Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Nahem Yousaf analyzes Philippe Labro’s fictionalized southern self and his portrait of southern culture in The Foreign Student (1986), which Yousaf describes as “a memoir with the texture of fiction.” Yousaf’s essay on Labro—a French journalist, writer and filmmaker—is an example of how southern culture has influenced the literary and cultural production of other countries. Through a hybrid between fiction and memoir, as Yousaf explains, Philippe Labro tells the story of his southern experience as a young student in the 1950s. At the time of globalism, this essay opens up an interesting perspective because it acknowledges the global dimension of southern culture and life-writing. Reflecting a cross-cultural approach to southern life-writing, Yousaf shows that Labro’s fictionalized southern memoir blurs the boundaries between the local and the global, and between the national and the transnational, in relation to southern culture. Yousaf defines The Foreign Student as a coming-of-age story in which Labro nostalgically looks back on the year he spent in Virginia as a student. By a subtle but conscious manipulation of his lived experiences there, Labro constructs a fictionalized younger self for whom the 1950s South represents a crucial and self-defining moment that marked the beginning of his life as a man. The discussion of Labro’s text, focusing on its southernness and on its generic status, makes Yousaf claim that The Foreign Student is precisely the “‘southern’ memoir” of Labro’s fashioning of his younger self: “Labro acts as guardian of his younger self and re-possessor of that self, nostalgically and sensually re-connecting to the vanished world of youth.”