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...

'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...

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...

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...

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...

"'In Search of Lost Time' is widely recognized as the major novel of the twentieth century." —Harold Bloom "At once the last great classic of French epic prose tradition and the towering precursor of the 'nouveau roman'." —Bengt Holmqvist "Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!" —Virginia Woolf "The greatest fiction to date." —W. Somerset Maugham "Proust is the greatest novelist of the 20th century." —Graham ...

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...

The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and—finally—the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse, a sen...

Swann's Way, by Marcel Proust.

This book analyses Irene Némirovsky’s literary production in its relationship to the literary and cultural context of the inter-war period in France. It examines topics of central importance to our understanding of the literary field in France in the period, such as: the close relationship between politics and literature; the historical, political, cultural and personal legacies of the First World War; the so-called ‘crisis of the novel’ and the attempt to create and develop new narrative ...