Journal Articles
Angeline, Eileen. “L'Amant de la Chine du nord: Not Just a Rewriting or Re'Vision' of L'Amant.” Annual of Foreign Films and Literature 2 (1996): 15-30.
Examines the role of memory in Duras’s L'Amant de la Chine du nord and L'Amant. Angeline claims that the former is not merely an rewriting of the latter as allegedly prompted by the film version of L’Amant. Rather, Angeline regards both works involved in “writing the self,” which includes straightforward and fictional accounts.
Angeline refers to Philippe Lejeune’s concept of “autobiographical space” which encompasses the image of the self across genres or across all the works of an author. Angeline suggests that Duras’s life story has been the foundation of her works and the role of the imagination is essential to her. Angeline demonstrates how Duras recovers and reexamines her past through different narrative strategies in the two works.
Baisnee, Valerie. “Love on the Mekong: The Photo Portrait of the Young Narrator in Duras's The Lover.” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 84 (1995): 41-50.
Focuses on the portrait of the adolescent in the scene of crossing the Mekong River in The Lover. Baisness considers the clothes of the adolescent as a language which reveals conscious and unconscious relationships of the protagonist with her family and the colonial surroundings. Further, the narrative of the clothes points out the ambivalent relation between mother and daughter. Though the daughter’s clothes marks her access to the maternal body, separation from the mother’s social and sexual image is also conveyed. Baisnee discusses the adolescent’s seduction which borders on prostitution and which transforms the girl into the object/subject of desire.
Finally, Baisnee explores the social transgression in the scene, especially the forbidden relationship between a white woman and a non-white man. Baisnee stresses that by transgressing the social
order and the racist taboos, the girl achieves her desires to love and to write. Thus, Baisnee claims that the adolescent’s sexual exhibition can be a political gesture of self-assertion.
Bree, Germaine. “Autogynography.” The Southern Review 22.2 (1986):
223-230.
Interrogate the definition of autobiography and introduce autobiographical writings by women. Bree draws on Donna Stanton’s term “autogynography” to highlight the tendency of gender-blind in the theoretical approach to autobiography. Also, Bree indicates Susan Friedman’s conclusion that the definitions of autobiography proffered by men cannot apply to women ’s autobiographical writings.
Given that the characteristics of the autobiographical texts are inseparable from the concepts of self, Bree notes that the sense of self in women is not isolated human being but the presence and recognition of another consciousness. Bree further examines three autobiographical texts by women: Nathalie Sarraute’s L’Enfance (Childhood), Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant (The Lover), and Julia Kristeva’s “My Memory Hyperbole.” Bree suggests that the question of memory represented through language is tackled in both L’Enfance and L’Amant. Bree finds that in Duras’s autobiographical text, it is not the identity but the confused outline of the colonial world that emerges. Similarly, Kristeva defines alternative autobiographical subject in the text which embodies the shared collective experience.
Cismaru, Alfred. “Promiscuity on the Screen?” Lamar Journal of-the Humanities 19.2 (1993): 35-43.
Cohen, Susan D. “Fiction and the Photographic Image in Duras' The Lover.”
L'Esprit Createur 30.1 (1990): 56-68.
Claims that the verbal is valorized and replaces the visual in Duras’s work. Cohen discusses The Lover to illustrate the relation of the verbal to the visual. As Cohen points out, The Lover is originated in the non-existent photography of the heroine ’s crossing the river, which is imagined and represented verbally. As Cohen puts it, for Duras, “to see means to imagine with words” (59-60). It is the non-being of the image that allows Duras to write the image and consequently, the only proof of its existence lies in the author’s written word. In addition to the relation between verbal invocation and visual absence, Cohen claims that the associative metonymy triggers textuality. Cohen also finds that in The Lover writing is equated with music. Finally, Cohen suggests that the absence of the photography renders Duras’s text legendary.
Freadman, Anne. “. . . You Know, the Enunciation . . .. ” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 22.2 (1995): 301-18.
Glassman, Deborah. “Images of the Heart: Marguerite Duras's Autobiographies.” Auto-Biography Studies 5.1 (1989): 26-47.
Hellerstein, Nina S.“'Image' and Absence in Marguerite Duras' L'Amant.”
Modern Language Studies 21.2 (1991): 45-56.
---. “Family Reflections and the Absence of the Father in Duras's L'Amant.” Essays in French Literature 26 (1989): 98-109.
Explores the significance of the absence of the father in L'Amant.
