Preliminary Material -- Acknowledgements -- Broaching Silence -- Tactics and Strategies in Algerian Letters -- Speaking of Silence -- Manipulating Silence -- Tactical Silence in Reading -- Textual Silences and the Reader's Tactics -- The Threat of Silence -- Bibliography -- Index.

It’s Silence, Soundly, It’s Nothing, Seriously and It’s Absence, Presently, continue The ‘It’ Series published by Matador since The Book of It (2010). They constitute another stage in an artistic journey exploring the visual and audial dialectic of mark, word and image that began over 25 years ago. In their aesthetic form the books are a decentred trilogy united together in a new concept of The Bibliograph. All three present this new aesthetic object, which transcends the narrow limits of the academic bibliography. The alphabetical works also share a tripartite structure and identical length. The Bibliograph itself is characterised by its strategic place within each book as a whole as well as by the complex variations in meaning of the dominant motifs – nothing/ness, absence and silence – which recur throughout the alphabetical entries that constitute the elements of each text. It’s Nothing, Seriously, for example, addresses the amusing paradox that so much continues to be written today about – nothing! The aleatory character of the entries in the texts encourage the modern reader to reflect on each theme and to read them in a new way. The reader is invited as well to examine their various inter-textual relations across given conventional boundaries in the arts and sciences at several levels of physical, psychical & social reproduction.

Literary production is increasingly shaped by globalization and the complex nature of cultural, political, and social interaction. As such, longstanding colonial and postcolonial relations between Africa and Europe have yielded a range of challenging questions, and new generations of writers with roots in Africa have invariably found themselves navigating new geographic terrains and negotiating racialized identities, while simultaneously exploring the potential of literature in addressing the...

This collection features studies on trauma, literary theory, and psychoanalysis in women’s writing. It examines the ways in which literature helps to heal the wounded self, and it particularly concentrates attention on the way women explain the traumatic experiences of war, violence, or displacement. Covering a global range of women writers, this book focuses on the psychoanalytic role of literature in helping recover the voices buried by intense pain and suffering and to help those voices be heard. Literature brings the unconscious into being and focus, reconfiguring life through narration. These essays look at the relationship between traumatic experience and literary form.

Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives explores the nature and effects of risk in self-narrative representations of life events, and is an early step towards confronting the dearth of analysis on this subject. The collection focuses on risk-taking as one of women’s articulations of authorial agency displayed in literary, testimonial, photographic, travel and film documentary forms of autobiographical expression in French. Among many themes, the book fosters discussion on matters of courage, strength, resilience, freedom, self-fulfillment, political engagement, compassion, faith, and the envisioning of unconventional alliances that follow a woman’s stepping out of her comfort zone. The fourteen essays included in this collection discuss works of women authors from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, France and the Caribbean. They exemplify a variety of self-narratives that blur unified conceptualizations of both identity and national belonging. They address questions about women writers’ attitudes towards risk and their willingness to change the status quo. They also explore the many personal and public forms in which agency manifests through risk-taking engagements; the ways in which women challenge the conventional wisdom about feminine reserve and aversion to danger; the multiplicity of seen and unforeseen consequences of risk taking; the all-too-frequent lack of recognition of female courage; the overcoming of obstacles by taking risks; and, frequently, the amelioration of women’s lives. Addressing both the broader context of the study of risk and the more specific areas of female expression and autobiography in Francophone cultures, this collection is attractive to a diverse audience with the potential to cross disciplines and inform a wide body of research. A number of the essays deal with issues born in postcolonial circumstances. This examination of the elucidation of marginalized voices should prove enlightening to an array of scholars researching specific ethnic, sexual, gender, and general subjects related to identity. In making inroads towards expanding the well-developed area of risk studies into the humanities, this collection makes an important contribution that has the potential to promote a variety of cross-disciplinary research including examinations of the psychology and sociology behind chauvinism, personal expression, and formative experiences.

This book examines the representation of the female fertility cycle in contemporary Algerian, Mauritian, and French women's writing. It focuses on menstruation, childbirth, and the menopause whilst also incorporating experiences such as miscarriage and abortion. This study frames its analysis of contemporary women's writing by looking back to the pioneering work of the second-wave feminists. Second-wave feminist texts were the first to break the silence on key aspects of female experience which had thus far been largely overlooked or considered taboo. Second-wave feminist works have been criticised for applying their 'universal' theories to all women, regardless of their ethnicity, socio-economic status, or sexuality. This book argues that contemporary women's writing has continued the challenge against normative perceptions of the body that was originally launched by the second-wave feminists, whilst also taking a more nuanced, contextual and intersectional approach to corporeal experience. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach of this book is informed not only by critics of the second-wave feminist movement but also by sociological studies which consider how women's bodily experiences are shaped by socio-cultural context.