Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê
Imagining the Ideal Reader
By (author) Alexandra Kurmann
Not available to order
Publication date:
14 January 2016Length of book:
228 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498514873
Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader uncovers the primary textual relationship that Linda Lê (1963– ), the most prolific Francophone author of the Vietnamese diaspora, fosters with a literary precursor of Austrian descent: the feminist writer-in-exile, Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973). This study offers an overdue exploration of the notably European roots of Lê’s writerly formation. It traces an unexamined feminist import in her work to a sixteen-year inter- and intra-textual engagement with Bachmann and positions the latter as an imagined ideal reader of Lê’s oeuvre. Intertextual analyses of Bachmann’s post-war novel, Malina, with Lê’s literary essays, early fiction, and trilogy, reveal that to overcome the challenges of writing in exile Lê adopts an alternative literary fore-bear of the European tradition.
Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê is a remarkable analysis of the literary writing of Linda Lê in its sustained construction of intertextual relations with other thinkers, artists, poets, and writers including those established with the Austrian poet, Ingeborg Bachman. Kurmann’s book will mark an enduring contribution to the ways in which Lê is viewed, understood and analyzed by scholars and taught in our classrooms as well as to French studies, more generally. Her exemplary scholarship, careful attention to textual detail, and insightful, often brilliant close readings will provide a model for those who are certain to follow in the fertile path she here opens.