India Song Criticism

This Study Guide consists of approximately 26 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of India Song.

India Song Criticism

This Study Guide consists of approximately 26 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of India Song.
This section contains 432 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the India Song Study Guide

India Song is hailed as an experimental feminist text that simultaneously critiques colonial culture, women's status in society, and representations of the female body. Feminist critics make much of the fact that all of the voices in the play/film are disembodied and that the characters are seen as physical bodies devoid of direct dialogue. This experimental technique is regarded as a critique of traditional representations of women. As Gabrielle H. Cody, in Impossible Performances remarks:

Duras's drama consistently features female protagonists who exist in a relationship of struggle with the representational frame and who "speak back" to the viewing authorities of a masculine symbolic.

Critics are also impressed with Duras's complex use of "offstage" sounds in India Song. Lib Taylor in "Sound Tracks" observes that

The verbal text is woven into a complex, orchestrated soundscape of instrumental music, songs, non-verbal cries and utterances, screams of...

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This section contains 432 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the India Song Study Guide
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India Song from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.