La mise en scène de soi dans les essais de Linda Lê

This article examines Linda Lê’s essays as a site for the construction of her authorial ethos. Drawing on five collections of essays, it argues that these texts constitute less a critical discourse on literature than a metadiscourse in which reflection on works and writers simultaneously becomes a reflection on the self. Mobilizing the concepts of ethos, authorial image, and literary posture, the study identifies several authorial figures: the reader shaped by the memory of books, the critic for whom literature is an experience of lucidity, and the writer who defines herself within an imagined community of authors marked by exile and alterity. Portraits of writers thus function as mediations through which the essayist indirectly elaborates her own figure and negotiates her literary identity.