1st Edition

Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women Translingual Selves

By Natalie Edwards Copyright 2020
184 Pages
by Routledge

184 Pages
by Routledge

This volume examines the ways in which multilingual women authors incorporate several languages into their life writing. It compares the work of six contemporary authors who write predominantly in French. It analyses the narrative strategies they develop to incorporate more than one language into their life writing: French and English, French and Creole, or French and German, for example. The... Read more

Introduction

Chapter 1

Lydie Salvayre: Translanguaging, Testimony and History

Chapter 2

French-Vietnamese Translanguaging in the Work of Kim Thúy

Chapter 3

"En Australie, je parle une langue minoritaire": Catherine Rey’s Franco-Australian Life-Writing

Chapter 4

Gisèle Pineau’s Evolving Translanguaging: From Un Papillon dans la cité to L’Exil selon Julia to Mes quatres femmes

Chapter 5

Staging Resistance to the Language of the Colonizer: Chantal Spitz’s Translanguaging

Chapter 6

Hélène Cixous’s Franco-German Translanguaging in Une Autobiographie allemande

Conclusion

Biography

Dr. Natalie Edwards is Associate Professor of French at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She specializes in women’s writing, life writing and translingual writing in French. She is the author of Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography (2011) and Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in French (2016). She is co-editor of Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Visual Art in French Autobiography (2011) and Framing French Culture (2015) and of ten edited volumes on contemporary French and Francophone literatures.

"Edwards’s nuanced approach avoids ‘white reading’, offering parallel interpretations which acknowledge those readers who share the author’s multilingualism… the decolonizing ambition of this work should be praised and is, for the most part, highly successful. Edwards’s conclusion powerfully captures the importance of translanguaging in an increasingly plurilingual and mobile world; moreover, it is a practice which is intersectional in its scope and interdisciplinary in its application, thus perhaps hailing a new paradigm for women’s lifewriting research."

- Jasmine Cooper, Newnham College, Cambridge