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Ubiquitous shit

A faecal history of French literature
by
June 2022, no. 443

Cacaphonies: The excremental canon of French literature by Annabel L. Kim

University of Minnesota Press, US$27 pb, 288 pp

Ubiquitous shit

A faecal history of French literature
by
June 2022, no. 443
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1932 (Agence Meurisse/Wikimedia Commons)

Freud once argued that the pleasure of shit is the first thing we learn to renounce on the way to becoming civilised. For Freud, the true universalising substance was soap; for Annabel L. Kim it is shit; and French literature is ‘full of shit’, both literally and figuratively, from Rabelais’s ‘excremental masterpieces’ Pantagruel and Gargantua and the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom through the latent faecality of the nineteenth-century realists to the canonical writers of French modernity.

David Jack reviews 'Cacaphonies: The excremental canon of French literature' by Annabel L. Kim

Cacaphonies: The excremental canon of French literature

by Annabel L. Kim

University of Minnesota Press, US$27 pb, 288 pp

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