Naomi Segal

André Gide's sexuality was explicitly central to everything he wrote. This text offers a contribution to debates in gender, feminist and queer theory, examining images of pedagogy, pederasty, reproductive fantasy in the writings of Gide.

Pederasty and Pedagogy

André Gide

The body is an emissary. We know little of our own feelings or the feelings of others, but that ignorance is mediated through our organ of touch, the skin. The term 'consensuality' stands for the co-presence of perceptions on the skin, which is the backcloth to sensation and thought. If the intelligence of the body is the basis of both sense and consent, consensuality also has to do with human relations based on the sense of touch, particularly the mother-child couple and the relation of desire, love and loss. This book touches on a range of cultural figures including Gide, Princess Diana, Kafka, Gautier and Rilke, and such films asGattaca, The Talented Mr Ripley, Being John Malkovich, The Piano and The Truman Show, together with theories of the caress, phantom limbs and replacement children. Connecting all these is the work of psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, who wrote on group psychology, psychodrama, psychic envelopes, creativity and thought; he also published a study of May '68 written from the heart of Nanterre. He was analysed by Lacan, not knowing at the time that the latter had treated Anzieu's mother. HisLe Moi-peau (The Skin-ego) shows how the psychic skin holds, protects and communicates but can also constrict or tear. If love enwraps and loss flays, how do we mourn?

Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch

Consensuality

Daniela Koleva

Researchers in the new field of literary-and-cultural studies look at social issues – especially issues of change and mobility – through the lens of literary thinking. The essays range from cultural memory and migration to electronic textuality and biopolitics.

From Literature to Cultural Literacy

This 1986 study of Manon Lescaut draws on various debates in the fields of psychoanalysis, feminism and literary criticism. It has two principal aims: to analyse this story of a young man's passion for a femme fatale as it is presented by the narrator; and to suggest ways in which feminist criticism can help explain how the text operates. The volume is in three parts. In Part I, Dr Segal offers a close reading of Manon Lescaut in which the narrator's relationship with language is the key issue. Part II considers four central themes which are present in the text's language and structure: money, the image of the woman, the concept of the double, and fatality. In the final part the author presents a feminist critique of Freud and Lacan, and develops thereby a fascinating version of the Oedipus Complex which is brought to bear on Manon Lescaut.

Feminism and Manon Lescaut

The Unintended Reader

"Narcissus and Echo" is about romantic confessional fiction, in which the woman dies and the man lives to tell "his" tale. Whether femme fatale, nun, sister, aristocrat or fallen women, she is always somehow blamed for her own destruction. What motivates the man's narrative and how does the women's voice, curiously, survive the text? Naomi Segal brings insights from feminist and psychoanalytic theory to bear on writers such as Chateaubriand, Musset, Prevost and Gautier. Running throughout this lively and provocative study are dichotomies between speech and sight, male "doubles" and female "mirror", the narcissism of nostalgia and the paradoxes of undesire.

Women in the French Récit

Narcissus and Echo

Nicholas White

Scarlet Letters explores the fascination exerted by adultery throughout the long history of western cultures. Critics from the UK, USA and Australia, working in a variety of specialisms, have contributed to this substantial new collection of close readings and wider contextualisations. As well as focusing on the bourgeois nineteenth century as the high age of representations of adultery, the book offers historicist and psychoanalytic analyses of texts ranging from the Amphitryon myth to Fatal Attraction and The Piano .

Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s

Scarlet Letters

Pendant l'été 1918, André Gide passa trois mois à Cambridge en compagnie de son jeune amant Marc Allégret. Ce séjour fut l'occasion de sa rencontre avec maints intellectuels anglais mais aussi la cause de la grande crise de son mariage, qui conduisit sa femme Madeleine à brûler toutes les lettres qu'il lui avait écrites depuis leur jeunesse. La complexité du désir chez Gide, son attitude envers les femmes et le féminin et envers la pédérastie et la pédagogie, son besoin inlassable des départs et des retours, l'exploitation du vécu dans ses oeuvres romanesques et la création de soi dans ses écrits non-fictionnels - voilà quelques-unes des matières qui sont développées dans ce livre.

Naomi Segal

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