Shifting Subjects Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women's Autobiography

There are many different ways to say 'I.' This book examines the ways in which four contemporary women writers (HZl_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.