The Malady of Death

Sharon A. Willis (Essay Date 1989)

SOURCE: Willis, Sharon A. "Staging Sexual Difference: Reading, Recitation, and Repetition in Duras' Malady of Death. "In Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, edited by Enoch Brater, pp. 109-25. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Willis examines Duras's treatment of sexual difference as a site of resistance within her novel Malady of Death.

Duras is hardly a "new" woman playwright. She first published in 1943; her accelerated output in recent years has roughly coincided with her first widespread popular reception in the United States as well as in France. Nor is she primarily known for her dramatic productions, at least in the English-speaking world. Rather, her theater has tended to arise as a consequence of her other literary work, in critical reformulations that change the stress of problems...