A Different Subject: Autotheory in Contemporary French Self-Writing
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis considers the increased entanglement of contemporary French self-writing and theorising in the 2000s, with particular reference to questions of gender, sex and sexuality. The study of modern French autobiography has long emphasised the intimate connection between developments in intellectual thought and formal experimentation. Yet while the belated reception of queer theory and gender studies in France has generated significant critical interest, how these paradigms are both absorbed into and reconjugated by life writing has yet to be extensively examined. Attending to this omission, this thesis focuses on the generically hybrid works of four contemporary writer-theorists — Anne F. Garréta, Paul B. Preciado, Virginie Despentes and Didier Eribon — who make implicit and explicit use of theoretical precepts gleaned from gender studies and queer theory so as to narrate, reinterpret and retheorise the self. In so doing, this thesis establishes ‘autotheory’ — a genre which has gained recent critical interest to describe Anglophone texts that blend autobiography with theory — in the French context, arguing that its emergence marks a formal and ideological rupture with the predominant mode of autofiction. Chapter one establishes the critical ascendance and political valence of confessional French autofiction in the 1990s and 2000s through a reading of Anne F. Garréta’s faux autofiction, Pas un jour (2002). Bringing Lauren Berlant’s concept of the ‘juxtapolitical’ into conversation with Garréta’s baroque Oulipian textuality and her own literary criticism, this chapter considers the psychoanalytic diagnostic of desiring and gendered subjectivity contained by the genre and its potential for renewal. Chapter two addresses the underexplored Derridean impulses of Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008) to argue that Preciado rewrites the self beyond any one ‘genre’ through a deconstructive method of contamination, in which theory is both absorbed into and secreted out …
abstract: This thesis considers the increased entanglement of contemporary French self-writing and theorising in the 2000s, with particular reference to questions of gender, sex and sexuality. The study of modern French autobiography has long emphasised the intimate connection between developments in intellectual thought and formal experimentation. Yet while the belated reception of queer theory and gender studies in France has generated significant critical interest, how these paradigms are both absorbed into and reconjugated by life writing has yet to be extensively examined. Attending to this omission, this thesis focuses on the generically hybrid works of four contemporary writer-theorists — Anne F. Garréta, Paul B. Preciado, Virginie Despentes and Didier Eribon — who make implicit and explicit use of theoretical precepts gleaned from gender studies and queer theory so as to narrate, reinterpret and retheorise the self. In so doing, this thesis establishes ‘autotheory’ — a genre which has gained recent critical interest to describe Anglophone texts that blend autobiography with theory — in the French context, arguing that its emergence marks a formal and ideological rupture with the predominant mode of autofiction. Chapter one establishes the critical ascendance and political valence of confessional French autofiction in the 1990s and 2000s through a reading of Anne F. Garréta’s faux autofiction, Pas un jour (2002). Bringing Lauren Berlant’s concept of the ‘juxtapolitical’ into conversation with Garréta’s baroque Oulipian textuality and her own literary criticism, this chapter considers the psychoanalytic diagnostic of desiring and gendered subjectivity contained by the genre and its potential for renewal. Chapter two addresses the underexplored Derridean impulses of Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008) to argue that Preciado rewrites the self beyond any one ‘genre’ through a deconstructive method of contamination, in which theory is both absorbed into and secreted out …
author: Owen Rowlands, Lili
language: eng
keywords: French literature, French theory, Gender studies, Life-writing, Sex and sexuality
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2022-01-31
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:24Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.90173