Rocky Mountain Review71-1-2018 | Spring 2018
Special Issue on Virginie Despentes
Guest Co-Editors
Arline Cravens
Saint Louis University
Michèle Schaal
Iowa State University
PrefaceIntroductionArticlesLes Damnées de Virginie Despentes Léonore Brassard, Université de Montréal L’œuvre de Virginie Despentes, notamment Baise-moi, met en scène des personnages de femmes combattantes qui, en s’appropriant une violence d’abord subie systémiquement, jouent autour des cadres du genre. Quand il emprunte cette esthétique, le féminisme de Despentes peut-il se lire dans l’héritage de la pensée de Frantz Fanon qui, un demi-siècle plus tôt, pensait l’identité des opprimés dans la situation coloniale ? Mercédès Baillargeon, University of Maryland Cet article propose une interprétation sociologique, esthétique et féministe des Chiennes savantes, deuxième roman de Virginie Despentes qui demeure peu étudié. Despentes révèle les processus de socialisation menant à la construction de l’identité féminine qui, selon Pierre Bourdieu, repose sur la domination masculine. Cette socialisation conduit à la 4 ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW SPRING 2018 construction binaire et à la naturalisation des identités de genre. À travers la caractérisation des personnages, les dynamiques de pouvoir et l’ironie dramatique, Despentes dénonce la mise en scène de l’opposition entre le masculin et le féminin. Cette ironie fonctionne comme une resignification et subversion qui engendrent l’« agency, » selon Judith Butler, de la protagoniste. Les Chiennes savantes de Virginie Despentes ou l’hétéropatriarcat triomphant Michèle A. Schaal, Iowa State University Les Chiennes savantes (1996) de Virginie Despentes, reste l’un de ses ouvrages les moins étudiés. Or, le roman préfigure le manifeste féministe de l’auteure, King Kong théorie (2006), en proposant une critique, par la fiction, de l’hétérosexualité et du patriarcat, tout en s’inscrivant dans la lignée des féminismes lesbien, matérialiste et beauvoirien. Pour Despentes, l’hétérosexualité constitue un système politique patriarcal qui peut engendrer la domination et l’oppression. Cet hétéropatriarcat se manifeste dans la violence de genre rencontrée par les femmes et triomphe car il a été intériorisé par tout.e.s. Mordre au travers : un traité au féminin sur la violence Colette Trout, Ursinus College Colette Trout aborde les onze nouvelles de Mordre au travers (1999) sous l’angle de la violence, manifeste sous toutes ses formes : la violence physique que les hommes infligent aux femmes ; celle que les femmes perpètrent sur elles-mêmes et sur les autres et la violence de fantasmes sexuels. Utilisant le concept d’intersectionalité, Trout montre que ces violences se situent à la jonction de plusieurs facteurs, qui ont rapport à la classe sociale et au genre. Le recueil, qui a reçu peu d’attention de la critique, exprime l’engagement de Despentes pour dénoncer sans relâche une société impitoyable pour les femmes et les plus démuni.e.s. Nadia Louar, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh This essay identifies and analyses the specific ways in which this female French writer and film maker has created herself as an author out of a biographical focus on her life as a sex worker and rape victim. Relying on the notion of “posture” which I tie in with art sociology and discourse analysis as developed by Pierre Bourdieu and revised by Alain Viala and Jérôme Meizos, I show how Despentes’ authorial posture regulates the transgressive readings of her works. Leah E.Wilson, Washington State University Virginie Despentes’s Apocalypse Baby responds to the censorship she received following Baise-moi’s film release and unsettles distinctions between men/women, detectives/criminals, and censors/censored. I argue that Despentes is a Braidottian nomad who constructs genre, gender, and sexuality borders to collapse them, demonstrating that women’s fluid sexual identities are necessary for subversion. However, with the novel’s explosive ending, I contend that the author reveals how crossing genre, gender, and sexuality boundaries is insufficient if we do not collectively embrace a more expansive feminism and dismantle patriarchal values that perpetuate hegemony within contemporary literature, culture, and society Vernon Subutex et le roman “balzacien” Maxime Goergen, University of Sheffield This article analyses the widely-made critical assumption that Vernon Subutex, Despentes’s latest novel, sits within the tradition of the Balzacian novel. It suggests that Despentes’s work should indeed be considered as a prime example of the resurgence of a “Balzacian” conception of the novel in France today. Vernon Subutex’s narrative construction, its descriptive scope, its utopian undertones, and the significant role played by marginal or liminal characters hark back to Balzac and the Human Comedy. The article also tries to explain why a “Balzacian” reading of Despentes’s work is crucial in order to unveil some of its underlying ideological tenets. The Novelist as DJ: Vernon Subutex and The Music of Our Times Colin Nettelbeck, The University of Melbourne This article offers an analysis and evaluation of the role of music in Vernon Subutex. It argues that while music – principally rock, punk and their derivatives – is an important aspect of Despentes’s earlier work (and indeed of her whole world-view), with Vernon Subutex it plays a major transformative role in the author’s narrative art. Cinematographic and collage techniques are also at work in Despentes’s novelistic strategies, but it is significantly through music that Vernon Subutex attains its formal complexity and its gravitas. Beginning with a review of the musical “presence” in Despentes’s earlier novels, and an analysis of the bridging role of Bye Bye Blondie and Apocalypse Bébé, the article examines the music in Vernon Subutex both as a symbolic representation of the French Zeitgeist at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, and, through the performance of the novelist as DJ, as a structuring and compositional device. ReviewsReviews are published in alphabetical order according to the name of the author reviewed. World War I and Southern Modernism, by David A. Davis. Reviewer: Joy Landeira Gay Indians in Brazil: Untold Stories of the Colonization of Indigenous Sexualities, by Estevão Rafael Fernandes and Barbara M. Arisi. Reviewer: Alexander M. Cárdenas-Jara Autobiographical Writing in Latin America: Folds of the Self, by Sergio R. Franco. Reviewer: Tim Conrad James Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years, by Wayne Franklin. Reviewer: Doreen Alvarez Saar Université des Montagnes. Pour solde de tout compte, by Ambroise Kom. Reviewer: Jean-Blaise Samou Direct Speech in Beowulf and Other Old English Narrative Poems, by Elise Louviot. Reviewer: Peter Fields Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories, by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui and Marisa Belausteguigoitia. Reviewer: Alexander M. Cárdenas-Jara Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis, by Liesl Olson Reviewer: Craig Monk Ethnologue. Languages of Africa and Europe, by Gary F. Simons and Charles D. Fennig, editors Reviewer: John M. Ryan Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell, by J.R.R. Tolkien, translator. Reviewer: Peter Fields Contributors |