1997 Articles

Graffigny’s Writing Subject: Language and Identity in the Lettres d’une Péruvienne

Dobie, Madeleine

This account of Graffigny's epistemology represents a seminal contribution to the study of this text - indeed it has become something of a critical commonplace to contrast the embodiment of subjective experience in the Lettres d'une Péruvienne to more conventionally rationalistic and abstract Enlightenment strategies for criticizing ethnocentrism. I would like to argue that although Graffigny's Lettres are indeed marked by philosophical sensualism, it is important to consider
another current of the text's epistemology, which carries somewhat different critical implications: the representation of language as the medium of experience.