The Mother in Hélène Cixous’s and Pascal Quignard’s  Works : Acts of Resistance Cover Image

La résistance en morceaux: images de la mère dans les écrits d’Hélène Cixous et de Pascal Quignard
The Mother in Hélène Cixous’s and Pascal Quignard’s Works : Acts of Resistance

Author(s): Martine Motard-Noar
Subject(s): Aesthetics, French Literature, Theory of Literature, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: mother; fragment; language; death; hypertext

Summary/Abstract: Hélène Cixous’s works stand as quite different from Pascal Quignard’s works in their narrative structure. However, both writers try to use their writing to resist the death of the Mother, a figure very much related to language and writing. Quignard’s act of resistance against such disappearance is built as fragmented texts whose dual structure (short text‐blank space) could be considered as both a reenactment of the mother’s death and a protection against it. Cixous’s writing engages in a constant negotiation between dreams, word play, and intertextuality, a structure which she calls a “hypertext”, in order to escape from the inevitable physical loss of the mother. In the end, Quignard’s and Cixous’s texts cut and sew their narrative structure into segments that are none other than acts of resistance.

  • Issue Year: 2016
  • Issue No: 10
  • Page Range: 137-150
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: French
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