Hellerstein suggests that while the paternal absence deprives all the family members of the source of emotional, economic, and sexual definition, it also has the liberating effect of freeing the narrator from the constraints of convention, family stability and society.
Further, Hellerstein discusses the symbiotic relationship between mother and son, caused by the absence of the father. Also, as Hellerstein claims, the Chinese lover plays both parental and fraternal role in the process of the heroine’s self definition.
Similarly, the relation between the heroine and her brothers is centered around the figure of the Double and the mirror-reflections.
Hellerstein points out that the father ’s absence is reflected in the absence of the Father figure: God, the absence of the fixed center, the immutable essence of truth.
Herrera, Andrea O'Reilly. “Liberating Duras: 'The Staircase That Never Stops'.” Women and Language 12.2 (1989): 21-26.
Hill, Leslie. “Marguerite Duras and the Limits of Fiction. ” Paragraph:
A Journal of Modern Critical Theory 12.1 (1989): 1-22.
Focuses on Duras’s L’Amant, La Douleur and the film Aurelia Steiner, all of which address the difficulties and impossibilities of representation. In Duras’s work, Hill notices the preoccupation with limits and borders, which attributes the transgressive potential to the act of writing. Also, Hill points out the identification of writing with the sacred and with God in Duras’s texts. Specifically, for Duras, writing bears witness to what cannot be represented, except as a disappearing trace, as a moment of transcendence or transgression and God is the name for the impossibility of naming.
Since both L’Amant and La Douleur are attempts to bear witness to powerful or catastrophic events, Hill further explores in what way such representation is possible. Hill suggests that both novels mark
a shift beyond the limits of fiction. Hill indicates that all the three texts abandon representation but inquire into the possibilities and impossibilities of representation.
Hulley, Kathleen. “Contaminated Narratives: The Politics of Form and Subjectivity in Marguerite Duras's The Lover.” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 15.2 (1992-1993): 30-50.
Claims that Duras’s The Lover disrupts the codes of cohesive identity with the binary logic of fictional realism: true/invented, I/not I, white/not white, rich/poor, male/female. As Hulley points out, Duras’s writing evokes an absence which representational discourse tends to mask and as a gesture of political resistance, the hole words Duras hollows in her texts undermines the forms of subjectivity upon which colonization is built. Specifically, Hulley discusses the desire between the French girl and the Chinese lover, which transgresses the codes of propriety and race distinction so as to reiterate the disappearance of identity. Further, Hulley analyzes the undecideability of colonial positionings and the instability of the narrative which the text provokes. Also, Hulley suggests that in The Lover Duras represents the fetishization of the transgressive desire and thus invokes the void in the signifying system to which the narration constantly return.
Husserl-Kapit, Susan. “Marguerite Duras.” Visions Magazine 9 (1993):
9-12.
Martin, Graham Dunstan. “The Drive for Power in Marguerite Duras' L'Amant.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 30.3 (1994): 204-18.
Examines the power relationships in Duras' L'Amant. Martin investigates the origins of the heroine’s drive for power in her relationships with her mother, brother and the Chinese lover. Martin suggests that there is a power-vacuum in the family and therefore the members seek to fill it. Also, the lack of love and care results in power struggle between mother and daughter. As Martin demonstrates, the heroine’s sexual allure and intellectual ability are the mark of the daughter’s triumph over the mother. Still, the power relation between the heroine and her older brother is characterized by their competition for dominance. As to the heroine ’s relation with the Chinese lover, Martin finds the transgression of social conventions brings power. Martin claims that the quest for power also entails the violence against the heroine herself.
Besides, Martin suggests that Duras regards sado-masochism and the urge towards sex-murder as marks of passion ’s all-conquering power.
In other words, power is constituted by inviting the ultimate threat
to one’s own survival in all its extremity and thus the drive for power is linked with the drive to death.
Medcalf, Anne and Marie Cattan. “Blurring the Boundaries? The Sense of Time and Place in Marguerite Duras' L'Amant.” SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 36 (1993): 220-29.
Examines the ambiguity in the discourse of women colonial writers.
Medcalf uncovers the interweaving of gender, race and class in the colonial context, and thus the duality of colonial and anti-colonial tendencies involved in colonial women’s position is manifest.
Medcalf claims that The Lover both challenges and partakes in the Orientalist discourse. Specifically, Medcalf finds that the social boundaries between the narrator’s family and the colonized are erected and defended. However, Medcalf also points out that the binary divide between colonized and colonizer, oppressor and oppressed, are disturbed as the mother’s insight into the nature of colonialism and her treatment of the colonized contradict each other.
