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Why is the story of romance in books, magazines, and films still aimed at women rather than at men? Even after decades of feminism, traditional ideas and messages about romantic love still hold sway and, in our \"postfeminist\" age, are more popular than ever. Increasingly, we have become a culture of romance: stories of all kinds shape the terms of love. Women, in particular, love a love story. The Glass Slipperis about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Comparing influential classics to their current counterparts, Susan Ostrov Weisser relates in highly amusing prose how these stories are shaped and defined by and for women, the main consumers of romantic texts. Following a trajectory that begins with Jane Austen and concludes with Internet dating sites, Weisser shows the many ways in which nineteenth-century views of women's nature and the Victorian idea of romance have survived the feminist critique of the 1970s and continue in new and more ambiguous forms in today's media, with profound implications for women. More than a book about romance in fiction and media,The Glass Slipperillustrates how traditional stories about women's sexuality, femininity, and romantic love have survived as seemingly protective elements in a more modern, feminist, sexually open society, confusing the picture for women themselves. Weisser compares diverse narratives-historical and contemporary from high literature and \"low\" genres-discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, Victorian women's magazines, and D. H. Lawrence'sLady Chatterley's Lover; Disney movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories. Ultimately, Weisser shows that the narrative versions of the Glass Slipper should be taken as seriously as the Glass Ceiling as we see how these representations of romantic love are meant to inform women's beliefs and goals. In this book, Weisser's goal is not to shatter the Glass Slipper, but to see through it.

Taking up Paul Preciado's theories in his book Testo Junkie (2013) concerning contemporary biocapitalism, this essay argues that Michel Houellebecq's latest novel, Sérotonine (2019), represents a radical move away from the hegemony of the white cis-male, heterosexual body depicted in his earlier literary corpus. The narrator of Sérotonine is stripped of his sexual capacity by an antidepressant that makes him impotent. Once unable to escape the stimuli and commodities designed to incite pleasure, thus leaving the body in a constant state of arousal, Houellebecq's male subject is now unequivocally portrayed as being flaccid. Rather than disclose a sense of reconciliation or resignation with the market, the novel reveals an expulsion from it entirely. The narrator's futile attempts to reinstate his male dominance further demonstrate the totalizing presence of sex, pleasure, and pharmaceutical drugs in Houellebecq's novels and attest to the notion that the once-hegemonic male body of his literary universe is now simply hanging on to life itself as contemporary biocapitalism careens forward on its never-ending quest to maximize pleasure and desire.

Contemporary French writers often blur the distinction between fiction and nonfiction through recourse to false documents or feigned documentary discourse. Three distinct uses of invented documents are considered here: the convergence of documentary recording and fictional reconstruction (Bon’s Daewoo); the integration of fictional documents into a documentary-fictional configuration (Message’s Cora dans la spirale); and a non-realist approach that converts the documentary gesture itself into a critical allegorization of the present (Taillandier’s Les états et empires du Lotissement Grand Siècle). The pseudo-document offers a means of investigating and negotiating the possibilities of fiction in an age when the latter has become increasingly fragile, threatened by the overwhelming desire for the real.

After Roland Barthes's unexpected death in March 1980, the posthumous publication of two of his \"diaries,\" whose existence had only been known to a handful of people, sparked controversy among his literary executors, family, former students, and friends. Although various commentators took sides over which of the two texts was the most compromising, significantly, the consensus among readers seemed to be that some texts are too intimate to publish. The move by Barthes's interlocutors to designate some texts as \"intimate\" above others, and to locate a prohibition against publishing in this essential quality of \"intimacy,\" reveals an unresolved tension between the postmodern distrust of autobiographical veracity on the one hand, and readerly desire and fantasy, on the other. Further, this ambiguous and often self-contradictory position is one that Barthes himself increasingly claimed and privileged in his own late works, including his seminars Le Neutre and La Préparation du roman.

