Contenu du sommaire : Héritage(s)

Widely recognized today as the foremother of Chinese American letters, Sui Sin Far testifies in her writings to the irreducible tensions arising from her own bi-racial legacy, and to her complex positioning within the dominant Eurocentric tradition of American literature. Although she saw herself as a “connecting link [between] Occidentals and Orientals,” her texts call into question this optimistic sense of a hyphenated identity. In contrast to the assertive verticality that is associated with the notion of heritage, Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far's autobiographical and fictional works define a space of wavering in-betweenness whereby double inheritance ultimately proves to be double dispossession.

If The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus will not easily be tamed, it might be because in the bricolage of its very writing something keeps eluding its reading. To paraphrase the opening of the text, The Age of Wire and String does not offer itself up to the reading act so much as, from the outset it aims to “read itself” in the course of what, for the nonce, might be called an “autography,” short-circuiting all connection with its reading. What is thus implemented is a strategy of resistance, faced with which the reader happens to wander in a language terrain that remains alien—a language severed from the possibility of inheriting it, the usufruct of which the reader cannot enjoy. The text, in the fictionalizing of its very language, thus subsides in the very act, or the performance of its writing—a writing without destination, thus forcing the reader to reconsider most of the conventions on which reading is grounded.