Gide's Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing

by Michael Lucey

Overview

In this provocative new book, Michael Lucey examines the unstable convergence of sexuality, politics, and literary commitments in Andre Gide's writing of the 1920s and 1930s, when Gide wrote most openly about his homosexuality and participated most actively in left-wing politics. Through close readings of Gide's memoirs, novels, and political tracts, Lucey interrogates both the political content of Gide's ways of reflecting on his homosexuality and the way sexuality inflected his politics.

One of the first modern writers to be "out," Gide used his writings during this period to do more than simply publicize his homosexuality. He wrote in a way that revealed sexuality as an arena where easy distinctions between public and private could be challenged. Gide's work thus addresses not only the psychoanalytic, but also the social and political foundations involved in the formation of private sexual subjectivity; further, it considers how personal, private struggles might be implicated in or lead to more public ones.

Written with precision and elan, Gide's Bent will attract readers interested in modern French literature, political and psychoanalytic literary theory, and Queer Studies, both inside and outside the academy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195080865
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/08/1995
Series:	Ideologies of Desire
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.56(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

University of California, Berkeley

Table of Contents

	Note on Translation	ix
	Introduction	3
1.	Watching Sex in Si le grain ne meurt	21
2.	The Place of the Oedipal: Writing Home from North Africa	42
3.	Corydon and L'Ecole des femmes: Mimesis, the Mantis, the Gynaeceum	68
4.	Without Delay: Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Lacan, and the Onset of Sexuality	108
5.	Gribouille en Afrique: Gide's Voyage au Congo	143
6.	Sexuality, Politics and Culture: Gide's Trip to the Soviet Union	181
	Epilogue: Queer Tears	217
	Works Cited	223
	Index	231

Editorial Reviews

"Gide's Bent is a generous as well as a deeply imaginative book. Michael Lucey brings to bear an array of theoretical skills that I would describe as dazzling, except that to dazzle is obviously the least of his intentions: the brilliance of his authorial proceeding is exceeded only by the modesty of the understated, constantly illuminating and clarifying authorial presence. This study marks a vibrant new moment in gay/lesbian and gender studies."—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Duke University

From the Publisher