Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader

Abstract

I want to begin with a brief account of the circumstances involved in the construction and destination of this paper. For the past few years, I have been putting together a book about women’s writing; more specifically, about the act of reading women’s writing, and what might be at stake—critically, politically, historically—in such a project. Since I work “in French,” and since I am well aware that there is not a women’s writing, my examples (my corpus, as we used to say in the days of high structuralism) come primarily from what I think I can show is a tradition of female authorship in France. To situate my project within the field of French studies, rather than the more heterogeneous world of feminist studies, has meant locating my “problematic” within the discussion of writing and sexual difference that has been taking place on both sides of the Atlantic, in French and English departments, though with the usual jet (and intracontinental) lag, over the past fifteen years.