The Transformation of the Subject is a comparative study, written in French, spanning three literary-historical periods — the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. At once, it is an inquiry into three authors, their distinct habitus, professions, and modes of memoir writing, as well as the roles they inhabit within their respective social orders: François-René de Chateaubriand as soldier and aristocrat, Montesquieu as magistrate and nobleman, and Jean-Paul Sartre as an engaged intellectual and writer.
Ultimately, the work is shaped by a perspective that remains acutely aware of its own positionality: it is a reading of male-authored texts articulated through a distinctly female gaze. In this sense, it seeks not merely to interpret the formation of the subject across time, but to reframe it — subtly displacing the traditional male gaze with a reflective, critical, and self-conscious women’s gaze.