Reading Over the Referent in Duras, Djebar, and Louis: Autofiction, Universalism, and Excentric Reading

Abstract

This dissertation explores the construction of identity in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century autofictions of Marguerite Duras, Assia Djebar, and Édouard Louis—that is, novels in which the central character is identified as the author’s textual double. This unusual constellation of figures bridges differences in geographical and historical context to bring to the fore the authors’ positioning between the French cultural center and the extended reaches of French empire. Building on Alex Woloch’s concept of minor characters, these three case studies focus attention on peripheral figures in the authors' respective accounts of adolescence in colonial Vietnam, pre-Independence Algeria, and deindustrialized Northern France. Shifting away from the auto, or self-referential, aspect of autofiction makes it possible to take seriously the genre’s function as fiction, instead. This excentric mode of reading exposes the tension between the author’s particular, embodied identity—which conditions the reader’s expectations of the text—and literature’s promise of a first-person subjectivity endowed with unlimited power and absolute freedom. Furthermore, excentric reading works to reveal the movement from particular to general, and back again, at the core of this corpus, in order to expose the mechanisms that allow an individual to become representative of a collective. Which is to say, this dissertation looks to a genre that appears to condense and encapsulate identity in order to explore the possibility of writing beyond or without identity: what does it mean to write as no one and who is allowed to do so?