From two world wars to rapid industrialization and population shifts, events of the twentieth century have engendered cultural anxieties to an extent hitherto unseen, particularly in Europe. In Telling Anxiety, Jennifer Willging examines manifestations of such anxiety in the selected narratives of four women writing in French ��Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Anne H矇bert. Willging demonstrates that the anxieties inherent in these women�� works (whether attributed to characters, narrators, or implied authors) are multiple in nature and relate to a general post-Second World War scepticism about the power of language to express non-linguistic phenomena, such as the destruction and loss of life that a large portion of Europe endured during that period.
Willging maintains that, while these women writers are profoundly wary of language and its artificiality, they eschew the radical linguistic skepticism of many post-war male writers and theorists. Rather, Willging argues, the anxieties that these four writers express stem less from a loss of faith in language�� referential function than from a culturally ingrained doubt about their own ability, as women, to make language reflect certain realities. Ultimately, Telling Anxiety reveals the crippling obstacles of literary agency for women in the twentieth century from the perspective of those who fully understood the awesome responsibility of their work.
