Presented by Dr Leslie Barnes as part of the SLLL Literary Studies Seminar Series

This paper examines questions of truth and ownership in relation to fiction and autofiction through a study of a recent plagiarism scandal involving two French authors, Camille Laurens and Marie Darrieussecq. In 2007, shortly after the publication of Darrieussecq’s Tom est mort, a first-person novel recounting a woman’s despair after the sudden death of her young son, Laurens published a scathing article in La Revue littéraire in which she accused Darrieussecq of ‘psychic plagiarism’. In 1995, Laurens had published Philippe, a work of autofiction in which she relayed the trauma of losing her own infant son just hours after his birth. Not only had Darrieussecq’s novel, she insisted, been subtly but very obviously modelled on her own narrative; in writing the novel, Darrieussecq had claimed a story that was not hers to tell. In their very public feud—a feud that took place not only in the press, but also in their subsequent publications—Laurens and Darrieussecq offer timely reflections on conflict, vulnerability, and the work of literature today.

Leslie Barnes is Lecturer in French Studies at the Australian National University and author of Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). She specializes in 20th- and 21st-century French and francophone literature and film, with particular emphasis on Southeast Asia. Her research interests include contemporary metafiction, immigrant writers and minority discourse, and narrative constructions of the Southeast Asian sex worker industry. She has published her research in French Forum, French Cultural Studies, and Journal of Vietnamese Studies.

Image: 'Seated child' - Egon Schiele