Reading dialogues: Exploring interactions between text and identity in the fiction of Christiane Baroche, Helene Cixous and Paule Constant.

This thesis is an exploratory study of the transformative potential of reading, taking as its specific focus the interaction between fictional texts and the identity of the reader. Based on close readings of post-1980 fiction by the three writers, Christiane Baroche, Helene Cixous and Paule Constant, the textual analyses are situated largely within a framework of feminist theory, although they are not restricted to gender issues. The first chapter sets out my conceptual framework, positing a dialogic model of reading and formulating a dynamic, mobile concept of identity. The remaining chapters are speculative explorations of interactions between text and reader, each chapter considering examples from each of the three writers. My approach is thematic, the topics being both suggested by the texts themselves and implicated in different ways with (sexual) identity: identification (Chapter 2), loss (Chapter 3), mother-daughter relations (Chapter 4) and difference (Chapter 5). The textual analyses are underpinned by a politics of reading which is explicitly foregrounded in Chapter 2. My analyses draw out a series of reading effects - meditation, interrogation, speculation - and suggest that it is when these effects last beyond the reading of the text that reading is likely to be most transformative. Moreover, the most productive interactions between text and identity, whether they are psychological or political, are shown also to involve interactions between individual and collective identities. My thesis presents analyses of fiction texts which are not yet widely studied in anglophone countries, implements a sustained exploration of the effects of reading, and provides a conceptual framework for further investigations. I hope that in this way it will contribute to, and advance, knowledge in not only French studies but also both feminist literary studies and a growing body of scholarly work on reading