Allen S. Weiss

Lawrence R. Schehr

More than a book about food alone, French Food uses diet as a window into issues of nationality, literature, and culture in France and abroad. Outstanding contributors from cultural studies, literary criticism, performance studies, and the emerging field of food studies explore a wide range of food matters.

On the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture

French Food

The first four decades of the twentieth century saw male homosexuality appear in French literature with increasing frequency and boldness. Departing from earlier, more muted presentations, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, René Crevel, Francis Carco, and a host of less-famous writers, all created overtly gay characters are gave them increasingly numerous and significant roles. Far from being simply shunned or marginalized, a number of these works were instead accepted as canonical. Lawrence Schehr's French Gay Modernism is the only study devoted to the analyzing these representations of male homosexuality in early twentieth-century French literature. Schehr explains how earlier representations of homosexuality, encoded rather than conspicuous, served as a basis for later writers to treat homosexual behavior as sets of relationships rather than as secrets or scandals. The prominence of authors such as Proust and Gide also helped other writers take up homosexual relationships in their work, often by adopting the same representational strategies. Schehr doesn't limit his study to high literary culture, however. He devotes considerable attention to popular writers whose homosexual characters encounter contempt, scorn, and worse and whose portrayals of homosexual couples and society were at once more open and more at risk.

French Gay Modernism

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 inner world, 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.

Gay Discourses in French Literature

Alcibiades at the Door

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.

Reading Narrative from Balzac to Sartre

Subversions of Verisimilitude

As traditional notions of masculinity have been called into question, representational reactions and articulations have swept postmodern cultures. Certain contemporary French cultural productions illustrate this shift in masculinities and this volume offers up the first comprehensive examination of their development. Acclaimed critic Lawrence R. Schehr analyzes AIDS narratives, mainstream films, popular novels, graphic narratives, and rightist polemics, among other genres, in order to explore the changing meaning of masculinity in French society, making this volume appealing to a broad range of researchers and students in a variety of fields.

From Neuromatrices to Seropositivity

French Post-modern Masculinities

Dominique D. Fisher

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.

Lawrence R. Schehr

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