"Les Belles Lettres" and "Reading Merleau-Ponty in Field, Stein and Fallon"

“Les Belles Lettres” is a four chapter book on: Sappho; Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West; Djuna Barnes. In the exegesis, I read Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the reversibility of the flesh in Michael Field deconstructing the Victorian male viewing subject and the Ancient Greek and Victorian construction of femininity as death. On my chapter on Stein I argue that nationalistic objects of perception inhabit the lesbian body in her work. In Working Hot by Kathleen Mary Fallon I read the pre-objective body, the body as words and the synthesis of the thing.