Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 08:26:55 -0500 (CDT)
From: cberkowi-AT-bayou.uh.edu (Charlotte Berkowitz)
Subject: Re: CALL FOR FRENCH FEMINIST PAPERS


Hi all,

Pat Yongue and I, no doubt motivated by a desire to recreate the vivifying
atmosphere of Lubbock, have proposed the panel described below to the chair
of The International Conference on Narrative, which will take place in April
at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL).  We apologize for giving you only
two weeks notice, but hope that you will be similarly motivated to send
abstracts.  Feel free to e-mail them to cberkowi-AT-bayou.uh.edu or
plyongue-AT-bayou.uh.edu. For our departmental mailing address, see the
signature following the panel description.  For more information on the
conference, go to http://www.narrative.nwu.edu.  

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Charlotte 

	French Feminism and the Question of Narrative Voice: Toward Reconceiving
the Subject

	When the grand narratives of Western culture have been said to fail, the
theories of _text_ proposed by the three French neo-Freudian psychoanalysts
and literary analysts Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva enter
the scene replete with intriguing new ways of conceiving the subject.  For
these theorists, the repressed primary referent of language is the maternal
body with which the child was once at one, a relation in which identity is
neither oedipally alienated nor maternally fused, but interwoven, "in play"
through connection to the mother with all life.  
	The voice of the maternal narrative, then, speaks the bodily recorded,
oedipally hidden reality of interconnection.  Neither the voice of the
author nor the voice of  "the reader," but a blend of the two known in
Cixous' lexicon as the "equivoice" and in Kristeva's as the "voiced breath
that connects us to an undifferentiated mother," this voice cannot directly
be represented in language ("the-Name-of-the-Father").  To "hear" this voice
in a literary work is little by little to overcome oedipal terror by
decoding in extra-linguistic moments--e.g., sound-play, rhythm and
gesture--devices that signal beneath the surface of a culturally fixed and
therefore consumable narrative surface the expansive questioning and
regenerative presence of the (m)other.  Or, in Kristeva's terms, by
descending beneath the work's "phenotext" to its "genotext."  
	The originators of this panel will present, and we invite additional
panelists to submit by October 15, eight- to ten- page papers that explore
issues of narrative voice in terms of such "French Feminist" theory.
Following the presentations, a respondent will pose questions and moderate
discussion.  In addition to recuperating new meaning from culturally
"established" texts, we are interested in discovering the influence of the
theory on newer works.  We are especially interested in the therapeutic
potential of textual work and hope these presentations will generate
enriching, ongoing conversation among all who attend the session.  

Dr. Charlotte Berkowitz
Department of English       713-395-2800 ext. 6037
University of Houston       cberkowi-AT-bayou.uh.edu 
Houston, TX 77204-3012




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