Rossini), religion, and the arts (Girodet's Endymion, Michelangelo). The most important allusions are to the figures of beauty in Greek culture: Adonis, Endymion and Pygmalion. The intertextuality between Sarrasine and the myth of Pygmalion is a vital one, as it establishes the tragedy of misconception: Sarrasine creates a statue of the "female" La Zambinella, only to discover later that his subject wasn't a real "woman" as Sarrasine—that "a real woman is born from the statue". Furthermore, the replication of the statue into marble, and into two separate portraits (Adonis, and Girodet's Endymion) only perpetuates the symbolic notion that Sarrasine is always influenced by an intrinsic gender ambiguity. Renditions in other media The composer Richard Beaudoin is writing an opera based on Sarrasine. Notes Sources Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Hill and Wang: New York, 1974. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1981. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. I. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Livia, Anna. Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Katherine Kolb, "The Tenor of "Sarrasine". PMLA, Vol. 120, No. 5 (Oct., 2005), pp. 1560–1575 Published by: Modern Language Association Noble, Yvonne. "Castrati, Balzac, and Barthes' S/Z." Comparative Drama. Kalamazoo: Spring 1997. Vol. 31, Iss. 1. pp28–42. Sprenger, Scott. "Mind as Ruin," Stories of the Earth, New York/Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2008, 119-136. Sprenger, Scott. "Sarrasine de Balzac ou l'archéologie du moi moderne," La Plume et la pierre : l'écrivain et le modèle archéologique au XIXe siècle, Nîmes, Champ Social, 2007, 291-318. Stoltzfus, Ben. Lacan and Literature : Purloined Pretexts. SUNY Press: Albany, 1996. p145. Petrey, Sandy. "Castration, Speech Acts, and the Realist Difference: S/Z versus Sarrasine" Vol. 102, No. 2 (Mar., 1987), pp. 153–165, Published by: Modern Language Association Bertault, Philippe. Balzac and The Human Comedy. New York: New York University Press, 1963. Print. External links Books of La Comédie humaine 1830 short stories 1830 French novels Novellas by Honoré de Balzac Nonlinear narrative novels