Self-writing beyond self: Neige Sinno’s Triste tigre [Sad Tiger] (2023)
Abstract
Does literary memoir always express personal experience? Can it communicate something bigger, something that reaches beyond the self? My paper explores these questions by analysing a recent release in France: Neige Sinno’s Triste tigre [Sad Tiger] (2023). This prize-winning memoir belongs to a wider spate of contemporary literary memoirs in France about sexual abuse. Like other French authors writing in a post-#MeToo climate, Sinno is shifting the terms of feminist debate in France. French society appears increasingly willing to give a platform to victims-survivors of sexual violence – to hear their stories and understand their experiences (the 2024 Pelicot case being a quite extreme case in point).
Even though Triste tigre is a first-person text by a victim-survivor of childhood sexual abuse, Sinno’s writing in many respects moves beyond the self. This paper will explore the formal strategies that Sinno uses – intertextual weaving, text/image experimentation, second-person address, and more – to suggest that her writing destabilises the boundaries between self/other, individual/collective, public/private, subjectivity/objectivity, victimhood/agency, remembering/forgetting, chaos/coherence. Through this analysis, I will show how Sinno uses first-person writing not just to communicate the unspeakable trauma of being a victim of sexual violence and abuse, but to convey the profound horror of this experience by attempting to grasp the subjectivity of the perpetrator of sexual violence.
About the presenter
Dr Beth Kearney is an Early Career Researcher and Casual Academic in the School of Languages and Cultures. Her current research focuses on contemporary narratives of sexual violence and the ways that they challenge national and cultural scripts. She is also preparing a monograph on the use of photography in experimental life writing by women writers of the Francophone world. She has published in academic journals such as L’Esprit créateur, Francosphères, Australian Journal of French Studies, and Modern & Contemporary France and has a chapter in Women’s Historical Fiction Across the Globe (eds. Karunika Kardak and Catherine Barbour). She is also a critic with public-facing publications in The Australian Book Review, Asymptote, The Conversation, and MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture.
About Studies in Culture, and Translation & Interpreting Research Joint Seminars
Studies in Culture
Through the scholarly analysis of many different kinds of cultural products, texts and phenomena, Studies in Culture brings together researchers who seek to understand how the world is understood differently by people coming from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Researchers in this cluster work on literature, film, music, theatre, the visual arts, intangible heritage, testimonies and historical narratives.
Research in Studies in Culture within the School centres around four broad sub-themes of Heritage, memory and trauma studies; Intellectual and cultural history; Literature; and Film and visual cultures.
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Translation & Interpreting
Translation and Interpreting (T&I) is a rapidly developing multidisciplinary area of research. The school’s translation and interpreting research activities cover two main streams: applied research relating to translation and interpreting practice, pedagogy and the T&I industry, and theoretical approaches to translation in the areas of literature, cultural studies and philosophy.
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