Mythes et érotismes dans les littératures et les cultures francophones de l’extrême contemporain ed. by Efstratia Oktapoda (review)

The aims and claims of this collection are ambitious. It sets out to shed new light on the field of the erotic in contemporary French and francophone literature and culture through a critical approach that conjoins eroticism and myth. In so doing it purports to renew women’s studies, and, more broadly, gender studies, within the French and francophone worlds. Over its fourteen chapters it aims to map new tendencies in current erotic writing by both women and men. The volume’s foundational apparatus (an Introduction and a lengthy first chapter on ‘La Crise de l’éternel féminin’ in contemporary francophone erotic texts by women) covers some of the key works, authors, and developments that have become closely associated over the last twenty years with a new era of frank and experimental sexual writing. While interesting, these introductory essays rehearse much that is already known and do not offer new critical paradigms. For the main part, subsequent chapters focus on female creators (only one chapter, on Michel Houellebecq, is devoted to a male writer). Some fairly familiar arguments are made in chapters on Catherine Breillat, Annie Ernaux, Calixthe Beyala, and Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. Also covered are the erotic writings of Gabriel Osmonde (Andreï Makine’s alter ego); the intermingling of erotic and political registers in Milan Kundera and Nancy Huston; the influence of the father in the unfolding of desire in Houellebecq and Nina Bouaroui; and the self-destructive and toxic eroticism of protagonists in the work of québécoise writer Marie-Sissi Labrèche. There are chapters, too, that have a broader scope, setting out to examine, for example, the expression of sexuality in Moroccan women’s writing; the body and sensuality in Algerian women’s writing; sexuality as it emerges from, and remains tainted by, slavery in Antillean literature. All chapters offer coherent readings, but several remain somewhat underdeveloped in terms of critical apparatus. Many of the arguments made in this volume are already very well covered in the wealth of secondary literature that has been published to date, in French and in English, on the core corpus. Most surprisingly, relatively little of this material is referenced or engaged with. Finally, the idea of myth does not emerge from the essays as systematically as one might expect. It is taken up via a general interest in how selected authors and texts deconstruct certain myths about gender and unpick normative views — thus Ernaux evokes and works against myths of feminine passivity; Houellebecq explodes myths of love; Despentes, of heteronormative culture; Breillat, of the obscenity that accretes to woman’s body — yet these gestures scarcely feel new. Ultimately, while the volume captures a sense of the recent proliferation of sexually explicit works and the ways in which these have destabilized preconceptions, it does not quite live up to the claims it makes for itself.