The Evolution of Epistolary Matter in the Works of Marguerite Duras: Aurélia Steiner or the Destruction of the Letter

Abstract

The presence of the epistolary material in Marguerite Duras’s literary work evolves from its canonical definition as a means of communication to its progressive problematization. In Aurélia Steiner (1979) the letter becomes the enunciation device of the narrative to materialize its destruction: the epistolary sender becomes an I emptied of ipseity who writes to an impossible addressee. Both the call-invocation of the absent and the identity search fail. After this literary limit-experience, the epistolary material revives in the autobiographical space to generate its hybridization: with direct dialogue style in L'Homme atlantique and with narrative in Yann Andréa Steiner