La metaphore ou la mktonymie? HelGne Cixous et la question d'essentialisme L'essentialisme: la question du m&mella mtme question. Les fkministes se trouvent duns une impasse: ou elles postulent une spkc8citk et se voient accuskes d 'essentialisme ou elles nient la diflkrence sexuelle et sont accuskes de se masculiniser. Hkline Cixous parle d'une kcriture au fkminin ou d'une kconomie libidinale oit les pulsions orientent le moi vers le monde. Dans la conjoncture historique actuelle, selon Cixous il faut employer les mots "masculine" et "fkminin," mais il faut reconnaitre qu'ils sont imbriquks dans un rkseau d'inscription culturelle. Socialisb et me'taphorisks, ses mots font signes et tissent des relations de (re)production. Tout comme Derrida, Cixous dkstabilise l'opposition binaire du propre et dufigurkdans le langage et la philosophie en exposant leur cornplicite'.Cixous pose la question li l'envers, selon Binhammer. Est-ce que le corps-signifurnt dans le discours sociale peut se dktacher du corps objet-concret? Dans I'oscillation entre les deux polarite's, la mktaphore maternelle fonction en tant quecatkchrise ou mktaphore mortepriseau sens propre du "dktournement d'un mot de son sens propre. " Si au lieu de lire leglissement du corps mktaphorique au corps littkral d partir de l'axe de substitution, d'identitk, on le lit ci partir de l'axe de combination, de contiguitk (cesf-d-dire, de l'axe mktonymique), on dkplace l'opposition catkgorique oulou. La mktonymie ktant le trope qui se rklise uniquement dans une situation historique spkcifque dfin de complkfer le riseau signifant, Cixous pense la difkrence diffe'rament pour que "la femme" ne soit plus prisonniffe des oppositions catkgoriques.If we keep on speaking the same language together, we're going to reproduce the same history. Begin the same old stories all over
Many young girls, from morning to night, hang over this pestiferous reading, to the neglect of industry, health, proper exercise, and to the ruin both of body and of soul. . . . The increase of novels will help to account for the increase of prostitution and for the numerous adulteries and elopements that we hear of in the different parts of the kingdom. (1792) 1 My avidity for books daily increased: I subscribed to a circulating library, and frequently read, or rather devoured -little careful in the selection -from ten to fourteen novels in a week. Evils of Adultery and Prostitution Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) 2By the 1790s women's consumption of novels was a profoundly fraught yet persistently frequent affair. By then moralists, essayists, and critics had pronounced, with overwhelming consensus, that novels corrupted, seduced, and poisoned the minds and bodies of young female readers. However, an equally forceful consensus was formed by women who refused to listen to the warnings and continued to read, and even to write, this dangerous and contaminating form of literature. 3 As James Raven's bibliographic research
What is the history of sexuality a history of? This article provides an overview of scholarship in the field of 18th‐century studies and the history of sexuality, paying particular attention to the exemplary case of female same sex desire in order to explore the hermeneutical problems faced by this area of study. Unlike, for example, the history of women which has its object of study defined within its title, the history of sexuality is, in many ways, a history without a proper object. Is it a history of sexual practices such as prostitution, homosexuality or adultery? Is it a history of sexual identities like the sodomite, the sadist or the virgin? This essay argues that it is a history of ideas and ideologies surrounding sexuality’s discursive significance and reads how what we know about the past is grounded in our present cultural understandings of sexuality. Concentrating on the history of lesbianism and the emergence of a bourgeois discourse of heteronormativity in the 18th century, the article demonstrates how what we know about sex in the past is determined by who speaks, from where, and when.
Eighteenth-century literature displays a fascination with the seduction of a virtuous young heroine, most famously illustrated by Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and repeated in 1790s radical women's novels, in the many memoirs by fictional or real penitent prostitutes, and in street print. Across fiction, ballads, essays and miscellanies, stories were told of women's mistaken belief in their lovers' vows. In this book Katherine Binhammer surveys seduction narratives from the late eighteenth century within the context of the new ideal of marriage-for-love and shows how these tales tell varying stories of women's emotional and sexual lives. Drawing on new historicism, feminism, and narrative theory, Binhammer argues that the seduction narrative allowed writers to explore different fates for the heroine than the domesticity that became the dominant form in later literature. This study will appeal to scholars of eighteenth-century literature, social and cultural history, and women's and gender studies.
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