Never Say I by Michael Lucey

Never Say I by Michael Lucey

Rereads 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.

“A breakthrough bookNever 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)

Michael Lucey is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality and translator of Didier Eribon’s Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, both also published by Duke University Press.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780822338970
ISBN 10	0822338971
Title	Never Say I
Author	Michael Lucey
Series	Series Q
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Duke University Press
Year published	2006-11-17
Number of pages	336
Prizes	null null null null null null null null null null
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.