Bellei, Francesca. “BORDER QUEERS: WRITING THE GENDER OF BOUNDARIES - A comparative reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Ananda Devi’s Ève de ses décombres”. Working Paper. Web. Full Text Abstract

Borders have traditionally been seen as places where people and cultures mix and bleed into one another, even though they exist to prevent exactly such an exchange. How can we reconcile the ambiguous nature of the border as that which forbids entry whilst generating both a point of access and the desire for it? I will explore this paradox through a comparative study of Ananda Devi’s Ève de ses décombres, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Ève and Gloria are two women on the edge of their communities. As bilingual, biracial and gay/bisexual women they don’t fit in on either side of the wall; my thesis is that they become the wall itself. In Anzaldúa’s text, the US-Mexico border is described as an “open wound” which “staking fence rods in my flesh, / splits me splits me”: a body both active and passive, a phallic serpent which she erects as the symbol of her womanhood. Similarly, Ève closes in like a wall around all those who fall for her and prevents them from escaping Troumaron, while she is herself besieged, and her body is a wall where everyone leaves their mark. Are the ruins of the title her own, or just the rubble she leaves behind? By reading Devi and Anzaldúa through classic works of postcolonial and queer theory, I want to uncover whether and to what extent borders can be read (and written) as hybrid bodies or whether they demand permanent crossing over.

Author Bio

Francesca Bellei is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She holds a BA in Classics from the University of Cambridge and an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews. Her research interests include queer, feminist and migration theory, as well as postcolonial and Mediterranean studies.

Carpenter, Olivia. “NATHALIE SARRAUTE’S TROPISMES AND THE METAPHOR OF TISSU”. Working Paper. Web. Full Text Abstract

When Nathalie Sarraute depicts a knitting woman in her 1932 novel Tropismes, a figure “silent and apart, her head bowed modestly, counting her stitches under her breath” (31), I argue that she points to such a woman as a means of thinking through ideas about the texture and materiality of a woman’s interiority. Meditatively counting her stitches, the knitting woman appears to turn within, using her handicraft to gain access to her interiority while building fabric on her needles. Taking an interest in this and several other examples of women engaging with fiber arts, fabric, and textiles in Sarraute’s novel, my paper examines the link between these activities and the French word tissu. In an effort to illuminate connections between Sarraute’s depictions of women using fabric and Sarraute’s simultaneous fascination with the female body, I contend that the dual nature of the meaning of tissu becomes crucial, first in its understanding as cloth or fabric and second in its understanding as bodily tissue. Like a spider, weaving a web from its own secretions, the knitting woman takes control of the substance akin to bodily tissu emerging from her interior. Engaging both feminist and psychoanalytic approaches, my paper foregrounds Sarraute’s tissu as a way of thinking about the novel itself as a secretion of its author’s interiority, an embodied web of ideas and images over which its female author has agency and power in the act of her weaving.

Author Bio

Olivia Carpenter is a second-year PhD student in the English department at Harvard. Her work primarily focuses on race and gender in the long eighteenth century in literature from Great Britain and beyond, though she maintains broader interests in feminist literary criticism and the novel.

Les Abus de la mémoire

February 2, 2013

di Tzvetan Todorov
Arléa, 61 pp., € 5.00

DALILA COLUCCI

Appassionato studio sulle delicate questioni della memoria e dell’oblio nelle società occidentali alle soglie del secondo millennio, Les Abus de la Mémoire gioca la sua partita teorica sul pericoloso crinale tra due condizioni limite dell’atto del ricordare: quella che lo vede minacciato e quella opposta della sua sacralizzazione. Entrambe sono, a ben guardare, vicendevolmente implicate, essendo il culto odierno della memoria risultato...