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Shifting Subjects

Shifting Subjects There are many different ways to say I. This book examines the ways in which four contemporary women writers (H l ne Cixous, Assia Djebar, Gis le Halimi and Julia Kristeva) have written their autobiographical I as a plural concept. These women refuse the individual I of traditional autobiography by developing narrative strategies that multiply the voices in their texts. Each chapter examines a text, or a series of texts, that offers a different approach to writing a plural I. Taken together, the texts depart from current theorizations of the female autobiographical I by calling for another category of identity; the women cannot write the self by using an individual I or by a collective we. Instead, these texts rest uncomfortably between the pronouns I and we and thus call for different understandings of female selfhood and of collective belonging.