Misfit of the Family

Lucey Michael Lucey

Description

In more than ninety novels and novellas, Honore 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 the full complexity with which sexuality was understood by Balzac, it is necessary to appreciate how he conceived of its relation to family, history, economics, law, and all the many structures within which sexualities take form.The Misfit of the Family is a compelling argument that Balzac must be taken seriously as a major inventor and purveyor of new tools for analyzing connections between the sexual and the social. Lucey's account of the novelist's deployment of "sexual misfits" to impel a wide range of his most canonical works-Cousin Pons, Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, Lost Illusions, The Girl with the Golden Eyes-demonstrates how even the flexible umbrella term "queer" barely covers the enormous diversity of erotic and social behaviors of his characters. Lucey draws on the thinking of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and engages the work of critics of nineteenth-century French fiction, including Naomi Schor, D. A. Miller, Franco Moretti, and others. His reflections on Proust as Balzac's most cannily attentive reader suggest how the lines of social and erotic force he locates in Balzac's work continued to manifest themselves in twentieth-century writing and society.

Sujets

• French

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 25 août 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822385165
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

   Misfit        

Edited by Michèle Aina Barale,

Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon,

and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

   iMtfis         

Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality

                  

Michael Lucey

                

©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

of America on acid-free paper 

Designed by Rebecca M. Giménez

Typeset in Carter and Cone Galliard

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

   Lalo

       

Acknowledgments, ix

Preface, xiii



Balzac and Alternative Families, 

 Legal Melancholy: Balzac’sEugénie Grandet and the Napoleonic Code, 

 



On Not Getting Married in a Balzac Novel, 

Balzac and Same-Sex Relations in the s, 

 

Balzac’s Queer Cousins and Their Friends, 

 The Shadow Economy of Queer Social Capital: Lucien de Rubempré and Vautrin, 



Notes, 

Vautrin’s Progeny, 

Works Cited, 

Index, 

              

This book has been a long time in the writing. I first began work- ing on it in –, when I held a Junior Faculty Fellowship from the University of California at Berkeley’s Doreen B. Townsend Cen- ter for the Humanities. The center’s director at the time, Paul Alpers, and the other members of its fellowship group provided a support- ive context in which to get the project off the ground. The project turned out to be a lot more demanding than I had imagined, and over the years I’ve benefitted from many sources of encouragement to keep me going. Undergraduates and graduate students in my classes in Berkeley’s French and Comparative Literature Departments gra- ciously put up with my ways of relentlessly including both obscure and well-known works by Balzac in my courses during those years. Many of those students contributed substantially to my efforts to find the right framework to say what I had to say about the works I examine in this volume. The Townsend Center provided further resources in , allowing me the luxury of team teaching an interdisciplinary seminar with Carolyn Dinshaw. Together with a very smart group of gradu- ate students we were able to pursue some of the theoretical reading and thinking that helped me find new ways of looking at much of this material. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s kind invitation to contribute to the an- thology she edited,Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction(Duke University Press, ) provided me with the occasion to bring an early version of chapter  to completion. An invitation from Yopie Prins to