Essai
Nouvelle parution
Dirt for Art's Sake. Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita

Dirt for Art's Sake. Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la maison d'édition)


Elisabeth LADENSON, Dirt for Art's Sake. Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2007, 304 p.
ISBN 978-0-8014-7410-1


RÉSUMÉ

In Dirt for Art's Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson recounts the mostvisible of modern obscenity trials involving scandalous books and theirauthors. What, she asks, do these often-colorful legal histories haveto tell us about the works themselves and about a changing culturalclimate that first treated them as filth and later celebrated them asmasterpieces? Ladenson's narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill (written in the eighteenth century, put on trial in the United States in 1966); she considers, along the way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, and the works of the Marquis de Sade.

Overthe course of roughly a century, Ladenson finds, two ideas that hadbeen circulating in the form of avant-garde heresy gradually becameaccepted as truisms, and eventually as grounds for legal defense. Thefirst is captured in the formula “art for art's sake”—the notion that awork of art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality. Thesecond is realism, vilified by its critics as “dirt for dirt's sake.”In Ladenson's view, the truth of the matter is closer to “dirt forart's sake”—the idea that the work of art may legitimately include therepresentation of all aspects of life, including the unpleasant and thesordid.

Ladenson also considers cinematic adaptations of these novels, among them Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary,Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and the 1997 remake directed by Adrian Lyne,and various attempts to translate de Sade's works and life into film,which faced similar censorship travails. Written with a keen awarenessof ongoing debates about free speech, Dirt for Art's Sake traces the legal and social acceptance of controversial works with critical acumen and delightful wit.


À PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR

Elisabeth Ladenson is Associate Professor of French and ComparativeLiterature at Columbia University. She is the author of Proust'sLesbianism, also from Cornell.