Cutting the Body

This book is about how poets, filmmakers, and psychoanalysts look upon the female body, how they examine it as if dissecting it--at times relishing it, at others anguishing over its fragmentation. Eliane DalMolin examines how Charles Baudelaire, François Truffaut, and Sigmund Freud, based on their inheritance of lyricism, shaped and perpetuated a cultural understanding of women that they continued to represent in late romantic images, despite their respective innovative talents and influences in bringing about three decisive cultural moments: modernism, New Wave cinema, and psychoanalysis.

The work's originality comes primarily from its unique summoning of three distinct disciplines around the notion of the cut. It places the complex desire to cut the woman's body at the center of an investigation of male identity in Western culture through incisive discussions of poetry, cinema, and psychoanalysis. The terms of this inquiry disclose an uncanny male disposition to femininity and motherhood, and its direct implication in productive acts of cutting. Cutting the Body will appeal to literary scholars, film specialists, feminist theorists, and experts in psychoanalytical theory.

Eliane DalMolin is Associate Professor of French, University of Connecticut. She is coeditor of Sites: The Journal of 20th-Century/Contemporary French Studies.