Onze Mille

Forbidden Fictions

‘Phillips discusses texts by Apollinaire, Pierre Loüys, Georges Bataille, Pauline Réage, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Tony Duvert, Elizabeth Barillé and Marie Darrieussecq, engaging in different levels of critical analysis so as to emphasize intertextual and parodic elements in one case, or points of possible identification in another.’ TLS French culture has long been perceived by the English-speaking reader as somehow more ‘erotic’ than its Anglo-Saxon equivalent. Forbidden Fictions is the first English-language study devoted exclusively to the wide spectrum of French literary pornography in the twentieth century. John Phillips provides a broad history of the genre and the associated moral and political issues. Among the texts examined in detail – all selected for their literary or sociopolitical importance – are landmark works by Apollinaire, Louÿs, Bataille, Réage, Robbe-Grillet, Arsan, and Duvert. Phillips challenges current politically correct trends in literary criticism and stereotyped censoring discourses about pornography to provide a new reading of each text and to illustrate the genre’s potential for social subversion. Forbidden Fictions addresses the most controversial issues of contemporary sexual politics, such as objectification, sadomasochism, homoeroticism and paedophilia, with particular emphasis on the feminist debate on pornography. In the light of current controversy over the control of pornography, this is a timely and scholarly review of the ethical, moral and social arguments surrounding the censorship of sexually explicit material.

French Basic Course Units 1-12 Revised

Speech and Sociability at French Urban Marketplaces

This study is both particularistic and generalizing. At one level it can be seen as an investigation of French urban marketplaces as systems of communication, with a microscopic examination of verbal interaction and sociability patterns in a specific cultural setting. At another level it constitutes an attempt to show some relationships between the ethnography of communication, urban anthropology and symbolic interactionism: all three lines of inquiry converge here to highlight the social and symbolic dimensions of traditional street markets in modern urban France, with primary focus on the role of speech in sociability. A major source of inspiration is interactional sociolinguistics which considers language as an activity performed by social actors for specific purposes.