Against Transgression

Ashley Tauchert’s new book questions the widespread use of Transgression as a term of critical analysis and approval. Tauchert takes the concept back to its origins in the compelling thought experiments of Georges Bataille and traces its transformation into critical dogma in the work of Michel Foucault. Offering neither a manifesto nor a template, Against Transgression tracks the author′s rejection of Transgression as a legitimate critical methodology following her mother′s death and her own maternal transfiguration. In her quest for the possibility of critical thought beyond the now–hegemonic transgressive turn, Tauchert finds herself blowing the dust off a surprisingly radical mode of English literary criticism in C.S.Lewis′s speculative narrative work. Bataille and Lewis make for very odd critical bedfellows indeed, as Tauchert correlates the theoretical pornography of the iconic text of Transgression ( Madame Edwarda) with the extraordinarily popular conservatism of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in her search for a credible response to ′Transgression′.

Introduction: reflections of a transgressive daughter and her maternal transfiguration.

1. Preface Against Transgression: Bataillean transgression and its resonance in contemporary critical thought.

2. Minerva’s Owl: the quest for feminine agency and the freedom of constraint.

3. ‘A Serious and Dangerous Matter’: ‘Transgression’ and the death of god.

4. Preface to Compassion.

Index.

Ashley Tauchert is currently Head of the English Department in the School of Arts, Languages and Literatures at the University of Exeter. She established the ‘Institute for Feminist Theory and Research’ with Gillian Howie in 1998, which hosted the international Third Wave Feminism conference at Exeter in 2001. She coordinates the ′Eighteenth–Century Narrative Project′ and acts as Associate Editor for Critical Quarterly. She has come to enjoy a relatively quiet, reflective life in Devon.