| My dissertation explores the autobiographical aspects of Marguerite Duras' work, which have become a common place of literary criticism since the publication of L'Amant in 1984. Although the interweaving of life and books has long been recognized as a characteristic of Duras' writing, there are surprisingly very few critical studies on Duras' practice of autobiography. My study is therefore devoted to a systematic autobiographical appraisal of her texts. The first chapter examines the relationship between memory and autobiography, showing how Duras' childhood in Indochina provides the necessary framework for her writing and how this writing, concretized in a series of family stories, applies a variety of genres (novel, theater, essay, autobiography) and presents a controversial term: autofiction. The second chapter studies Duras' war writings. The dual aspect of these writings---an historical and political context (the representation of the Holocaust) and the revelation of her personal experience (waiting for her husband to return from the concentration camps)---brings memoirs and autobiography into consideration according to their distinct and complementary characteristics: political life/personal life, historicity/individuality. By telling her personal life as part of collective life, Duras implements the convergence of personal and global history; the intimate and the collective in her writing. The third chapter deals with two questions. The first part explores the links between writing and autobiography, showing how writing became one of major components of Duras' life as well as a recurrent subject of her writing. She develops "a writing on writing", in which the act of writing itself becomes the subject of writing. The second part analyzes how Duras' self-representation, by favoring generic encounters and abolishing artistic frontiers, results in the creation of new hybrid forms and genres: cine-roman, film textualise , texte-theatre-film, roman /autobiographie, interview stylisee . In this dissertation, I examine Duras' work in the light of the theoretical exploration of autobiography as a genre, with reference to other autobiographical voices (such as Colette, Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet), and against the historical background of colonialism and the Second World War. |
