Overview

A wicked queen orders the place cook to kill her grandchildren and serve them up for dinner - ""in a sauce Robert"". But as any good cook knows, this sauce is properly served with game, not domestic animals. Does the ogress transgress? Perhaps, but the cook breaks the rules as well. Deceiving his mistress, he rescues the children and replaces them in the requested dish with goat and lamb. In this provocative volume, Louis Marin treats a subject to which some fo the most exciting literary criticism has been devoted: the body as represented in text and image. From fairy tales to biblical narrative, from the divine body in the Eucharist to the body of Louis XIV as described in his physicians' journals, Marin focuses on the peculiar relationship between verbal and oral functions - speaking and eating, boasting and gluttony, lying and cannibalism. Drawing on the methodologies of semiology, philosophy of language, and literary and art criticism, Marin explores works by Rabelais, La Fontaine, Perrault and the ""Logic"" of Port-Royal. Throughout, he is concerned with the conceptualization of desire and pleasure, justice and force, natural violence and political power - questioning their ideological as well as their symbolic bases.

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9780801856136

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The leitmotif of this book is the way in which...the sacramental eating of Christ's body is performed through the grammar of the sentence...Marin's admiration for the word made flesh, and hence the word made power, is what makes this book both fascinating and disturbing. --'Times Literary Supplement'

Author Information

Louis Marin was director of studies at the Ecole des Haute Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and an associate of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University until his death in 1992. His many books include The Portrait of the King and La voix excommuniee: Essais de memoire.

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