Wow! eBook
The Pleasures of the Text: Violette Leduc and Reader Seduction
Author(s): Elizabeth Locey (Author)
- Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
- Publication Date: 1 Jan. 2002
- Language: English
- Print length: 176 pages
- ISBN-10: 0742515265
- ISBN-13: 9780742515260
Book Description
Why was Violette Leduc’s 1954 novel Thérèse et Isabelle not published in its entirety until November 2000? Under threat of scandal and obsenity charges, French publisher Gallimard withheld the novel, but Leduc continued to write of her life as a woman writer in wartime Paris, frankly depicting her own and imagined lesbian experiences. Mentored by Simone de Beauvoir and a contemporary of French twentieth-century luminaries Sartre, Camus, Genet, and Cocteau, Leduc is, however, known best as France’s great unknown writer. In The Pleasures of the Text, Elizabeth Locey restores Leduc to her rightful place in the canon, bringing to light her singular and important contributions to contemporary literary theory. Locey reads Leduc’s works from the perspective of reader seduction, which erodes the divide between body and text. Situating Leduc within a continuum with Emma Bovary and Roland Barthes at its extremes, Locey investigates Leduc’s use of the erotic touch, look, and voice to seduce her readers. More than an accessible introduction to an overlooked writer, The Pleasures of the Text confronts and challenges the philosophical debate between pornography and erotica and pins down some of the often slippery ways pleasure is mapped onto the body of the reader.
Editorial Reviews
Review
In her timely, accessible study, Locey examines the narrative and stylistic strategies Vilette Leduc employs in her works to reach, if not seduce, her reader emotionally an dpsychosomatically and thereby actualize her own salvation through literature. . . this volume should renew interest in Leduc. ― The French Review
The Pleasures of the Text is a quite original and interesting study, which will make a significant contribution to the field of Leduc scholarship. The line and focus it takes is new. . . . It will appeal to, and be of great use to, undergraduate and postgraduate readers alike, as well as Leduc scholars and devotees of Leduc’s work―it has a sustained theoretical base but is highly accessible. — Alex Hughes, University of Birmingham
About the Author
Elizabeth Locey is assistant professor of French at Emporia State University.
