Figures de lâexcès chez Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes et Marina de Van by Dominique Carlini Versini examines textual and visual images of the excessive body that run through the narratives of contemporary French women artists. From the 1990s onwards, a tendency towards excess has been observed in French fiction. On the one hand, young female writers have portrayed the body in a particularly crude manner. Meanwhile, a new trend has developed in film characterised by explicit or violent images of the body. The monograph's original approach is to compare the strategies of the two mediums to generate an embodied aesthetic experience while demonstrating that this formal experimentation goes hand in hand with a poetic reflection on the (material, cultural and symbolic) boundaries of the body.
Dominique Carlini Versini is an Assistant Professor in French Studies at Durham University in the UK. She completed her doctoral studies in 2018 at the University of Kent.
This monograph will be of interest to specialists and students in contemporary French studies, comparative literature, and film studies. Gender and body studies specialists will also find it relevant.