The Pleasures of the Text: Violette Leduc and Reader Seduction

by Elizabeth Locey

Why was Violette Leduc's 1954 novel Thérèse et Isabelle not published in its entirety until November 2000? Under threat of scandal and obsenity charges, French publisher Gallimard withheld the novel, but Leduc continued to write of her life as a woman writer in wartime Paris, frankly depicting her own and imagined lesbian experiences. Mentored by Simone de Beauvoir and a contemporary of French twentieth-century luminaries Sartre, Camus, Genet, and Cocteau, Leduc is, however, known best as France's great unknown writer.

In The Pleasures of the Text, Elizabeth Locey restores Leduc to her rightful place in the canon, bringing to light her singular and important contributions to contemporary literary theory. Locey reads Leduc's works from the perspective of reader seduction, which erodes the divide between body and text. Situating Leduc within a continuum with Emma Bovary and Roland Barthes at its extremes, Locey investigates Leduc's use of the erotic touch, look, and voice to seduce her readers. More than an accessible introduction to an overlooked writer, The Pleasures of the Text confronts and challenges the philosophical debate between pornography and erotica and pins down some of the often slippery ways pleasure is mapped onto the body of the reader.

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2002

Reviews

[Meli · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking forward to this book for a long time, so this is a disappointment. This text reads like an analysis written for an AP lit class where the author is trying to meet a word count and sound smart, and the result is stifled and messy. I think there could be something here in terms of content if the writing didn’t bring so much attention to itself.

The merit in this book is that it helps resuscitate the work of Violette Leduc from near oblivion and reassert her rightful place in the French and lesbian literary canon.