Volume 24, issue 2

Volume 24 (2024)

Publication date: 11.12.2024

Description

The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Philology of the Jagiellonian University.

Cover design: Dorota Heliasz

Licence: CC BY

Editorial team

Deputy Editor-in-Chief Jakub Kornhauser, Tomasz Krupa

Editor-in-Chief Wacław Rapak

Issue Editors Marta Segarra, Léonore Brassard

Issue content

Désir, contrat et consentement dans la littérature francophone. Introduction

Léonore Brassard, Marta Segarra

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, issue 2, Volume 24 (2024), pp. 241-245

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.023.20415

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Sujet du désir/ sujet du féminisme. Notes sur la division du sujet de #MeToo

Anne E. Berger

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, issue 2, Volume 24 (2024), pp. 247-258

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.023.20416

#MeToo hails the comeback of the decried “subject of feminism”: if not women as unified subjects, at least women subjects united across class, race, and even sexual orientation dividing lines, through the common experience of sexual violence at the hands of men. It warns us, then, it seems, against taking too quick a break from feminism. The outcry, and its repeated occasions, sound like a vindication of Catharine Mackinnon’s understanding of sexuality as a universal apparatus of male domination. Yet, a closer look at some of the scenes leading up to the drama that now goes by this name, complicates the matter at stake. Domination and seduction may overlap where sexuality is concerned, causing the subject of desire and the “subject of feminism” to split, but they needn’t coincide. A new theory – and practice – of seduction may be called for in order to bridge the gap between the two “subjects”.

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Les ruses du « oui » et du « non », ou les incertitudes du consentement sexuel et littéraire

Hélène Merlin-Kajman

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, issue 2, Volume 24 (2024), pp. 259-269

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.023.20417

Taking as its starting point a controversy over the interpretation of a poem by Chénier in which some readers saw the representation of a rape, this article examines the historicity of the signs of female sexual consent and the issues of a literary reading that allows for confusion and vacillation, characteristics that are conducive to education in a sexuality that is itself based on consent.

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Qu’est-ce que l’art ? Prostitution

Léonore Brassard

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, issue 2, Volume 24 (2024), pp. 271-281

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.023.20418

Both in social discourse and in the work of many artists, an association has been repeatedly made between Literature (mainly through its publication) and prostitution. This article aims to explore this commonplace. Starting with Charles Baudelaire’s famous line from Fusée: “What is Art? Prostitution”, it unfolds this paradigmatical association through numerous literary and philosophical texts. The article then attempts to displace the meaning of the association from the cliché that links the artist to the “idea” of a prostitute, to the relationship between the reader and the text. In this manner, the article links Literature and prostitution together to question the ideal of the contractual.

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Repenser l’échange amoureux avec Cixous et Wittig : Entre critique et réinventions

Sofía Batko Meyer

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, issue 2, Volume 24 (2024), pp. 283-294

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.023.20419

Starting from the correlation highlighted by feminist theory between love and the heterosexist structure of relationships, this essay looks at the attempts to reinvent love initiated by two French writers of the 1970s, Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig. To this end, the paper approaches the question of love in the work of Cixous and Wittig in terms of exchange, which it breaks down into three aspects. The first aspect concerns the libidinal question, insofar as love involves a relationship with the other that implies desire as an overflow. The second aspect considers the love relationship from an ethical angle, questioning the status of the love partner as otherness and difference. The third and final aspect looks at the consequences for the political economy of relationships of a resignification of love exchange based on a new approach to the act of giving.

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Troubler le protocole de dépucelage : désir, subjectivité sexuelle et autisme dans Mon père m’a donné un mari de Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam

Eftihia Mihelakis

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, issue 2, Volume 24 (2024), pp. 295-305

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.023.20420

This paper investigates the under-examined play, Mon père m’a donné un mari, written by French author Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam. The play centres around sixteen-year-old Alexandrine who is identified as Asperger and who masturbates in front of her parents. We argue that by focusing on an epistemic framework intersecting literary studies with Mad/SickGirl Studies, we can explain how Alexandrine’s parents confine her in what we call a “heteronormative corset”, a parentally-informed virginity loss protocol which is entwined with ableist and adult-centric stereotypes. We then address the unravelling of this protocol by insisting that at the core of Alexandrine’s “sick/mad language” there is a queer sexual subjectivity that troubles this protocol of virginity loss as the single-most defining experience marking the end of girlhood.

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Rompre le contrat hétérosexuel, consentir à d’autres imaginaires du désir ?

Flavia Bujor

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, issue 2, Volume 24 (2024), pp. 307-315

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.24.023.20421

Wendy Delorme’s Viendra le temps du feu and Phoebe Hadjimarkos Clarke’s Tabor, two French polyphonic dystopian novels published in 2021, can be construed as attempts to break free from a social contract that is essentially a heterosexual contract (Wittig), so as to usher in a utopian community where the dynamics of desire is redefined. As the reader is challenged to consent to these alternative imaginary worlds on a narrative as well as on a metaliterary level, both novels end up questioning the very desire for fiction as a source of empowerment.

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Title and imprint pages PDF Table of contents PDF About the Authors PDF

Słowa kluczowe: afterwardsness, consent, seduction theory, sexual encounter, subject of desire, subject of feminism, Chénier, consent, desire, honor, pagan/Christian, rape, virginity, literarity, prostitution, sex work, Baudelaire, Benjamin, prostitute, sex worker, French Litterature, capitalism, contract, market, Cixous, Wittig, love exchange, political economy, libidinal economy, mad/sick girl(s), queer sexual subjectivity, language, masturbation, Asperger (autism), heteronormativity, virginity loss, dystopia, utopia, heterosexual contract, queer desire

Funding information

The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Philology of the Jagiellonian University.

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Volume 24 (2024)