Lexington Books Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Le: Imagining the Ideal Reader (After the Empire: The Francophone World & 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. Review Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê is a remarkable analysis of the literary writing of Linda Lê in its sustained construction of intertextual relations with other thinkers, artists, poets, and writers including those established with the Austrian poet, Ingeborg Bachman. Kurmann's book will mark an enduring contribution to the ways in which Lê is viewed, understood and analyzed by scholars and taught in our classrooms as well as to French studies, more generally. Her exemplary scholarship, careful attention to textual detail, and insightful, often brilliant close readings will provide a model for those who are certain to follow in the fertile path she here opens.--Jane Bradley Winston, Northwestern University Scholars have recognized the vast intertextual network that subtends Linda Lê's fiction, but Kurmann is the first to give it the sustained attention it deserves. Engaging and deeply researched, her book is a welcome addition to a growing body of criticism that sees Lê's work as mediating between postcolonial and modernist literatures, allowing for fruitful reinterpretations of both.--Leslie Barnes, The Austrailian National University Intertextuality is particularly integral to Linda Le^'s oeuvre, and more studies exploring in detail the multidirectional web of influences operating in Le^'s writing are long overdue.... [W]ell researched, intelligent, and at times elegant, this book enriches our understanding of these important writers, and takes Le^ studies beyond familiar themes of exile, loss, and postcolonialism to a timely recognition of her implicit feminist ethics.--French Studies About the Author Alexandra Kurmann researches and lectures in French and Francophone studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.