front cover of All Contraries Confounded
All Contraries Confounded
The Lyrical Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras
Karen Kaivola
University of Iowa Press, 1991
This insightful volume extends feminist critical studies of twentieth-century women writers as it examines the complex ways female subjectivity experiences and is shaped by gender and power in literary texts. Because of the ways ambivalence and contradiction operate in the works of Woolf, Barnes, and Duras, to read them is to able to interrogate and thus more fully understand the ways our own subjectivity are constructed in relation to complex configurations of desire, loss, sexuality, power, vulnerability, and violence.
Kaivola has worked out a strikingly original means of reading difference—and reading differently—in order to account for what has been inexplicable in different literary texts by women. All Contraries Confounded seeks to problematize feminist theory that celebrates resistance in fiction by women, for it questions the ability of dominant modes of feminist critical theory to recognize and address fully the forms of contradiction and ambivalence that riddle women's writings—and women's lives.
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front cover of Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras
Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras
Love, Legends, Language
Susan D. Cohen
University of Massachusetts Press, 1993
One of the most famous living French writers, Marguerite Duras is renowned for her provocative and hauntingly beautiful works of fiction, drama, and cinema. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the narrative and stylistic characteristics of Duras's fiction. Susan D. Cohen examines the entire range of Duras's works, combining close textual analyses with a more general discussion of narrativity and its connections with gender, class, and race. The focus throughout is on language, representation, and difference, which Duras explores on every structural level.

Cohen shows how Duras's writings, even the controversial "erotic" works, expose and subvert the repression of women in traditional, dominant discourse and at the same time present an alternative, nonrepressive discursive model. She formulates a concept of creative "ignorance," which she identifies as the generative principle of Duras's textual production and the approach to language it proposes. Cohen also explores the distinctive features of Duras's prose, describing how the writer achieves the ritual, legendary aura that characterizes her work.
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