Publications
Through
the Reading Glass: Women, Books, and Sex in the French Enlightenment,
State University Press of New York, 2005.Both a chapter in the history of reading and an exploration into the roles and functions of reading in the lives and texts of women in the eighteenth century, this book uses women’s texts as different as memoirs, fairy tales, historical romance, love letters, periodicals, and fiction to study the practices and protocols that surround women’s reading in the Enlightenment. In showing how a reading culture was being constructed for and by women--in which books, sex, and acts of reading are richly and evocatively intertwined—I argue that there was, in fact, another revolution in the eighteenth century—a quiet one, perhaps, but enormously important—that made reading rather than speech the focus of women’s cultural and pre-feminist agenda.
http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61104
Through the themes of eros and power, Laclos demonstrates a view of society and social relationships that points toward a conception of evil located in the socio-moral. By focusing on the sexual and power games that were the modus vivendi of a segment of the French aristocracy prior to the Revolution, he advances a theory of conflict as the primary psychological mechanism determining human and social interaction. While Laclos suffuses his novel with irony and makes no overt call to revolution, his work nonetheless carries sociological and political significance both for the eighteenth century and beyond, as it unmasks social and individual practices that undermine the social contract.