Analyzes Samuel Beckett's novels, Mallarme's poetry, Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Salo, Assyrian palace reliefs, and writings by Henry James in terms of Freudian theories.

This exquisite novel tells the story of one of the most compelling heroines in modern literature--Emma Bovary.
"Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme unapproachable assurance as both excites and defies judgement." - Henry James

Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy provincial doctor, Emma revolts against the ordinariness of her life by pursuing voluptuous dreams of ecstasy and love. But her sensuous and sentimental desires lead her only to suffering corruption and...

In this work, Leo Bersani addresses homosexuality in modern culture. In his chapters on contemporary queer theory, on Foucault and psychoanalysis, on the politics of sadomasochism, and on the image of the gay outlaw in works by Gide, Proust and Genet, Bersani raises the possibility that same-sex desire by its very nature can disrupt oppressive social orders.

In each of the films discussed in this study - "Le Mepris," "All About My Mother," "The Thin Red Line" - something extraordinary is proposed. Or if not proposed, then shown, visually, by stranger and more powerful means than narrative or argument.

In this highly original and provocative study, Bersani takes us away from the interpretative questions which the competing critics of Mallarme familiarly raise, and explores a fundamental paradox within his work as a whole. On the one hand Mallarme can be taken as a prime example of textual imperialism in modern literature: his hermetic poems seem to demand ever more interpretative ingenuity from his readers and to provide a foretaste of the supreme Book which he dreamed of - 'the Orphic explanation of the Earth'. On the other hand he mounted an extraordinary assault on literature's claims to...

Over the course of a distinguished career, critic Leo Bersani has tackled a range of issues in his writing, and this collection gathers together some of his finest work. Beginning with one of the foundations of queer theory-his famous meditation on how sex leads to a shattering of the self, "Is the Rectum a Grave?"-this volume charts the inspired connections Bersani has made between sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics.

Over the course of these essays, Bersani grapples with thinkers ranging from Plato to Descartes to Georg Simmel. Foucault and Freud recur as key figures, and...

Two gifted and highly prolific intellectuals, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, here present a fascinating dialogue about the problems and possibilities of human intimacy. Their conversation takes as its point of departure psychoanalysis and its central importance to the modern imagination--though equally important is their shared sense that by misleading us about the importance of self-knowledge and the danger of narcissism, psychoanalysis has failed to realize its most exciting and innovative relational potential.
In pursuit of new forms of intimacy they take up a range of concerns across...

Leo Bersani is an eminent literary critic whose influential work spans half a century. His vast, in many ways unclassifiable, oeuvre has traversed and blurred the boundaries of the disciplines of modern French literature, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, art history, film theory, philosophical aesthetics, and masculinity studies and sexuality studies. Oxford University Press published Bersani's first book, on Proust, in 1965, but the work has long been out of print. This new edition comes in response to a recent renewal of interest among philosophers of literature, among others, and...

Leo Bersani s career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fieldsincluding French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory. Throughout this new collection of essays that ranges, interestingly and brilliantly, from movies by Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard to fiction by Proust and Pierre Bergounioux, Bersani considers various kinds of connectedness.
Thoughts and Thingsposits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts (the human subject) and things (the world). Bersani departs from...