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This study, which reads Leduc's narratives from a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective, has a double focus: - Part One scrutinizes the intricacies of her treatment of feminine bonding, seeking to bring new insights - inspired inter alia by theorists such as Melanie Klein, Freud, and Luce Irigaray - to bear on her representations of mother/daughter and lesbian relations. Part Two examines Leduc's use of language in Therese et Isabelle, probing the extent to which this novella contains examples of feminist and/or feminine discourse. By exploring Leduc' s lyrical evocation of feminine homosexuality from both a gender-related and a more traditional, formalist standpoint, the writer exposes the limitations of a purely feminist approach to her work
An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Bâtarde relates Violette Leduc’s long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women. When first published, La Bâtarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir—like that of Henry Miller, Leduc’s brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.
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This wide-ranging study looks at how the ageing process has alternately been figured in and excluded from twentieth-century French literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. It espouses a critical interdisciplinarity and calls into question the assumptions underlying much research into ageing in the social sciences, work in which the negative aspects of growing older are almost invariably suppressed. It offers a major reappraisal of Simone de Beauvoir's great but neglected late treatise, La Vieillesse, and presents the first substantial discussion of a lost documentary film about old age in which Beauvoir appears and which she helped to write, PROMENADE AU PAYS DE LA VIEILLESSE. Questioning ...
« Vingt ans après la mort de Violette Leduc (1907-1972), j’écrivais, pour la collection que dirigeaient J-M-G. Le Clézio et sa femme Jemia, et qu’animait Philippe Rey, un hommage à cet écrivain dont la découverte a été déterminante pour moi. Le principe de cette collection éphémère était de proposer un texte qui soit à la fois un portrait et une confidence intime. Il ne s’agit donc pas d’une biographie, mais du récit très personnel de mon rapport avec l’oeuvre de Violette Leduc. J’y raconte l’influence qu’elle exerça sur ma vie personnelle et ma vie de lecteur et d’écrivain. J’y analyse ses livres, en les comparant à d’autres oeuvres qui ont égaleme...
'Violette Leduc's novels are works of genius and also a bit peculiar' Deborah Levy, from the introduction An old woman lives alone in a tiny attic flat in Paris, counting out coffee beans every morning beneath the roar of the overhead metro. Starving, she spends her days walking around the city, each step a bid for recognition of her own existence. She rides crowded metro carriages to feel the warmth of other bodies, and watches the hot batter of pancakes drip from the hands of street-sellers. One morning she awakes with an urgent need to taste an orange; but when she rummages in the bins she finds instead a discarded fox fur scarf. The little fox fur becomes the key to her salvation, the fr...
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In the second remarkable volume of her life story, Leduc paints a vibrant picture of the brilliant minds around her--and the dark passions and insecurities that drove her to write. National features, reviews planned.
Two French schoolgirls discover obsessive pleasures in repressed secrets in this “masterpiece on the tyranny of love” (Independent, UK). “Violette Leduc was Simone de Beauvoir’s protege, an erotic writer to match Jean Genet and a feminist tour de force” (Rafia Zakaria, The Guardian). With this startling new translation of Leduc’s hidden classic, the groundbreaking Thérèse and Isabelle proves an authentic and liberating exploration of queer sensibilities, which still stands as “one of the greatest examples of French-Language erotic literature” ever written (Times Literary Supplement). Censored for half a century for its vivid depiction of budding female sexuality, this is th...