Description
Book SynopsisRereads the works of Colette, Gide, and Proust to show how central representations of sexuality were to the evolution of literary prose forms in twentieth-century France.
Trade Review“A breakthrough book.
Never Say I isn’t just an ‘important contribution,’ as people say. It is a necessary one, disturbing many simplistic assumptions about the writing of same-sex subjectivity in modern France.”—Ross Chambers, author of
The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism“In this abundantly helpful work, Michael Lucey retrieves a vital moment in modern culture when saying ‘I’ required not only a certain courage but also a certain art.”—D. A. Miller
“
Never Say I is a clear, cogent literary history of the articulation of the discourses and representations of same-sex desire and homosexuality in early twentieth-century French literature, and it is an important addition to our understanding of the literature and culture of the period.” -- Lawrence R. Schehr * Modern Philology *
“Michael Lucey constructs a deft and innovative model for thinking about the problems Colette, André Gide, Marcel Proust, and others faced as they struggled to articulate a first person that might aptly speak about — and, just as often, speak for — same-sex sexualities in a fraught linguistic, literary, social, and political arena. . . . This notion of the I as a figure—rather than as a subject—is one of the most important and exciting contributions
Never Say I makes. . . . Lucey’s formulation of the I as a figure allows us to see how each I can indeed be read, so long as it is read with care and attention to the fields within which it occurs. And it allows us to see more clearly the sophistication and simultaneous earnestness and playfulness with which these novelists, theorists of the self, handled the critical task of learning to articulate a queer first person.” -- David Namie * GLQ *
“Though the book’s title highlights the role of Gide, Proust, and Colette in this process, Lucey’s study offers much more than a rereading of these three well-studied figures and their work. Instead, he not only investigates the “position-taking” that came to characterize their literary output but also seeks to understand these positions in the context of an intimate web of writers, critics, and others in the cultural elite in France in this period.” -- Patricia Tilburg * Journal of the History of Sexuality *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction: Referring to Same-Sex Sexualities in the First Person 1
1. Gide, Bourget, and Proust Talking 29
2. Questions of Register in and around 1902 57
3. Colette, the Moulin Rouge, and Les Vrilles 94
4. Gide and Posterity 165
5. Proust’s Queer Metalepses 193
6. Sodom and Gomorrah: Proust’s Narrator’s First Person 215
Epilogue 250
Notes 259
Works Cited 303
Index 317
