Abstract
Nata Minor’s dilogy La partie de dames and Qui est là? plays with de/re-contextualized elements of psychoanalysis and/as fiction, subtly poeticizing theory. Referring to its privileged intertext, Pierre Loti’s Aziyadé, it questions the limits of the ‹text’, the notions of ‹originality’ and of ‹authority’. If Said’s remarks on the ‹textual attitude’ of orientalism are particularly pertinent in the case of Loti whose ‹Orient’ is a thoroughly text/ile phenomenon, Minor’s novels, critically reflecting Loti’s phantasmo-geography, abound in masquerades, (re)significant costumes, tissues, too. Minor ‹interweaves’ literature and philosophy; corresponding with Barthes’ ‹hyphology’ and Miller’s ‹arachnology’, she metaphorizes authorship as text/ile auto-incorporation; she also tells the very ‹Derridean’ story of a narrator obsessed with the phantasm of the living voice, lost in the traces of words. Loti’s play with cultural/sexual identities is developed further in Minor’s texts that stage a complicated circulation of desire(s), blurring sex and gender borders, leaving identities ‹en suspens’
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Stemberger, M. Texts and Textiles, or Deconstructing Loti: Nata Minor’s La Partie de dames and Qui est là? . Neophilologus 93, 215–231 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-008-9125-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-008-9125-9