The French fictional journal Raoul, Valerie
The French fictional journal,
1980, 19801215, 1980, Volume:
40, 40.
eBook
In this context Raoul discusses more than fifty novels or short stories wholly or partly in diary form and written in France between 1800 and the present.
Distinctly Narcissistic is a study of diary fiction written in Quebec between 1878 and 1990. Valerie Raoul explores the social and ideological context in which diary fiction occurs, and the relation ...in Quebec, between the diary form and (de)colonization.
Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma illustrates how stories about ill health and suffering have been produced and received from a variety of perspectives. ...Bringing together the work of Canadian researchers, health professionals, and people with lived experiences of disease, disability, or trauma, it addresses central issues about authority in medical and personal narratives and the value of cross- or interdisciplinary research in understanding such experiences. The book considers the aesthetic dimensions of health-related stories with literary readings that look at how personal accounts of disease, disability, and trauma are crafted by writers and filmmakers into published works. Topics range from psychiatric hospitalization and aestheticizing cancer, to father- daughter incest in film. The collection also deals with the therapeutic or transformative effect of stories with essays about men, sport, and spinal cord injury; narrative teaching at L'Arche (a faith-based network of communities inclusive of people with developmental disabilities); and the construction of a "schizophrenic" identity. A final section examines the polemical functions of narrative, directing attention to the professional and political contexts within which stories are constructed and exchanged. Topics include ableist limits on self-narration; drug addiction and the disease model; and narratives of trauma and Aboriginal post-secondary students. Unfitting Stories is essential reading for researchers using narrative methods or materials, for teachers, students, and professionals working in the field of health services, and for concerned consumers of the health care system. It deals with practical problems relevant to policy-makers as well as theoretical issues of interest to specialists in bioethics, gender analysis, and narrative theory. Read the chapter "Social Trauma and Serial Autobiography: Healing and Beyond" by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.
The anatomy of gender Currie, Dawn; Raoul, Valerie
The anatomy of gender,
1992, 19920215, 1992-02-15, 19920101, Volume:
3
eBook
Throughout the ages, the female body has been enshrined as an aesthetic object, associated with nature, sin and danger. This collection of essays covers a range of topics related to the female body.
Distinctly Narcissistic is a study of diary fiction written in Quebec between 1878 and 1990. Valerie Raoul explores the social and ideological context in which diary fiction occurs, and the relation ...in Quebec, between the diary form and (de)colonization. Many of the works she considers have received little critical attention until now.Raoul bases her study on a psychoanalytic theory of narcissism. Building on the structure developed in her earlier book, The French Fictional Journal (1980), she analyses the interaction of self, time, and writing in diary fiction, extending her approach to take into account the cultural context of the works concerned. The theory of narcissism serves as a framework for the treatment of topics as varied as feminine superiority in Laure Conan's early work, cerebral misogyny in narratives by men, ambivalent gender identities, and the recurring metaphor of giving birth to the self through the book.In re-examining parallels between individual and collective psychology as well as between gender and ethnicity, Raoul provides new insight into the specificity of Quebec fiction and the relation of fiction to autobiography.
Unlike other forms of fictional first-person narrative such as the memoir or epistolary novel, the French fictional journal or diary-novel has received inadequate critical attention. This is the ...first full-length analysis devoted to its particular features.Valerie Raoul bases her study on the premise that the interest of the fictional journal lies in its subjugation of one set of conventions, those of the diary, to another set, those of the novel, and the interference of each of those 'codes' in the function of the other. In this context she discusses more than fifty novels or short stories wholly or partly in diary form and written in France between 1800 and the present.In the first part of the book she deals with the fictivity of the diary-novel. Philippe Lejeune's work on the functioning of autobiography serves as a point of comparison to elucidate the distinctive reading pact involved in this aspect of first-person fiction. The second part analyses the internal communication model: on this intradiegetic level the fictional diarist is narrator, actor, and narrate. In the third part, an abstract model is developed to illustrate the functioning of the fictional journal as a bi-textual form of communication, in which the internal communications process is a mise en abyme of the external one between author, character, and reader. The personal narcissism of the 'intimiste' is seen to give way in the fictional 'journal intime' to narcissistic fiction, since diary-novels are always the narration of the production of a 'recit.'This book is an important investigation into the very nature of fiction and the meaning of the activity of writing. It not only fills an important gap in the appreciation of French prose, but also adds to the comprehension of personal narrative in particular and narrative discourse in general.
