Michael Lucey
Biographic Data
| ID | 1049302 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Lucey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Lucey |
| SIGNATURE | LUCEY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Departments of Comparative Literature and French, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Some novelistic versions of sexuality happening in language
This article explores how novels can use scenes of conversation to study what it is possible to mean about sexuality in a particular conversational context, and also the larger theoretical question of how an individual assembles a set of properties that are available in various ways to different people in different moments. It considers how non-denotative, non-referential aspects of language – its indexical functioning – predominate in certain se…
Sexuality, Indexicality, and Music in James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head
This essay uses the concept of indexicality as elaborated by linguistic anthropologists—a form of semiosis in which aspects of signs point for some (but not all) people who encounter them to contextual information—to study how James Baldwin thinks about sexuality and uses music in his last novel, Just Above My Head
Understanding 'understanding music' in Proust
Sonic events of various kinds (musical and otherwise) are often complex semiotic occasions in Proust’s Recherche. One of the ways we attest to the meaningfulness of sounds we hear, to our understanding of them, is by applying language to them. When we talk or write about sounds or react to them, we also produce social effects. This – by inducing us to react to them and then produce language about them – is one of the ways sounds make social meani…
Free Indirect
“The novel” (I'll come back to that) is not what it used to be. This is the lesson Timothy Bewes offers in his remarkable and challenging, if also frustrating, new book, Free Indirect. Bewes is “primarily concerned,” he writes in the introduction, with writing from “the two decades since the publication of J. M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello (2003)” (5) (although in point of fact the book is also a lot about film, and mostly about films from…
Sociological
In Thoughts and Things, Bersani juxtaposes Jean Genet's novel, Our Lady of the Flowers with some of Pierre Bourdieu's thinking about how naming works. Bersani finds in Genet's novel a moment of unnamability that is, for him, a challenge to the legitimating naming power of the state and that justifies favoring a psychoanalytic framework over Bourdieu's, whatever the power of Bourdieu's thinking about naming and about structures of domination. This…
Introduction
The introduction to this special issue sketches out some urgent forms of intelligibility that Proust's Recherche might hold for readers in 2022 given the many crises of the present moment. Whereas Proust's novel is often read as an investigation and valorization of various forms of subjective experience, contributions to this special issue consider how aspects of the Recherche's composition might provoke us to step back and objectify subjective e…
How You Read Madame Bovary
Prompted by the prior work of critics like Ross Chambers and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this article pursues the possibility that there would be a way of reading Madame Bovary that is not just about learning to be a sophisticated and refined enough reader of Gustave Flaubert to appreciate all that he managed to achieve in that novel. Rather, while sophistication and refinement may constitute a typical first step in becoming a reader of Flaubert…
On Proust and Talking to Yourself
This article uses the writings of Erving Goffman, M. M. Bakhtin, and Edward Sapir to pose some questions about what is happening when spoken language is produced. In particular, it looks at certain complexities of the partial roles of “animator,” “author,” and “principal,” into which Goffman proposed breaking down the role of speaker. It suggests that implicit in Goffman’s essay “Footing” is the possibility that even the analytic roles of animato…
The Contexts of Marguerite Duras's Homophobia
This article proposes a contextualization of Marguerite Duras's 1983 book, The Malady of Death, along with some of her other writings and statements from around that time. These writings register her long-term intimate relationship with a much younger gay man whom she called Yann Andréa, and also record a good deal of violently homophobic discourse. My contention is that there is something to be learned by taking the sexuality that Duras shared w…
Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality in the Third Person
This article proposes a contextualization of Simone de Beauvoir's 1943 novel L'Invitée (She Came to Stay), a novel that registers sexual relationships between women-such as the ones Beauvoir herself was involved in around the time of its writing-without ever representing them. To perceive how it registers them requires a careful investigation of the relationship of the text to a variety of its contexts, contexts whose existence can be fragile, wh…
Never Say I
Transatlantic Cruising
Book Review| April 01 2005 TRANSATLANTIC CRUISING Intercultural Movements: American Gay in French Translation Keith Harvey Manchester: St. Jerome, 2003. 273 pp. Michael Lucey Michael Lucey Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2005) 11 (2): 330–332. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-11-2-330 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Lucey; TRANSATLANTIC CRUISING. GLQ 1 April 2005; 11…
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self
