Presented by Annabel Kim Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University   Abstract: Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, in my book Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature, I take fecal matter and its place in literature seriously to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality, both a literary object and a reflection on literature itself, without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile. The shit in the canon expresses a call to democratize literature, making literature for all, just as shit is for (or of) all. Shit’s presence in this prized element of French identity is a continually uttered desire to manifest the universality France aspires to—as encapsulated by the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité—but fails to realize. In shit there is a concrete universalism that traverses bodies with disregard for embodied differences. Literature, and the ideas to be found therein, cannot be separated from the corporeal envelopes that create and receive them. In reminding us of this fact, Cacaphonies reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity […]

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in October of 2022.