The Violence of Desire in Amélie Nothomb's Novels

Hall, Elizabeth Berglund. “The Violence of Desire in Amélie Nothomb’s Novels”. Women in French Studies, vol. 17, 2009, pp. 103-15.

Last updated on 07/21/2022

Recent Publications

Hall, Elizabeth Berglund, et al. Textures: Pour Approfondir la Communication Orale et écrite. Yale University Press, 2018.

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Language proficiency emerges not solely as mastery of discrete skills, but also through one’s ability to express ideas fully in a variety of cultural contexts. This innovative French‑language textbook employs a holistic approach that integrates listening, reading, writing, and conversation—placing communication at the heart of the learning experience. It provides intermediate‑level students with the interpretive tools necessary for literary and cultural studies. There are interactions with a variety of texts and media, including short stories, poems, essays, images, and podcasts.
Hall, Elizabeth Berglund, et al., editors. Cixous After / Depuis 2000. Brill, 2017.

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Hall, Elizabeth Berglund. “The Laugh of the Mother: Traces of Humor in Hélène Cixous’s Recent Fictions”. Cixous After / Depuis 2000, 23, Brill, 2017, pp. 167-78.

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Hall, Elizabeth Berglund. “Integrating Women’s Voices and Contemporary Cultural Materials through E-Journaling”. Rethinking the French Classroom New Approaches to Teaching Contemporary French and Francophone Women, edited by Nicole Meyer and Joyce Johnson, Routledge, 2018.

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Hall, Elizabeth Berglund. “Writing Amélie-the-Writer: Nothomb’s Autofictional Quest For Jouissance”. 2014. Nottingham French Studies, 3rd ed., vol. 53, 2014, pp. 285-96.

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In many of Amélie Nothomb's autofictional novels, the final step toward regaining the jouissance of her lost childhood is the development of the character Amélie-the-writer. Nothomb depicts in multiple accounts her character Amélie's coming to writing, a process that mirrors her nostalgia for the tube-like identity of her prelinguistic self and her perceived divinity during her childhood in Japan, as well as her desire to return to the womb. This article considers first the characteristics that are associated with Amélie's childhood, her sense of a divine and mythic self, secondly the various scenes in Nothomb's autofictional novels in which the narrator Amélie experiences a moment of death and rebirth through violence at sea, and, finally, how the character Amélie achieves, to some extent, the desired return to the ideal of childhood through the creation of a fictional self in her writing.
Hall, Elizabeth Berglund. “Reading Postponed: Hesitating on Hélène Cixous’s Or, les Lettres de Mon Père”. Women in French Studies, vol. 4, no. Special Issue 2012, 2012, pp. 184-1 94.