Overview

Can fictions of desire determine real pleasures? Do texts regulate the performance of our sexual identities? In Sexuality and the Reading Encounter, Emma Wilson offers a new account of the intimate relations between reading, identity and identification. Interweaving theoretical debate with analysis of texts by Proust, Duras, Tournier and Cixous, her study reveals the formative potential and transferential pleasures of the reading encounter. Drawing on an understanding of identity as performative, alienated and fictitious, this study argues that the fictions we read act as mirrors and decoys displaying seductive images of intelligible sexual identities. The texts chosen for discussion here draw attention to the strategies by which identity is constructed textually. They work thus to frame the reading encounter and to highlight its formative power. In analysis of these texts, this study works to cut across the axes of homosexuality and heterosexuality, offering an alternative focus on the independence of fantasy and identity.

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9780198158851

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Her astute judgments about the four authors illuminate their difficult texts. --Choice<br>

Her astute judgments about the four authors illuminate their difficult texts. --Choice

`a highly intelligent, up-to-date, well-informed study ... Wilson skilfully moves through the writings of several theorists, paying homage or disagreeing ... she is always resourceful, and often insightful, in her interpretations. Her readings are astute on all four writers.' Times Literary Supplement `Sexuality and the Reading Encounter is a highly intelligent, up-to-date, well-informed study ... Wilson skilfully moves through the writings of several theorists, paying homage or disagreeing ... she is resourceful, and often insightful, in her interpretations.' Times Literary Supplement `Wilson's use of Butler's rereading of Lacan to describe the formative and yet not normative power of certain fictions over their readers is thoroughly convincing. Her prose style in rich and precise. ... The book is impeccably researched and written with evidently painstaking care. It should significantly advance debate about the intertwining of reading, desire, and identity in French fiction since modernism, and should be on the reading lists of all undergraduates following courses that include the texts and authors on which it focuses.' MLR, 92.3, 1997

Wilson's use of Butler's rereading of Lacan to describe the formative and yet not normative power of certain fictions over their readers is thoroughly convincing. Her prose style in rich and precise. ... The book is impeccably researched and written with evidently painstaking care. It should significantly advance debate about the intertwining of reading, desire, and identity in French fiction since modernism, and should be on the reading lists of all undergraduates following courses that include the texts and authors on which it focuses. * MLR, 92.3, 1997 * Sexuality and the Reading Encounter is a highly intelligent, up-to-date, well-informed study ... Wilson skilfully moves through the writings of several theorists, paying homage or disagreeing ... she is resourceful, and often insightful, in her interpretations. * Times Literary Supplement * a highly intelligent, up-to-date, well-informed study ... Wilson skilfully moves through the writings of several theorists, paying homage or disagreeing ... she is always resourceful, and often insightful, in her interpretations. Her readings are astute on all four writers. * Times Literary Supplement *

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