Moreover, the relationship between the narrator and the Chinese lover reflects that between the masculinized colonizer and the feminized colonized. Finally, Medcalf claims that Duras’s discourse is itself ambiguous, despite the fact that the critics tend to dismiss the colonial background as exotic.
Morgan, Janice. “Fiction and Autobiography/Language and Silence: L'Amant by Duras.” The French Review 63.2 (1989): 271-279.
Discusses the tension between intimacy and distance, deception and sincerity, language and silence in Duras’s autobiographical work, L'Amant. Morgan notice that from time to time Duras slips into third-person narration and thus the transparency of the first-person account of an individual experience is transposed into a more complex kind of theater, transcending the limits of the personal and connecting Duras’s experience with the other myth of passion. Also, Morgan regards L'Amant as a work of revelation, a record of silence, which lies at the heart of Duras’s childhood experience as well as her aesthetic practice. In other words, silence is central to Duras’s autobiography and fiction, and thus it is through the shaping of silence that the writer is able to attain authenticity.
Solomon, Barbara Probst. “Marguerite Duras: The Politics of Passion.”
Partisan Review 54:3 (1987): 415-422.
Records the meeting with Marguerite Duras in New York in 1964. As Solomon finds, those things Duras drew attention to in New York and clothes and fancy car they discussed about appear in Duras’s The
Lover, which must have already been in her mind in 1960s. Also, Solomon suggests that The Lover may be a story of incest disguised and the true lover should be the beloved brother. Moreover, Solomon claims that in her work, Duras tends to interrupt the story of the shameful passion for the brother by a political subplot.
Stimpson, Catharine R. “Marguerite Duras: A 'W/Ringer"s Remarks.”
L'Esprit Createur 30.1 (1990): 15-18.
Thormann, Janet. “Feminine Masquerade in L'Amant: Duras with Lacan.”
Literature and Psychology 40.4 (1994): 28-39.
Discusses Duras’s narrativization of feminine masquerade which installs a feminine desire and a relation to language, both similar and unsettling to Lacan’s theorization. Thormann suggests that the lacking photograph signals the original representation of the desire of the writing subject and the writing is linked with the erotic body.
Further, Thormann points out that the image of the girl crossing the river on the ferry is constructed as a reflection of a signifying system by a subject already inscribed in the Symbolic. However, Duras’s feminine masquerade, produced as the object for the gaze, is unsettling for the subject is not identified with it. Moreover, the masquerade opens a space of feminine desire, initiating writing.
Book Articles
Chester, Suzanne. “Writing the Subject: Exoticism/Eroticism in Marguerite Duras's The Lover and The Sea Wall.” De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P, 1992. 436-57.
Focuses on Duras’s representation of the power relations between the female Other with the exotic Other in The Lover and The Sea Wall.
Chester maintains that in both novels the factors of gender and class problematize the relationship of the colonizer to the colonized.
Specifically, Chester finds that while The Sea Wall represents the protagonist as an object of prostitution and of male desire, The Lover constructs a female subject with an active relationship to desire.
Chester elucidates that in The Lover Duras avails herself of the autobiographical “I” to realize her own subjectivity. Also, Chester notes that in The Lover Duras establishes a female subjectivity through the appropriation of the masculine position of the observer, and through the eroticization of the exotic, the feminization of the Asian lover, and the representation of an unchanging Oriental essence, given that by doing so she reinscribes Orientalist/Colonialist themes.
Gunther, Renate. Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein and L'Amant. London;
Valencia: Grant & Cutler; Artes Graficas Soler, 1993.
Hirsch, Marianne. “Resisting Images: Rereading Adolescence.” Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice. Ed. Judith Kegan Gardiner. Urbana : U of Illinois P, 1995. 249-79.
Explores the rupture and dislocations in the autobiographical and familial narrative. Hirsch focuses on four autobiographical works by women writers, including Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, Valerie Walkerdine’s “Dreams from an Ordinary Childhood” and “Behind the Painted Smile,” and Lorie Novak’s photograph entitled Fragments. Hirsch claims that the authors reveal the discontinuities in the familial narrative by reframing photograph images. The discovered fissures in the moments of adolescence become a source of daughterly resistance and agency against familial ideologies. As Hirsch suggests, the authors’
intervention into their familial and personal stories enables us to think about female agency as constituted within the framework of the family and within the space of adolescence. As to The Lover, Hirsch demonstrates the way Duras founds her writing on the absence of the
“photographie absolue.” Moreover, Duras’s intervention into the family story by depicting the nonexistent picture highlights the autobiographical subject constructed out of different positions and within the framework of contradictory impulses and desires.
