The Pleasures of the Text: Violette Leduc and Reader Seduction

Why was Violette Leduc’s 1954 novel Therese et Isabelle not published in its entirety until November 2000? Under threat of scandal and obsenity charges, French publisher Gallimard withheld the novel, but Leduc continued to write of her life as a woman writer in wartime Paris, frankly depicting her own and imagined lesbian experiences. Mentored by Simone de Beauvoir and a contemporary of French 20th-century luminaries Sartre, Camus, Genet and Cocteau, Leduc is known best as France’s great unknown writer. In this volume, Elizabeth Locey restores Leduc to her place in the canon, bringing to light her contributions to contemporary literary theory. Locey reads Leduc’s works from the perspective of reader selection, which erodes the divide between body and text. Situating Leduc within a continuum with Emma Bovary and Roland Barthes at its extremes, Locey investigates Leduc’s use of the erotic touch, look, and voice to seduce her readers. More than an introduction, this text confronts and challenges the philosophical debate between pornography and erotica and pins down some of the often slippery ways pleasure is mapped onto the body of the reader.