French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Oberhuber, Corps de papier. Résonances
Other Literary Studies
Andrea Oberhuber, Corps de papier. Résonances
Montreal: Éditions Nota Bene, coll. "Nouveaux essais Spirale", 2012.
EAN 9782895184423.
Price $21.95
Publisher's overview:
Exploring the themes of the body, text, and identity in women's writing, this essay traces the social, cultural, aesthetic, and literary history of the female subject in the modern era. Alongside the paper heroines of Claire de Duras, Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn, and Élise Turcotte, the author accompanies these women writers and artists through her analyses, as well as through her own images and fictional texts. The intertwining of voices, the resonance of perspectives, the breakdown of genre boundaries, and the opening of the space of the book to the gaze of others allow this collection to be conceived as a book of dialogue, ever ready to be renewed.
"Writing challenges the 'porosity' of the boundaries between what I deem speakable and what I consider indecent in light of my self-image. It is a matter of words that fully engages my embodied existence—a site of resistance to letting go. Saying I is never a given."
Andrea Oberhuber's study situates itself at the intersection of feminist literary criticism, gender studies, and word-and-image relations. By examining figures ranging from the nineteenth-century novelist Claire de Duras to avant-garde and surrealist creators like Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, and Unica Zürn, alongside contemporary writers such as Élise Turcotte, the work highlights a long genealogy of female self-representation. These diverse creators shared a commitment to challenging traditional boundaries of gender and artistic medium. Through this historical and aesthetic trajectory, the essay explores how women writers and artists have historically used the creative space to negotiate their bodily and social identities.
The volume addresses crucial questions about the relationship between physical embodiment and textual creation, investigating how the act of writing "I" serves as a site of resistance. By blending academic analysis with personal images and fictional texts, Oberhuber models the very breakdown of genre boundaries she discusses. This interdisciplinary approach makes the book particularly valuable for scholars and students of French and Francophone literature, feminist theory, and visual culture. Readers interested in how the female body is constructed, reclaimed, and transformed through literature and art will find this dialogic study both theoretically rigorous and deeply engaging.