The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this, the first study of this significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies. -- .

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this, the first study of this significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies.

I was normal. Completely normal. Apart from the fact that I haven't spoken for seven years, and that I'm obsessed with solving crimes I find in newspapers. So there I was, minding my own business and leading my perfectly "normal" life, when the leader of a youth gang decided to break into my house, steal my salad and, oh yeah, kidnap me. Great! Just great! ******* WINNER OF THE "MOST CREATIVE PLOT AWARD" AT THE 2013 SKOW AWARDS *******

In this accessible guide, Victoria Best explores the turbulent twentieth century in France through its literature, introducing the works that created fresh perspectives on the human condition in an age of rapid change and insecurity. Challenging and experimental, modern French writing reflects the problems of a culture transformed by sophisticated theoretical inquiry and violent historical events. Preoccupied with finding ways to express new extremes of experience, twentieth-century texts dramatise the realisation that stories provide a significant means of making sense of the world. The book provides an overview of the key literary movements and the major writers of prose, poetry and drama, from great novelists such as Proust, to great thinkers like Sartre, by way of controversial figures such as Genet, Beckett and Marguerite Duras.

This comparative study of the work of Colette and Marguerite Duras analyses the complex and intricate links between identity and narrative, and challenges recent theoretical discussion in both literary and psychoanalytic domains. Exploring the textual preoccupations that Colette and Duras shared -- in particular their concerns with gender relations, with the genesis of the woman writer, and with the fraught but fascinating bonds between mothers and daughters and lovers -- this analysis highlights how the profoundly different perspectives of Colette and Duras mark out space for a new interrelation of self and other; an interrelation that emphasises the enigmatic territories of consciousness such as fantasy and memory, and the significant collision of subjectivities in erotic, desiring and familial relations. Working with the most recent and innovative developments in performative theory and Kristevan psychoanalysis, this book offers a new reading of subjectivity through the creative interplay of theory and text.