M. de Charlus did not care to go about with M. de Vaugoubert.For the latter, his monocle stuck in his eye, would keep looking round at every passing youth.What was worse, shedding all restraint when he was with M. de Charlus, he adopted a form of speech which the Baron detested.He referred to everything male in the feminine, and, being intensely stupid, imagined this pleasantry to be extremely witty, and was continually in fits of laughter.As at …
Proust's Queer Metalepses
MLN - Volume 116, Number 4, September 2001 (French Issue)
Legal Melancholy
Research Article| November 01 2001 Legal Melancholy: Balzac's Eugéénie Grandet and the Napoleonic Code Michael Lucey Michael Lucey Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (2001) 76 (1): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2001.76.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Ic…
Legal Melancholy
Sexuality, Politicization, May 1968
michael lucey teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. He is the author of Gide's Bent Sexuality, Politics, Writing (Oxford University Press,1995), as well as of a forthcoming book, The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2002). His current book project is tit…
Practices of Posterity
In a passage from Les Nouvelles Nourritures that Gide apparently composed during the early 1920s, he imagines a figure of posterity: You who will come when I no longer hear the noises of the earth and my lips no longer drink of its dew—you who will perhaps read me later—it is for you that I write these pages; for you are perhaps not astonished enough with living; you do not properly admire this stunning miracle that is your life. It seems to me s…
Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs
Le fantasme renvoie a l'identite sexuelle et surtout sociale de celui qui le produit. Genet a pu se demander quelles seraient les consequences, sur ces identites, d'une intervention sur le fantasme meme. L'A. met a jour, a partir de l'analyse du fantasme developpee par Genet dans Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, un certain conservatisme de l'ecrivain dans ses conceptions relatives a la sedimentation sociale du fantasme, et a ses relations a l'identite sexu…
Gide's Bent
Gide’s Bent
Gide's Bent investigates the place of sexuality in the writings of André Gide, one of the first "out" modern writers. Focusing on his writing of the 1920s and 1930s, the years in which Gide wrote most openly about his homosexuality and also the years of his most notable left-wing political activity, Gide's Bent interrogates both the political content of his reflections on his homosexuality and the ways his sexuality inflected his political intere…
Gide's bent
Never Say I
Sociological
In Thoughts and Things, Bersani juxtaposes Jean Genet's novel, Our Lady of the Flowers with some of Pierre Bourdieu's thinking about how naming works. Bersani finds in Genet's novel a moment of unnamability that is, for him, a challenge to the legitimating naming power of the state and that justifies favoring a psychoanalytic framework over Bourdieu's, whatever the power of Bourdieu's thinking about naming and about structures of domination. This…
Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs
Le fantasme renvoie a l'identite sexuelle et surtout sociale de celui qui le produit. Genet a pu se demander quelles seraient les consequences, sur ces identites, d'une intervention sur le fantasme meme. L'A. met a jour, a partir de l'analyse du fantasme developpee par Genet dans Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, un certain conservatisme de l'ecrivain dans ses conceptions relatives a la sedimentation sociale du fantasme, et a ses relations a l'identite sexu…
Gide’s Bent
Gide's Bent investigates the place of sexuality in the writings of André Gide, one of the first "out" modern writers. Focusing on his writing of the 1920s and 1930s, the years in which Gide wrote most openly about his homosexuality and also the years of his most notable left-wing political activity, Gide's Bent interrogates both the political content of his reflections on his homosexuality and the ways his sexuality inflected his political intere…
Gide's bent
Gide's Bent
Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs
Le fantasme renvoie a l'identite sexuelle et surtout sociale de celui qui le produit. Genet a pu se demander quelles seraient les consequences, sur ces identites, d'une intervention sur le fantasme meme. L'A. met a jour, a partir de l'analyse du fantasme developpee par Genet dans Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, un certain conservatisme de l'ecrivain dans ses conceptions relatives a la sedimentation sociale du fantasme, et a ses relations a l'identite sexu…
Practices of Posterity
In a passage from Les Nouvelles Nourritures that Gide apparently composed during the early 1920s, he imagines a figure of posterity: You who will come when I no longer hear the noises of the earth and my lips no longer drink of its dew—you who will perhaps read me later—it is for you that I write these pages; for you are perhaps not astonished enough with living; you do not properly admire this stunning miracle that is your life. It seems to me s…
Proust's Queer Metalepses
MLN - Volume 116, Number 4, September 2001 (French Issue)
Legal Melancholy
Research Article| November 01 2001 Legal Melancholy: Balzac's Eugéénie Grandet and the Napoleonic Code Michael Lucey Michael Lucey Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (2001) 76 (1): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2001.76.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Ic…
Legal Melancholy
Sexuality, Politicization, May 1968
michael lucey teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. He is the author of Gide's Bent Sexuality, Politics, Writing (Oxford University Press,1995), as well as of a forthcoming book, The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2002). His current book project is tit…
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self
