Marvellous Bodies? Strange Sex(es)? – Fantastic Genre in Recent French Fiction

摘要

Tzvetan Todorov's influential definition of the Fantastic genre insists on sustained hesitation between the uncanny and the marvellous, between the real and the illusory. This article considers this equivocal textuality in four recent French novels, which also have a characteristically “sexy” contemporary focus on corporeality. These novels are: Marie Darrieussecq's Truismes (1996), Vincent de Swarte's Elle est moi (2005), Sophie Jabès' Alice la saucisse (2003) and Claire Legendre's Viande (1999). The analysis exploits the polysemy of the term genre, referring both to literary mode and to (masculine/feminine) gender, to discuss the fantastical genre of/in these novels, whose protagonists' strange sexual transformations and troubling gender performances exaggerate, confuse and deconstruct fixed notions of gendered corpo-reality.