Contenu du sommaire : Les femmes écrivains aux Etats-Unis.

An evaluation of feminist literary criticism with special emphasis on « gynocritics » focused on the woman writer, the essay examines major critical trends committed to elucidating the « difference » of female acknowledging female writing literary tradition and the specificity of women's culture. « Gynocritics » is seen as a subversive enterprise to rediscover, revise and rehabilitate female literary works. Finally, feminist criticism is seen as essentially prescriptive to inform and form women's minds.

The author situates herself within the field of literary feminism. She analyzes the problems of reception various works meet with depending on the sex of their authors, drawing on autobiographical elements. In the final analysis, it seems that women writers have a harder time being recognized as serious writers than men do.

Some things are now taken for granted, that shouldn't : the existence, for example, of a feminine way of writing, recognizable as such. Research in the field too often neglects matters of form, syntax and even lexicon, banking almost exclusively on thematic and other preoccupations, straining toward some linguistic Utopia. This essay explores the contemporary American corpus, in quest of proclaimed specificities ; it does not discover them there ; except, perhaps, in two places, two novels that both insist on necessary conjunctions and blendings : Ursule Molinaro's Encores for a Dilettante and Georgiana Peacher's Mary Stuart's Ravishment Descending Time.

This study deals with some aspects of Djuna Barnes' writing. The first part stresses the histrionic quality of the language and describes the way the signifier is manipulated by her desire to conjure up all kinds of sex fantasies. The second part analyses her crazy need for literary alibis. But in spite of being a pachwork of borrowings from other texts Nightwood remains a passionate and authentic exploration of the mystery of sex, desire and love.

Looking into her mirror, the heroine of Lehmann's Invitation to the Waltz experiences the division between Las-subject and she-as-object. By contrast, the heroine of H.D.'s Her, reflected in the gaze of her female lover, experiences herself as both subject and objet and this reciprocity is articulated in word-play on the object pronoun of the feminine gender. A number of modern poems by American women embody the sense of being 'other in oneself in images of mirroring. The poetic text is itself the site of images, reflections and transformations, where silence becomes speech, identity can be transposed or affirmed, the invisible made visible. These poems evoke the idea of the mirror as a threshold between the seen and the unseen, a meeting-place between the speaking subject and its shadow selves. Their mirror-images may take the form of looking-glass, pool, portrait or head-bearing shield.

This essay endeavours to assess the role of black women writers on the American literary scene, and the distinctive quality of their voices. It examines the claims they are making, the way they define their tasks and their artistic strategies. The search for the legacy is seen as a fundamental preoccupation. Alice Walker's In Search of their Mother's Gardens is chosen to illustrate the quest, enunciating as it does the principles of an inquiry into the past and into the dialectics of womanhood and blackness.

There exists a special connection between the female writer and the impulse towards local realism that we call regionalism. This essay shows why certain women writers found an expressive opportunity within this mode and how they established a tradition still accessible to the modern female imagination, for what else is regionalism, after all, but a recoil upon marginality ?

This article deals with the ways in which women writers of the Midwest have over the course of the twentieth century both transformed and reinforced their commitment to the quotidian world which much classic fiction by American men set aside as constricting. While their work has steadily demythologized that commitment, it has also grown steadily more attentive to the subtle rewards that altertness for the quotidian can provide in a changing modern world.

This essay studies the connection between sex and power, humor and impotence in the work of female humorist Erica Jong. She has turned her sexual energies and formidable vitality as a woman into power : by controlling her anxiety as a female and by assuming the power of her male half, she has proved capable of turning them into the absolute power of making both men and women laugh at their libido.