Victims and Victimization in French and Francophone Literature

by Buford Norman (Editor)

From the 2004 meeting of the annual French Literature Conference in Columbia, South Carolina, 14 papers, half in French and half in English, analyze literature from France and other francophone parts of the world. Among the topics are the metaphors of victimization in Céline's Bagatelles pour un massacre, the place of the victim, and woman as victim in Tahar Ben Jelloun's La Nuit de l'erreur. There is no index. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

196 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 2005

Reviews

[Parlei · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the clearly disconcerting pitfalls that a thematic discussion of "Victims and Victimization" might offer, and though the question of victim vs. survivor is never explicitly taken up (at least in half the articles I read), this collection of essays does have an interesting offer of perspectives in an array of French and Francophone literature.

All worth reading: Hamil Mustapha's "The Politics of Representation: Woman as Victim in Tahar Ben Jelloun's La Nuit de l'erreur; Medelaine Hron's "Pathological Victims: The Discourse of Disease/Dis-Ease in Beur Texts" discusses Paul Smaïl's Vivre me tue, Fawzia Zouari's Ce Pays Dont Je Meurs, and Ahmed Zitouni's Une Difficile Fin de Moi to question the problem of novels which "take up metaphors of disease or pathologically sick positions as central paradigms"; Farid Laroussi's "Leçon de savoir-survivre: le Maghreb en français" to take up the problem of the "écrivain maghrébin" as victim of literary market pressures for survival.