Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France)

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: Imaging the Ideal Reader uncovers and explores the sixteen-year intertextual relationship fostered by the Vietnamese-Francophone writer in French exile Linda Lê with a self-chosen literary precursor, the Austrian poet-turned-writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Spanning French and German language literatures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this book reveals transnational and trans-linguistic connections between the Francophone postcolonial and post-World War II literary worlds Contents 9 Acknowledgements 11 Introduction: The Weaving of an Intertextual Web 13 Chapter 1: Tissé avec une patience de Pénélope 37 Chapter 2: Appropriating the Precursor 63 Chapter 3: Malina as Textual Genesis 99 Chapter 4: Dead Letters 125 Chapter 5: Incorporating the Ideal Reader 143 Conclusion: La tâche de l’écrivain 167 Bibliography 171 Index 189