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The subject of this original and provocative work is the white male
body, a counterpoint in gender studies to the many readings of the
representation of the female body. To look at the construction of
this figure, the author examines a group of discontinuous works
that are representative of the discontinuity in the intermittent
representation of the male body.
Especially in nineteenth-century narrative, where Edgar Allan Poe
and Guy de Maupassant write astutely on the subject, there is never
continuity in representing the male body. "The Pit and the
Pendulum" and "Bel-Ami" are flickering, episodic investigations
into the male body as subject, as sentient feeling, as the subject
of torture or of adulation. Not until the twentieth century can
this male subject be continuously represented. Though the male body
is often at center stage, in works that treat it as a metonymy of
its own phallic and phallocentric power, this body has less often
been seen relative to pleasure and pain, to aesthetics, to human
vulnerability.
An introductory chapter explores a work by Alberto Moravia, "Io e
lui," as well as various manifestations of the male body's most
salient part, the penis, in contemporary discourse and aesthetics.
Another chapter deals with writings about the forbidden activity of
masturbation and focuses on the work of three disparate writers:
Paul Bonnetain, Michel Tournier, and Philip Roth.
In the final chapter, the author discusses several works that focus
on the representation of the male body during the gay liberation
movement in France and the subsequent celebration of the male body,
ending with the inscription of the male body in the literature of
AIDS. Among the authors discussed are Guy Hocquenghem, Herve
Guibert, and Michel Foucault.
The subject of this original and provocative work is the white male
body, a counterpoint in gender studies to the many readings of the
representation of the female body. To look at the construction of
this figure, the author examines a group of discontinuous works
that are representative of the discontinuity in the intermittent
representation of the male body.
Especially in nineteenth-century narrative, where Edgar Allan Poe
and Guy de Maupassant write astutely on the subject, there is never
continuity in representing the male body. "The Pit and the
Pendulum" and "Bel-Ami" are flickering, episodic investigations
into the male body as subject, as sentient feeling, as the subject
of torture or of adulation. Not until the twentieth century can
this male subject be continuously represented. Though the male body
is often at center stage, in works that treat it as a metonymy of
its own phallic and phallocentric power, this body has less often
been seen relative to pleasure and pain, to aesthetics, to human
vulnerability.
An introductory chapter explores a work by Alberto Moravia, "Io e
lui," as well as various manifestations of the male body's most
salient part, the penis, in contemporary discourse and aesthetics.
Another chapter deals with writings about the forbidden activity of
masturbation and focuses on the work of three disparate writers:
Paul Bonnetain, Michel Tournier, and Philip Roth.
In the final chapter, the author discusses several works that focus
on the representation of the male body during the gay liberation
movement in France and the subsequent celebration of the male body,
ending with the inscription of the male body in the literature of
AIDS. Among the authors discussed are Guy Hocquenghem, Herve
Guibert, and Michel Foucault.
French Food offers a smorgasbord of topics on cuisine in modern France, from the invention of French cuisine in the early 1800s to the McDonaldization of that national emblem, the French fry. The editors uses discrete moments in French history to illuminate the intersection of food, nationality, and culture: the origin of modern French gastronomy, the role of food in literature and films from Proust and Colette to detective fiction, public and private meals at the end of the nineteenth century, and the fusion of international cuisines at the turn of this century.
French Food offers a smorgasbord of topics on cuisine in modern France, from the invention of French cuisine in the early 1800s to the McDonaldization of that national emblem, the French fry. The editors uses discrete moments in French history to illuminate the intersection of food, nationality, and culture: * the origin of modern French gastronomy * the role of food in literature and films from Proust and Colette to detective fiction * public and private meals at the end of the nineteenth century and * the fusion of international cuisines at the turn of this century.
This collection of fifteen essays deals with the representations,
theories, and problematics of homosexuality in French writing of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though focusing on
literature, it also includes other self-conscious writing, such as
medical discourse and lexicography. The authors examine how
homosexuality is a component in the representation of ideology,
desire, and structures in the nineteenth century, and how, in the
twentieth century, homosexuality emerges in its own right as a
subject for representation and study.
Drawn from insights of the past twenty years, the essays reflect
the renewed approach of gender and sexuality as they relate to
homosexuality and its representation, and they rely on models that
differentiate between sexuality and gender and between natural
inclinations and social constructs. Despite the wide variety of
subjects, critical positions, and authors' backgrounds, what these
essays have in common is the willingness of the contributors to go
beyond a set of rhetorics, a set of limitations that were a
defining moment in the struggle of gay liberation, and its
reflection in both creative and critical writing.
The essays are the product of a new stage in the development of
gender studies: a look at all the genders, a recognition of a
completely destabilized system of genders and sexes, a privileging
of the slippages, ambiguities, and tropings among these positions.
The essays range from studies of traditional narrative and poetry
to readings of medical records, from examinations of
twentieth-century narratives of gay liberation to readings of
gender in the post-colonial world. For that reason, the editors
have given the collection the title "Articulation of Difference,"
for in that title, beyond gender and genre, is the idea of new
production, new worlds, and new ideas.
Realist novels are usually seen as verisimilar representations of
the world, and even when that verisimilitude is critically examined
(as it has been by Marxist and feminist critics), the criticism has
referred to extra-literary matters, such as bourgeois ideology or
defects in the portrayal of women. This book takes as its thesis
that the point defining realism is the point at which the processes
of representation break down, a sort of black hole of textuality, a
rent in the tissue.
The author argues that our notions of continuity, of readability,
of representability, or our ideas about unity and ideological
shift--or even our notions of what is hidden, occulted, or
absent--all come from the nineteenth-century realist model itself.