Morgan, Janice. “Fiction and Autobiography/Language and Silence: The Lover by Marguerite Duras.” Redefining Autobiography in
Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction: An Essay Collection. Eds. Janice Morgan et al. New York : Garland, 1991. 73-84.
Norindr, Panivong. “Filmic Memorial and Colonial Blues: Indochina in Contemporary French Cinema.” Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism:
Perspectives from the French and Francophone World. Ed. Dina Sherzer. Austin : U of Texas P, 1996. 120-46.
Ramsay, Raylene L. The French New Autobiographies: Sarraute, Duras, and Robbe-Grillet. Gainesville : UP of Florida, 1996.
Ryan, Judith. “Shrunk to an Interloper.” Field Work: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies. Eds. Marjorie Garber et al. New York : Routledge, 1996. 113-19.
Dissertation Abstracts
Angelini, Eileen Marie. “'L'Ecriture de soi': Strategies of 'Writing the Self' in the Works of Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Robbe-Grillet.” DAI 54:10 (1994): 3743A. Brown U.
Examines the works of three contemporary French writers, including Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance, Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Miroir qui Revient and Abgelique ou L’Enchantement. Based on Philippe Lejeune’s concept of
“autobiographical space,” Angelini explores these author’s multifaceted narratives which constitute their personality.
Angelini finds that in their “autofictional narratives” these authors have used new writing strategies, which present new ways of looking at the world, the self and literary texts by questioning conventional boundaries.
Blum-Reid, Sylvie Eve. “Writing Nostalgia: Fiction and Photography.” DAI 52:3 (1991): 936A. U of Iowa.
discusses the relationship between nostalgia and the images in Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant, Patrick Modiano’s Rue des Boutiques Obscures, George Perec’s work. Drawing on the philosophical tradition of questioning and psychoanalysis, Blum-Reid explores
“photographic writing” demonstrated in these texts. Blum-Reid suggests that the juxtaposition of words and images within narratives leads to the reflections on visual representation, memory and nostalgia.
Garane, Jeanne Marcella. “Imagined Geographies, Subjective Cartographies: Marguerite Duras, Jeanne Hyvrard, Simone Schwarz-Bart.” DAI 55:4(1994): 981A. U of Michigan.
Examines the link between the construction of female subjectivity and post/colonial geography in Jeanne Hyvrard’s Les Prunes de Cythere, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle, and Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant. Garane draws on postcolonial, postmodern and feminist theories to explore the link between identity and space, between colonialism as spatial appropriation and writing as textual reappropriation. Specifically, Garane focuses on the figure of mother and the relationship of the female self to the mother. Also, as Garane finds, the constitution of the subject inevitably duplicates the order of domination. Garane further examines the way in which these texts resist and perpetuate colonialism.
Lin, Wenchi. “The Performance of Identity in 'Sister Carrie,' 'A Passage to India,' 'The Lover,' and 'A City of Sadness'. ” DAI 54:11 (1994):
4083A. State U of New York.
Demonstrates the performative nature of identity by comparing three novels Sister Carrie, A Passage to India, The Lover, and the film A City of Sadness. Lin discusses the effect of class in constituting a social identity in Sister Carrie and the performance of racial identity in A Passage to India. Also, Lin analyzes the postmodern performance of Duras/ the girl’s gender identity in The Lover.
Finally, the historical insight which the film The City of Sadness provides into Taiwan’s national identity crisis.
Solomon, Julie Helen. “The Face of the Writer: Readings in Literary Self-Portraiture.” DAI 57:6 (1996): 2511A-12A. U of Pennsylvania.
Explores the element of the face in literary self-portraits such as Colette’s La Vagabonde, Michel Leiris’s L’Age d’Homme, and Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant. Solomon brings out the central themes: the paradoxes of physiognomy, the perception and value of physical beauty. Also, Solomon discusses the meaning of make-up, the experience of aging and of the mirror and others’ eyes. As to L’Amant, Solomon focuses on the discontinuity experienced by the writer, the shift from the girl described to the aging narrator.
Weiermair, Brigitte. “Marguerite Duras: 'L'Amant.' Zu Genese und Rezeption eines literarischen Bestsellers (Marguerite Duras:
'L'Amant.' The Genesis and Reception of a Literary Bestseller. ” DAI 57:1 (1996): 133c. U Salzburg.