The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance

This 1991 book examines the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the literature of the French Renaissance by exploring the issues of gender, the body, and repression in many of the key literary texts of the period, including Scève, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, and Montaigne. By means of detailed readings of individual texts, Lawrence Kritzman examines how sexuality functions as a rhetorical trope through which desire is represented. Professor Kritzman's study concentrates on three major objectives: the issues of gender identity and sexual difference in French Renaissance texts; the question of how the body is represented in the blasons, love poetry and prose of the period; and the way in which figural language depicts the libidinal, political and social tensions at work in texts. It was the first wide-ranging theoretical study to provide reading models to investigate the taboo subject of sexuality underlying literary production in the French Renaissance.

Preface; Introduction; Part I. Phetorics of Gender: 1. Pernette du Guillet and a voice of one's own; 2. Rabelais and the representation of male subjectivity: the Rondibilis episode as case study; 3. Verba erotica: Marguerite de Navarre and the rhetoric of silence; 4. Pedagogical graffiti and the rhetoric of conceit; 5. Montaigne's family romance; Part II. Figures of the Body: A. Disfiguring the Feminine: 6. Architecture of the Utopian body: the blasons of Marot and Ronsard; 7. Fictions of the body and the gender of the text in Ronsard's 1552 Amours; B. The text as body: 8. My body, my text: Montaigne and the rhetoric of self-portraiture; Part III. Allegories of Repression: 9. Maurice Scève: the rhetoric of dream and the language of love; 10. Sexuality and the political unconscious in Rabelais' Quatre Livre: three case studies: A. Pro-logos: excess and the golden mean; B. Rabelais' comedy of cruelty: the chicanous episode; C. Rabelais in Papimania: power and the rule of law; Bibliography of works cited.

This 1991 book examines the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the literature of the French Renaissance by exploring the issues of gender, the body, and repression in many of the key literary texts of the period, including Scève, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, and Montaigne.