“Le privé est politique” comme paradoxe littéraire : révolution et intimité chez les Québécoises Louky Bersianik et France Théoret

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_724D9CCA1756
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Title
“Le privé est politique” comme paradoxe littéraire : révolution et intimité chez les Québécoises Louky Bersianik et France Théoret
Journal
Textes & Contextes
Author(s)
Turbiau Aurore
Publication state
Published
Issued date
2020
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Language
french
Abstract
This article aims to study the ways in which the 1970s feminist slogan « the personal is political » was analysed and translated into literature by two of the main authors of the Quebec women’s liberation movement, Louky Bersianik and France Théoret. Accounting for the political significance of their works, the article examines to what extent intimacy is built in or evacuated from the narrative on account of its problematic place in feminist questioning. Louky Bersianik began this work independently of other feminists, before « the personal is political » explicitly became one of the staples of Quebec feminist writing ; she illustrated more than others that the details of women’s personal and daily lives have a collective meaning, and that it is necessary to politically address this in the public sphere. This article analyses The Euguélionne (1976) and Le Pique-nique sur l’Acropole (1979) from that point of view: these novels emphasize what is political in the personal, expanding on a frankly satirical and didactic literature that stages the torments of women’s daily lives. France Théoret tackles the same issue using an opposite approach to Louky Bersianik’s. She began writing as part of feminist writers’ collectives; she attended the debates in Les Têtes de pioche about « the personal is political » and about the political meaning of literature, and she decided to cut herself off from all of that in order to create a truly intimate writing of her own. This article analyses her late 1970s work to show how France Théoret stresses what is personal in the political, pointing out the political has no meaning if it is not situated alongside and does not provide analysis of the private and personal, granted in Théoret’s literary work through her voice as a writer.
Open Access
Yes
Create date
03/09/2024 22:47
Last modification date
04/09/2024 14:08
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