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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Annabel L. Kim, "Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
Description: Annabel Kim's second book*, Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) digs into fecal matter as a preoccupation of modern French literature. Inspired by the author's observations of a certain "fecal blindness" among student and other readers of French literature, Cacaphonies examines a series of canonical authors and texts through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which shit plays a powerful role as the work and waste of bodies and a figure of radical equality.Throughout its five chapters, the book examines the writing of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Mar...