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by Lucy Stone McNeece Lucy Stone McNeece proposes a political reading of six of Marguerite Duras' works, centering on a single narrative core as an allegory of the neocolonial politics of representation. She argues that Duras speaks about her past in colonial Indochina in part to establish an analogy between bankrupt colonial structures of the 1930s and the postmodern media culture of modern France and to alert her readers to the invisible oppression within the liberal democracies of Western Europe. Using two settings--India in the 1930s and northern France in the 1970s--Duras examines the vestiges of colonial attitudes and exclusionary, racist practices in contemporary culture and reveals the hidden structures that perpetuate these practices. The cycle, McNeece suggests, dramatizes the possibilities of representation, of reconstructing the real--connected to the dream of territorial and cultural appropriation--as a problem of language and demonstrates that the real is in some ways only a creation of conventions of language/culture itself. McNeece's study extends previous work on Duras by setting her work in a larger framework than that of psychoanalysis or feminism and focusing on the connections in her work between poetics and sociopolitical concerns.
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"This book is of particular interest to scholars and graduate students. Duras specialists will probably find the semiotic analysis of the six works considered the most interesting aspect of this study; the numerous literary and intellectual relationships expressed in the endnotes are also fascinating. This work attests to the growing complexity and sophistication of Duras criticism, needed to analyze the innovative processes used by this author."--
French Review "A fresh reading of [Duras'] work using an original,
important perspective: [this] book explores the complex ways in
which the 'politics of postcolonialism and the process of decolonialization' are enacted in
Duras' work."-- "A detailed and well-informed analysis of a particular body of work by one of the most popular authors of the 20th century."--William Thompson, University of Memphis |
