Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. What if the mere attempt at expression was bound to misfire, to efface the truth of that ineluctable something?In Someone, Michael Lucey considers characters from twentieth-century French literary texts whose sexual forms prove difficult to conceptualize or represent. The characters expressing these "misfit" sexualities gravitate towards same-sex encounters. Yet they diffe...

Michael Lucey offers a linguistic anthropological analysis of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.What happens when we talk? This deceptively simple question is central to Marcel Proust's monumental novel In Search of Lost Time. Both Proust's narrator and the novel that houses him devote considerable energy to investigating not just what people are saying or doing when they talk, but also what happens socioculturally through their us...

Never Say I reveals the centrality of representations of sexuality, and particularly same-sex sexual relations, to the evolution of literary prose forms in twentieth-century France. Rethinking the social and literary innovation of works by Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Colette, Michael Lucey considers these writers’ production of a first-person voice in which matters related to same-sex sexuality could be spoken of. He shows how their writings and careers took on political and so...

A personal and philosophical reflection on the question of old age as a limit concept of Western thought.A few years ago, Didier Eribon’s mother entered a retirement home. Over the course of several months, she lost her physical and cognitive autonomy, and despite his resistance, Eribon and his brothers were compelled to place her in a nursing home. The doctor had warned that she’d rapidly decline. And indeed, refusing the degradation and humiliation of her conditi...

What kind of future would the utopian idea of unlimited green energy bring about? On the Grid, based on Michael Warner's Berkeley Tanner Lectures, raises critical questions about the sharp turn in environmental thought which addresses climate change through the form of a new power grid, driven by renewable energy and the goal to "electrify everything." Environmental thought increasingly centers infrastructure, particularly the goal of a decarbonized electrical grid. The aim is unl...

'the metamorphosis of Monsieur de Charlus into a new person was so complete that... everything which had appeared incoherent to me until then, was becoming intelligible, and self-evident' The fourth volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time extends the protagonist's journey of discovery into the social world of fin-de-siècle France. As the biblically inflected title, Sodom and Gomorrah, suggests, however, this world has taken on a new colouring. Through a...

A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an extraordinary set of reflections on “the gay question” by Didier Eribon, one of France’s foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a pathbreaking biography of Michel Foucault, Eribon is a leading voice in French gay studies. In explorations of gay subjectivity as it is lived now and as it has been expressed in literary history and in the life and work o...

In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) created a universe teeming with over two thousand characters. The Misfit of the Family reveals how Balzac, in imagining the dense, vividly rendered social world of his novels, used his writing as a powerful means to understand and analyze—as well as represent—a range of forms of sexuality. Moving away from the many psychoanalytic approaches to the novelist's work, Michael Lucey contends that in order to grasp th...

'the social kaleidoscope was shifting' The Guermantes Way, the third volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, provides a transition from the realm of adolescence into the adult social world of Belle Epoque Paris. Its pages buzz with worldly conversations, with bravado and posturing, infatuation, scandal, prejudice, and intrigue. To the fore is Proust's ear for spoken language and how it provides a stage for human foibles as well as inventiveness ...

'I was at one of those periods in youth--vacant, without any particular love object--when, like a lover seeing his beloved in all things, we desire, we seek, we see Beauty everywhere.' In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom, the second volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), is a novel of exploration and (self-) discovery, continuing the story of the narrator's youth and adolescence. From the enclosed spaces of the fin-de-siècle social wo...

'The memory of a particular image is only regret for a particular moment...' The Swann Way is the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. The work is a portal to Proust's novel and an introduction to its unforgettable first-person narrator-protagonist. Immersed in themes of time, memory, identity, art, sensation, love, and jealousy, the narrator embarks on the story of hi...

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels.In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhls...