The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic...

Best known for his 1947 memoir L'EspEce humaine, Robert Antelme (1917-1990) is a central figure in the history of the European response to the Nazi concentration camps. In this first study in any language to be devoted to Antelme's work, Martin Crowley reveals the author's vital yet insufficiently recognized influence on recent thought in France and elsewhere about such questions as the nature of community and the indivisibility of humanity. He explores the conclusions Antelme drew from his deportation and his involvement with the post-war French left, and provides the first detailed textual...

This book offers a study of the whole of Duras's written oeuvre, covering journalism and lesser-known works as well as more famous texts. It brings out the constant presence of ethical questions in and around the experiences of passion and excess with which her work is always concerned, and subjects Duras's texts to an unprecedented level of close reading, carrying her beyond the terms of her usual reception.