Shifting Subjects

There are many different ways to say "I." This book examines the ways in which four contemporary women writers (H l ne Cixous, Assia Djebar, Gis le Halimi and Julia Kristeva) have written their autobiographical "I" as a plural concept. These women refuse the individual "I" of traditional autobiography by developing narrative strategies that multiply the voices in their texts. Each chapter examines a text, or a series of texts, that offers a different approach to writing a plural "I." Taken together, the texts depart from current theorizations of the female autobiographical "I" by calling for another category of identity; the women cannot write the self by using an individual "I" or by a collective "we." Instead, these texts rest uncomfortably between the pronouns "I" and "we" and thus call for different understandings of female selfhood and of collective belonging.