M. de Charlus did not care to go about with M. de Vaugoubert.For the latter, his monocle stuck in his eye, would keep looking round at every passing youth.What was worse, shedding all restraint when he was with M. de Charlus, he adopted a form of speech which the Baron detested.He referred to everything male in the feminine, and, being intensely stupid, imagined this pleasantry to be extremely witty, and was continually in fits of laughter.As at …
Transatlantic Cruising
Book Review| April 01 2005 TRANSATLANTIC CRUISING Intercultural Movements: American Gay in French Translation Keith Harvey Manchester: St. Jerome, 2003. 273 pp. Michael Lucey Michael Lucey Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2005) 11 (2): 330–332. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-11-2-330 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Lucey; TRANSATLANTIC CRUISING. GLQ 1 April 2005; 11…
Never Say I
Simone de Beauvoir and Sexuality in the Third Person
This article proposes a contextualization of Simone de Beauvoir's 1943 novel L'Invitée (She Came to Stay), a novel that registers sexual relationships between women-such as the ones Beauvoir herself was involved in around the time of its writing-without ever representing them. To perceive how it registers them requires a careful investigation of the relationship of the text to a variety of its contexts, contexts whose existence can be fragile, wh…
The Contexts of Marguerite Duras's Homophobia
This article proposes a contextualization of Marguerite Duras's 1983 book, The Malady of Death, along with some of her other writings and statements from around that time. These writings register her long-term intimate relationship with a much younger gay man whom she called Yann Andréa, and also record a good deal of violently homophobic discourse. My contention is that there is something to be learned by taking the sexuality that Duras shared w…
On Proust and Talking to Yourself
This article uses the writings of Erving Goffman, M. M. Bakhtin, and Edward Sapir to pose some questions about what is happening when spoken language is produced. In particular, it looks at certain complexities of the partial roles of “animator,” “author,” and “principal,” into which Goffman proposed breaking down the role of speaker. It suggests that implicit in Goffman’s essay “Footing” is the possibility that even the analytic roles of animato…
How You Read Madame Bovary
Prompted by the prior work of critics like Ross Chambers and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this article pursues the possibility that there would be a way of reading Madame Bovary that is not just about learning to be a sophisticated and refined enough reader of Gustave Flaubert to appreciate all that he managed to achieve in that novel. Rather, while sophistication and refinement may constitute a typical first step in becoming a reader of Flaubert…
Introduction
The introduction to this special issue sketches out some urgent forms of intelligibility that Proust's Recherche might hold for readers in 2022 given the many crises of the present moment. Whereas Proust's novel is often read as an investigation and valorization of various forms of subjective experience, contributions to this special issue consider how aspects of the Recherche's composition might provoke us to step back and objectify subjective e…
Free Indirect
“The novel” (I'll come back to that) is not what it used to be. This is the lesson Timothy Bewes offers in his remarkable and challenging, if also frustrating, new book, Free Indirect. Bewes is “primarily concerned,” he writes in the introduction, with writing from “the two decades since the publication of J. M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello (2003)” (5) (although in point of fact the book is also a lot about film, and mostly about films from…
Sociological
In Thoughts and Things, Bersani juxtaposes Jean Genet's novel, Our Lady of the Flowers with some of Pierre Bourdieu's thinking about how naming works. Bersani finds in Genet's novel a moment of unnamability that is, for him, a challenge to the legitimating naming power of the state and that justifies favoring a psychoanalytic framework over Bourdieu's, whatever the power of Bourdieu's thinking about naming and about structures of domination. This…
Understanding 'understanding music' in Proust
Sonic events of various kinds (musical and otherwise) are often complex semiotic occasions in Proust’s Recherche. One of the ways we attest to the meaningfulness of sounds we hear, to our understanding of them, is by applying language to them. When we talk or write about sounds or react to them, we also produce social effects. This – by inducing us to react to them and then produce language about them – is one of the ways sounds make social meani…
Some novelistic versions of sexuality happening in language
This article explores how novels can use scenes of conversation to study what it is possible to mean about sexuality in a particular conversational context, and also the larger theoretical question of how an individual assembles a set of properties that are available in various ways to different people in different moments. It considers how non-denotative, non-referential aspects of language – its indexical functioning – predominate in certain se…
Sexuality, Indexicality, and Music in James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head
This essay uses the concept of indexicality as elaborated by linguistic anthropologists—a form of semiosis in which aspects of signs point for some (but not all) people who encounter them to contextual information—to study how James Baldwin thinks about sexuality and uses music in his last novel, Just Above My Head
Art (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · History (9 works) · Human sexuality (9 works) · Literature (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Art history (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works)