Tearing the Body: Modern Self and Postmodern Corpo-rality in Les Chants de Maldoro

Lautréamont's most famous text, Les Chants de Maldoror, is read by many recent critics as a radical work that disrupts literary conventions and undermines traditional notions about the human subject. An emphasis on physical metamorphosis and on the blurring of frontiers betweeen bodies as well as between categories of bodies presents a postmodernist version of corporality. However, the work retains, in the area of sexuality, a more conservative modern view of the self as singular and autonomous. (CL)