Catherine Cusset - Böcker

This work traces the moral meaning of pleasure in libertine works of 18th-century France. The author contends that libertine works are linked by an ""ethics of pleasure"" that teaches readers that vanity and sensual enjoyment are part of their moral being.

Winner of the 1996 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize, Catherine Cusset's No Tomorrow traces the moral meaning of pleasure in several libertine works of the eighteenth-century—Watteau's Pélerinage à l'île de Cythère, Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Crébillon's Les égarements du coeur et de l'esprit, the anonymous pornographic novel Thérèse philosophe, Diderot's La religieuse, and Vivant Denon's short story ""Point de lendemain.""In this ambitious book, Cusset reframes the often misunderstood genre that celebrates what Casanova calls ""the present enjoyment of the senses."" She contends libertine works are not, as is commonly thought, characterized by the preaching of sexual pleasure but are instead linked by an ""ethics of pleasure"" that teaches readers that vanity and sensual enjoyment are part of their moral being. Developing Roland Barthes's concept of ""the pleasure of the text,"" the author argues that the novel is a powerful vehicle for moral lessons, more so than philosophical or moral treatises, because it conveys such lessons through pleasure.Cusset reads the proliferation of libertine novels as a reaction against the denial of pleasure in the literature and culture of the time. In the midst of the century's metaphysical impulse to simplify human psychology, these works focus on the moments in which human contradictions are revealed.Cusset's analysis suggests that libertine novels offered the eighteenth century a more complex picture of moral being and ultimately contributed a lesson of tolerance to the Enlightenment.

"Catherine Cusset's book caught a lot of me. I recognised myself" DAVID HOCKNEY"A perfect short exposé of Hockney's life as seen through the eyes of an admiring novelist" Kirkus Reviews"Hers is an affirming vision of a restless talent propelled by optimism and chance" New York TimesWith clear, vivid prose, this meticulously researched novel draws an intimate, moving portrait of the most famous living English painter. Born in Bradford in 1937, David Hockney had to fight to become an artist. After leaving home for the Royal College of Art in London his career flourished, but he continued to struggle with a sense of not belonging, because of his homosexuality, which had yet to be decriminalised, and because of his inclination for a figurative style of art, which was not sufficiently "contemporary" to be valued. Trips to New York and California - where he would live for many years and paint his iconic swimming pools - introduced him to new scenes and new loves, beginning a journey that would take him through the fraught years of the AIDS epidemic. A compelling hybrid of novel and biography, David Hockney: A Life offers an insightful overview of a painter whose art is as accessible as it is compelling, and whose passion to create has never been deterred by heartbreak or illness or loss.Translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan