in two recent literary texts: Linda Les A lenfant que je naurai pas (2011) and Jane Sautieres Nullipare (2008). It situates these texts within a socio-historic context in which, according to many commentators, discourses of motherhood are highly regulated. The article first discusses stereotypes of voluntarily childless women highlighted by sociological research. It proceeds to analyse the portrayal of these stereotypes in the literary texts, both of which are first-person narratives but which are not strictly autobiographical. The analysis focuses on the narrators sustained reflection behind their decision not to procreate. By restoring voice to the non-mother and insisting that there should be no shame in this lifestyle, they proclaim a female identity that does not depend upon reproduction. Together, they defy the stereotypes of the heartless woman, the selfish woman, the career woman, the irresponsible woman, the unnatural woman ...

Introduction: Mobility across media in the Francophone world:

This introduces the special issue on mobility across media in various areas of the Francophone world. Articles treat the notion of mobility as understood in film, literature, visual art and advertising and explore how genres as well as national traditions intersect. They explore a range of representations of mobility, such as the mobility between people, between genres, between languages, between artistic forms and between texts across historical periods. We show that the terminology regarding movement is constantly mobile itself, having undergone significant slippage in recent decades. Overall, this volume does not seek to arrest, but to add to, the understanding of the diverse modes of mobility present in the contemporary world.

Mobile objects in Sophie Calle’s Fantômes and Prenez soin de vous:

The mobility of people and objects is a central motif in the work of contemporary artist Sophie Calle. In this article, I compare two of Calle’s exhibitions that take a particularly unusual approach to mobility. In Fantômes and Prenez soin de vous, the objects are an email and works of art and their mobility arises from their displacement. In both exhibitions, Calle obliges the spectator to look at other people looking at the artefacts, which I refer to as the ‘double look’. In this article, I analyse how this technique serves to question the notion of a unitary, individual artist behind each work of art, how it questions the parameters of spectatorship, and how it challenges understandings of intimacy in contemporary culture.

Editors' Introduction: Interrogating Scandal

‘Scandale’ was the theme of a series of 2017 plays staged by the “Paris des Femmes” troupe. Anne Rotenborg, the troupe’s director, invited nine female playwrights to compose short pieces with a limited number of actors based upon this theme. Playwrights included Le€ıla Slimani, Marie Nimier, Christine Angot, Sylvie Germain, and Nancy Huston. As Carole Fr echette notes in her introduction to the published volume of the plays, the playwrights were initially confused over the meaning and parameters of the word ‘scandale.’ Some looked for a dictionary definition of “scandale,” she writes, and found “grave affaire malhonnête, honteuse, qui a un grand retentissement dans le public... querelle bruyante... fait qui heurte la conscience, le bon sens, la morale, suscite l’ emotion, la r evolte” (9–10). The playwrights slowly began to appropriate this slippery concept, “ a le retourner dans tous les sens.” The plays that resulted from this experimentation took different approaches to the notion of scandal, ranging from intimate affairs, to relationships undergoing dishonesty or betrayal, to representations of public shame and personal offence. Fr echette claims that scandal constitutes “l’app etit de notre monde” (11) and perceives a thirst for scandal in contemporary public and private life. She argues that scandals can range from “grandes affaires d’ Etat” to “affaires intimes.” Indeed, at the same time as the plays were being performed, presidential favorite François Fillon saw his campaign irreparably damaged by a scandal involving misuse of public funds regarding payments to his wife and children for allegedly fake jobs as his political assistants. “Penelopegate,” a perfect example of Fr echette’s scandalous “grande affaire d’ Etat” recalls the financial scandal that derailed Nicolas Sarkozy’s political campaign one year before. Fr echette writes that a Google search for “scandale” will generate around 20,200,000 results that range from private to public scandals and contain, beyond references to Donald Trump’s latest comments, references to controversial bra collections, athletes’ artificially inflated muscles, technical

Mobile Women in Virginie Despentes’s Apocalypse Bébé

This article argues that, in a similar way to Baise-moi, the plot of Virginie Despentes’s Apocalypse bebe revolves around a female road trip. The mobility of the women on the road trip is read through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s theory of foreignness in Etrangers a nousmemes. Particular attention is paid to the development of the main character, for whom the road trip is the catalyst for her to recognise the otherness within herself and thus to develop a tolerance towards the foreignness of others. The article argues that, through its representation of female characters who are each transformed through mobility, the text portrays a range of performances of femininity and stages a number of female subject positions.

Imagined Encounters: Assia Djebar’s Vaste est la prison

This chapter explores the work of Algerian writer and member of the Academie Francaise, Assia Djebar. An historian by training, Djebar weaves fiction, autobiography and archival research into her writing in order to plug the gaps of historical record. She performs this task in a relatively understudied work in her corpus, Vaste est la prison (1995). This text uses invented memory to function as capital in the incomplete story of the Algerian conflict and it does so as a direct challenge to French histories of the Franco-Algerian war. More specifically, a short, discreet section of Djebar’s text explores encounters that took place between Africans and Europeans centuries before the colonial expedition that determines narratives in the present day. Djebar performs this movement by recasting official accounts of language and of writing in this region, thus positing translation and interpretation as an alternative means of understanding cultural memory.

Pussy : The Feline and the Feminine in Cixous’s L’ Amour même dans la boîte aux lettres

The essays in Cixous after/depuis 2000, edited by Hall, Chevillot, Hoft-March, and Penalver Vicea, focus on Helene Cixous’s work of the 21st-century, exploring her treatment of mourning, suffering and death in the wake of events that mark her life from 2000-2015. Les essais reunis dans Cixous apres/depuis 2000, sous la direction de Hall, Chevillot, Hoft-March et Penalver Vicea, considerent les textes d’Helene Cixous publies au 21e siecle ; ils explorent egalement les questionnements de l’ecrivaine sur le deuil, la souffrance et la mort dans le sillage des evenements qui ont marque sa vie entre 2000 et 2015.

‘En Australie, je parle une langue minoritaire‘: Catherine Rey‘s Une femme en marche as Australian Life Writing in French

ABSTRACT In the Asia-Pacific region, literature is plurilingual. Even Australian literature is not necessarily written in English. There are several contemporary Australian authors who write in languages other than English and many who write in various Englishes. This article examines one such example by analysing the life writing of Catherine Rey. It focuses upon the self-reinvention that this French author performed by migrating to Australia in mid-life. Focusing on the first-person narrative Une femme en marche (2007) and drawing comparisons with self-reflexive essays by this author, the article teases out the contrasts between Rey’s representation of France and Australia as spaces for literary creation. It then interrogates how Rey reinvents herself through linguistic play within her life writing. Using theories of ‘translanguaging’, the article analyses the ways in which this author blends French and English to probe the gaps in languages, to nuance literary representation and to create new linguistic forms to express her self-narrative.