Cacaphonies
The Excremental Canon of French Literature
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Minnesota Press
Published:5th Apr '22
Should be back in stock very soon
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£89.00(9781517910877)
Exploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matter
Cacaphonies takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim undertakes close readings of key authors to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality, both a literary object and a reflection on literature itself, without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile.
Following the fecal through line in works by Céline, Beckett, Genet, Sartre, Duras, and Gary and the contemporary authors Anne Garréta and Daniel Pennac, Kim shows that shit, far from vanishing from the canon after the early modern period, remains present in the modern and contemporary French literature that follows. She argues that all the shit in the canon expresses a call to democratize literature, making literature for all, just as shit is for (or of) all. She attends to its presence in this prized element of French identity, treating it as a continually uttered desire to manifest the universality France aspires to—as encapsulated by the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité—but fails to realize. In shit there is a concrete universalism that traverses bodies with disregard for embodied differences.
Cacaphonies reminds us that literature, and the ideas to be found therein, cannot be separated from the corporeal envelopes that create and receive them. In so doing, it reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life.
"In dazzling readings of classic French texts, Annabel L. Kim reclaims feces as literary matter. Sidestepping familiar psychoanalytic frames, Kim turns excrement into a force for democracy. From Céline to Duras to Garréta, this caca communism blows up our old ways of thinking. Irreverent and erudite, as funny as Rabelais, Cacaphonies is a genuine scatological pleasure!"—Lynne Huffer, Emory University
"We tend to assume that the trajectory of modern literature repeats that of society and technology (urbanization, sanitation, dematerialization, sanitization, deodorization) in taking us ever further away from the excretory body. It does not, insists Annabel L. Kim. On the contrary, modern literature refuses to endorse the fantasy of being ‘free from or clear of shit.’ Thus, to turn to the excretory body in literary works is to ask what literature’s deepest understanding of the human is, and what literature itself is. Cacaphonies is an extraordinarily engaging project: insightful, serious, self-consciously ‘profane,’ metacritically alive."—Thangam Ravindranathan, author of Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings
"Kim’s readings are creative, bold and surprising. They reek, but they are never gratuitous, and they open up a field of literary waste studies that poses pressing ecological questions."—Times Literary Supplement
"Kim’s book offers a fresh, fun(ny), clever, and innovative perspective on canonical texts while weaving through her analysis a discussion about life and death, and about how shit ultimately brings us back to that."—H-France Reviews
"A must-read, Cacaphonies provides a truly insightful, engaging, and joyful reading experience."—The French Review
"Provocative in the aesthetic and political projects it presents and interrogates, Cacaphonies is smart and engrossing, a wonderful and also really, really shitty book."—New Books Network
"Kim’s works open up a field of literary waste studies at a time when ecological questions are more important than ever."—Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
"Cacaphonies is not a call to abolish the canon, but a brilliant request to reopen it so as to make the experience of literature fully democratic: that is, as widely shared as the experience of shit itself. In addition, while being extremely pleasurable to read, the study is a profound and necessary call to ponder and act upon pressing environmental issues at stake in our present moment."—MLN
"In Cacaphonies Kim makes a compelling case not to dispose of literary excrement so quickly. If we get our hands dirty and engage with shit directly, we may just discover a fertile aesthetic, ethical, and political site of radical equality with the potential to dismantle boundaries, to reshape the way we think."—Modern Language Quarterly
"By the end of Kim’s book, most readers will have been persuaded that its initially unpromising subject matter is not only worthy of intellectual consideration, but also opens up surprisingly rich avenues of enquiry into a wide range of important recent and contemporary authors—no mean feat."—Modern & Contemporary France
ISBN: 9781517910884
Dimensions: 216mm x 140mm x 38mm
Weight: unknown
264 pages