Chawaf, Chantal (b. 1948). First published by Éditions des Femmes in 1974 with Retable: la rêverie, Chawaf has produced more than a dozen texts. Her highly elaborated ‘écriture du corps’ brings into language areas of pre-verbal experience which have been cut off from language in the Cartesian separation of mind and body. Blé de semences (1976) draws on myth and fairy-tale to explore in archetypal terms the drama of the adolescent girl's ambiguous attachment to the mother. Elwina, le roman-fée (1986) satirizes an unscrupulous male publisher's attempt to exploit a young woman whose writing is literally a search for the mother.

[Elizabeth Fallaize]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.