Synopses & Reviews
Autobiography in France has taken a decidedly visual turn in recent years: photographs, shown or withheld, become evidence of what was, might have been, or cannot be said; photographers, filmmakers, and cartoonists undertake projects that explore issues of identity.
Textual and Visual Selves investigates, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, the ways in which the textual and the visual combine in certain French works to reconfigure ideasand#8212;and imagesand#8212;of self-representation.
Surprisingly, what these accounts reveal is that photography or film does not necessarily serve to shore up the referentiality of the autobiographical account: on the contrary, the inclusion of visual material can even increase indeterminacy and ambiguity. Far from offering documentary evidence of an extratextual self coincident with the and#8220;Iand#8221; of the text, these images testify only to absence, loss, evasiveness, and the desire to avoid objectification. However, where Roland Barthes famously saw the photograph as a prefiguration of death, in this volume we see how the textual strategies deployed by these writers and artists result in work that is ultimately life-affirming.
About the Author
Natalie Edwards is an assistant professor of French at Wagner College and coeditor of This Self Which Is Not One:and#160;Womenand#8217;s Life Writing in French. Amy L. Hubbell is an associate professor of French at Kansas State University, lecturer in French at the University of Queensland, and the author of and#192; la recherche dand#8217;un emploi: Business French in a Communicative Context. Ann Miller is a university fellow at the University of Leicester and the author of Reading Bande Dessinand#233;e: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip.