identity and desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous Wilson, Emma creator author text xxk 1996 monographic eng

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210 pages 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 Emma Wilson French fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism Sex in literature Books and reading -- Psychological aspects Identity (Psychology) Books and reading French fiction History and criticism Psychological aspects 843.91093538 WIL 9780198158851 0198158858 InACL 260927 20260927161300.0 281431 eng