The mother tongue of love and loss : Albert Cohen's "Le livre de ma mère"
- This article reads Albert Cohen's "Le Livre de ma mère", which mourns the death of his mother, as a poetics of love and loss. It is a poetics of otherness that disavows the claim to expression and selfhood. The mother, being the paradigmatic figure of otherness, is a figure for literature, a form of language that is characterized by saying things differently. Literature itself is a motherly space insofar as it others the language of the self. This argument is developed along close readings of both the French original and the English translation of Cohen's work, following three thematic axes: first, the peculiar kinship of love and death; second, the mother as the other; third, literature as filio-logy: a logic of filiation that does not leave the self unchanged.
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| Author: | Caroline SauterGND |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-755999 |
| URL: | https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-26/sauter_mother-tongue-of-love-and-loss.pdf |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-26_8 |
| ISBN: | 978-3-96558-050-3 |
| ISBN: | 978-3-96558-051-0 |
| ISBN: | 978-3-96558-049-7 |
| ISSN: | 2627-731X |
| Parent Title (English): | Untying the mother tongue / ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo ; Cultural Inquiry ; 26 |
| Publisher: | ICI Press |
| Place of publication: | Berlin |
| Document Type: | Part of a Book |
| Language: | English |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2023/09/11 |
| Year of first Publication: | 2023 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2023/09/21 |
| Tag: | Death; Love; Mother; Mother tongue |
| GND Keyword: | Cohen, Albert; Le livre de ma mère; Tod <Motiv>; Liebe <Motiv>; Mutter <Motiv>; Muttersprache |
| Page Number: | 15 |
| First Page: | 165 |
| Last Page: | 179 |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 512765693 |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik |
| 8 Literatur / 84 Französische und verwandte Literaturen / 840 Literaturen romanischer Sprachen; Französische Literatur | |
| Sammlungen: | CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft |
| CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft / ICI Berlin | |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - CC BY-SA - Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 4.0 International |
