Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women

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 book demonstrates how women writers transform languages to invent new linguistic formations and how they create new formulations of subjectivity within their self-narrative. It intervenes in current debates over global literature, national literatures and translingual and transnational writing, which constitute major areas of research in literary and cultural studies. It also contributes to debates in linguistics through its theoretical framework of translanguaging. It argues that multilingual authors create new paradigms for life writing and that they question our understanding of categories such as "French literature."

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.

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