Instead of assuming representability, the author argues that we
should look at places where the texts do not continue the
representationalist model, where there is a sudden falling off, an
abyss. Instead of seeing that point as a shortcoming, the author
argues that it is equal to the mimetic successes of representation.
After an initial chapter dealing with the limits and ruptures of
textuality, the book considers the work of Stendhal, from its early
state as a precursor to the later realism to "La Chartreuse de
Parme," which shows how the act of communication for Stendhal is
always made of silences, gaps, and interruptions. The author then
reads several works of Balzac, showing how he, while setting up the
praxes of continuity on which his oeuvre depends, ruptures the
works at various strategic points. In a chapter entitled "Romantic
Interruptions," works of Nerval and the younger Dumas, seemingly
unrelated to the realist project, are shown to be marked by the
ideological, representational, and semiotic assumptions that
produced Balzac.
The book concludes with Flaubert, looking both at how Flaubert
incessantly makes things "unfit" and how critics, even the most
perspicacious postmodern ones, often try to smooth over the
permanent crisis of rupture that is the sign of Flaubert's writing.
This book focuses on the extension of realist writing toward
alterity, toward otherness, in its ongoing efforts to enable
individuals to speak and be heard correctly. Through a series of
close readings of six authors from Balzac to Proust, the author
shows the ways realist narrative engages the problem of bringing
the other into the realm of the discursively representable. The
acts of representation involved in that development were not
necessarily coterminous with either the representation of the
exotic and its attendant stereotypes or with the representation of
individuals themselves. The representation of the other was the
extension of discourse to what was previously unrepresentable. The
author argues that the unrepresentable is often perceived as
oppositional because of the structuring of discourse by hierarchies
and metaphysics, whereby any bivalent pair is made into an
oppositional pair.
This collection of fifteen essays deals with the representations,
theories, and problematics of homosexuality in French writing of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though focusing on
literature, it also includes other self-conscious writing, such as
medical discourse and lexicography. The authors examine how
homosexuality is a component in the representation of ideology,
desire, and structures in the nineteenth century, and how, in the
twentieth century, homosexuality emerges in its own right as a
subject for representation and study.
Drawn from insights of the past twenty years, the essays reflect
the renewed approach of gender and sexuality as they relate to
homosexuality and its representation, and they rely on models that
differentiate between sexuality and gender and between natural
inclinations and social constructs. Despite the wide variety of
subjects, critical positions, and authors' backgrounds, what these
essays have in common is the willingness of the contributors to go
beyond a set of rhetorics, a set of limitations that were a
defining moment in the struggle of gay liberation, and its
reflection in both creative and critical writing.
The essays are the product of a new stage in the development of
gender studies: a look at all the genders, a recognition of a
completely destabilized system of genders and sexes, a privileging
of the slippages, ambiguities, and tropings among these positions.
The essays range from studies of traditional narrative and poetry
to readings of medical records, from examinations of
twentieth-century narratives of gay liberation to readings of
gender in the post-colonial world. For that reason, the editors
have given the collection the title "Articulation of Difference,"
for in that title, beyond gender and genre, is the idea of new
production, new worlds, and new ideas.
Provocative, subtle, polemical, reasoned, contentious, witty--this
is one of the first works to bring the insights of American gender
studies and queer theory to modern French literature. It focuses on
the complex relations among narrative, theory, interpretation, and
homosexuality in the work of Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, Michel
Tournier, and Renaud Camus.
Focusing on works by Rene Crevel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes,
and Herve Guibert, this book studies how the figures of
homosexuality function at the limits of narrative, as part of the
deep structure of narrative, and at the border between public and
private discourse. The first three chapters follow the difference
between inside and outside, between public and private, between
what is known and what can only be surmised. The homosexual Rene
Crevel, who is both inside Surrealism and outside it, forces us to
reread the marginalized figure of homosexuality in Surrealism.
Crevel is discussed in light of his most important work, Mon corps
et moi, a sustained effort to negotiate the problems of public and
private personae. Long before concentrating on Jean Genet,
Jean-Paul Sartre often turned to the subject of homosexuality in
his writings of the 1930s and 1940s. The figures and forms of
homosexuality in Sartre's work are shown to relate to a
phenomenology of perception, to a persistence of the relation
between vision and knowledge, and to a set of narrative ploys that
put Sartre's own relation to homosexuality in a new light. The last
of these three chapters focuses on Roland Barthes, with a
retrospective glance at Andre Gide, through an examination of their
travel and confessional writings. Discourses of homosexuality are
related to discourse about social power, dominant structures, and a
model of colonialism. The final chapter examines the AIDS-related
works of Herve Guibert, which are both a meditation on and an
exploration of AIDS, that most public of private phenomena. It also
examines the changing relation between public and private, between
the outside world and Guibert's innerworld, and between the
singularity of literary writing and the nomothetic nature of the
public document, all of which change in a world and in an
individual affected by AIDS.
Subversions of Verisimilitude focuses on the ways in which a number
of French literary narratives written in the realist tradition show
a dynamic balance between the desire of the author/narrator to
present a verisimilar world and the need for aesthetic balance.
While the works studied-narratives by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola,
Colette, Proust, and Sartre-range over the course of a century,
from 1835 to 1938, they share a perspective on the relations
between and the need to engage questions of realist verisimilitude
and narrative interest and aesthetics. The book discusses some of
the subversive paths taken in realism and, specifically, in
canonical narratives solidly anchored in the tradition. The goal
here is to analyze these realist texts, regardless of the narrative
mode chosen, in order to see the deviations and detours from
realism, mostly for aesthetic ends.The book contributes to our
understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative and
furthers our knowledge of the ways in which critical theory
illuminates such canonical works.
This book is a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly.
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