Reading Duras Otherwise: TV, Translation, and Lost Texts

Abstract:Drawing on a new archival discovery, this article revises the literary history of Marguerite Duras' Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) to situate its origins as a television screenplay for American audiences. It offers the first comparative analysis of the American screenplay and the French novel, situates this comparison within the wider context of televisual technologies that emerged in France and the US in the postwar decades, and explores Duras' ambivalence about visual culture and new media. The essay concludes by theorizing the connection between the novel's central trope of loss and the screenplay's status as a lost text.