The Refusal of Representation

Modern French literature is marked by the flowering of hybrid genres. The article is devoted to the study of novels belonging to exofiction, one of the leading hybrid genres in modern French literature. At the heart of exofiction is the appropriation of someone else’s experience and the entering into someone else’s personal narrative. Instead of the chain of events that organizes the traditional biographical novel, the exofictional narrative focuses on filling in the gaps with the narrator’s personal experience, instead of representation, on the “perceptual autonomy of the narrator” (S.L. Dauthuille). The main motifs of exofictional prose are both the exploration of someone else’s biography and work with the archive, as well as affectivity, which exposes the connection of the narrative to the subject experience. This article deals with two novels by contemporary French women writers: “Être ici est une splendeur” (2016) by Marie Darrieussecq and “La petite danseuse de quatorze ans” (2017) by Camille Laurens. At the center of the narrative of both novels is the story of a biographical character: the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and Marie Geneviève Van Goethem, a dancer at the Paris Opera who posed for Dega’s famous sculpture. Both texts reveal similar thematic areas, in particular, the recontextualization of social and gender issues and the redefinition of the status of women in art, as well as common narrative and genre conventions. These include the hybridization between novel, biography, essay, and research; the special status of the intradiegetic narrator; self-reflexive strategies; as well as the problematization of the boundaries between real and fiction. However, the refusal of representation plays a special role, emphasizing the distinctive dimension of the exofiction. This article analyses the novels by C. Laurens and M. Darrieussecq and identifies genre characteristics of exofiction that works with the specific experience of “Einfühlung”. In analyzing the novels, I explore the aesthetic, ethical and narrative strategies chosen by female writers to work in the hybrid genre. Finally, it is shown how exofiction works with the rejection of representation and how the optics of “women’s writing” supports it

Appropriation · Art · Art history · Biography · Drama · Focalization · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Politics · Salon · French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · Literature and Culture Studies · Philosophy

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