Discussions of American experimental poetry's relation to emotion have been common over the past several years, but few studies have examined the varieties of emotional power in such writing. Moreover, such discussion has viewed conceptually experimental and confessional approaches as incompatible. But Trisha Low's The Compleat Purge (2013) balances itself between conceptualism and confessionalism. It examines emotions like boredom, fascination, and shame as it manipulates relations of form and feeling by engaging affective repetition and emotional excess. Developing a relationship to confessional authenticity that foregrounds emotional vulnerability despite a possible critical distance from the latter, Low's writing suggests that the gap between conceptual and confessional approaches is not as wide as many assume.

The French modernist author Georges Perec regularly uses languages other than French to fulfill linguistic constraints in his writing. This article studies his use of Arabic in the twin contexts of postwar modernization and decolonization in France and its former empire. It focuses on the mono-vocalic novella Les revenentes (1972), which contains no vowels other than \"e\". It argues that using Arabic and pseudo-Arabic words and names to satisfy this putatively formal constraint inscribes the postcolonial economy of linguistic and literary relations in both the language of the text and its script.

In her article \"Rewriting Canonical Love Stories from the Peripheries\" Karen Ya- Chu Yang compares postcolonial and postmodern intertextuality in Taiwanese and the Caribbean texts. Hsien-Yung Pai's \"Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream\" (1966) and Tien- Hsin Chu's \"Breakfast at Tiffany's\" (1997) are two short stories which depict identity crises of first generation and second generation [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (waishen gren, mainland immigrants). In these two texts disillusionment towards the center's romantic prospects is the lived reality for those compelled to accept their currently marginalized status and adopt hybrid flexibility as a practical survival strategy. In comparison, Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Maryse Conde in La Migration des coeurs (1995) deconstruct the love prospects from within for purposes of disenchanting the passing down of particular romantic fallacies. Rhys and Conde highlight race and ethnic hybridity to problematize love formulas. As rewritings from the peripheries, Rhys and Conde explore problematic and creative places and spaces of hybrid reconstructions providing insight into the hidden restrictions and possibilities of border crossing.

The sexual revolution is justly celebrated for the freedoms it brought--birth control, the decriminalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce, greater equality between the sexes, women's massive entry into the workforce, and more tolerance of homosexuality. But as Pascal Bruckner, one of France's leading writers, argues in this lively and provocative reflection on the contradictions of modern love, our new freedoms have also brought new burdens and rules--without, however, wiping out the old rules, emotions, desires, and arrangements: the couple, marriage, jealousy, the demand for fidelity, the war between constancy and inconstancy. It is no wonder that love, sex, and relationships today are so confusing, so difficult, and so paradoxical.

An accomplished literary theorist, Christine Montalbetti has published critical works on topics such as travel literature, narrative digression, the status of readers and characters, and the relationships between fiction and the world. Her fiction writing, however, calls our scholarly certainties into question, blurring narratological categories and exploding the boundaries between fiction and reality on a road trip through the American West in Journée américaine (2009). In Journéeamericaine Montalbetti appropriates two iconic cinematic and literary models, namely, the road movie and the road novel. In both cases, those models open onto wide vistas, providing foundations from which to engage and call into question genre conventions and readers' horizons of expectation. Subverting the genre conventions of her models, Montalbetti's narrator seems to abandon herself to the pleasures of narrative digression. In lieu of an adventure story \"on the road,\" the narrator proposes a multitude of narratives encompassing an astonishing variety of subjects. Breaking boundaries, Montalbetti inserts herself into the narrative as well, and the novel becomes a virtual laboratory from which to explore the possibilities of fiction, opening onto a tentative utopian space of communication between author and reader, pushing ever further the frontiers of the genre.

The focus of this article is on the representation of the inner Parisian 'quartier' of Belleville in three twenty-first century films neonoirs, through a study of their use of setting and location. After first examining how the depiction of the 'quartier' in twentieth century French cinema contributed to the establishment of a Belleville stereotype, the article explores the extent to which these three recent films adopt and adapt the conventions of the original noir series. Setting in cinema has been closely studied, and Paris has been the subject of wide research in this context. The article's originality lies in its focus on the cinematic representation of a Parisian 'quartier', highlighting the interaction between the conventions of the neonoir genre and the changing identity of Belleville.