Rendering French Realism
Rendering French Realism

Author: Lawrence R. Schehr

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1997-07-01

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0804780161

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Realist novels are usually seen as verisimilar representations of the world, and even when that verisimilitude is critically examined (as it has been by Marxist and feminist critics), the criticism has referred to extra-literary matters, such as bourgeois ideology or defects in the portrayal of women. This book takes as its thesis that the point defining realism is the point at which the processes of representation break down, a sort of black hole of textuality, a rent in the tissue. The author argues that our notions of continuity, of readability, of representability, or our ideas about unity and ideological shift—or even our notions of what is hidden, occulted, or absent—all come from the nineteenth-century realist model itself. Instead of assuming representability, the author argues that we should look at places where the texts do not continue the representationalist model, where there is a sudden falling off, an abyss. Instead of seeing that point as a shortcoming, the author argues that it is equal to the mimetic successes of representation. After an initial chapter dealing with the limits and ruptures of textuality, the book considers the work of Stendhal, from its early state as a precursor to the later realism to La Chartreuse de Parme, which shows how the act of communication for Stendhal is always made of silences, gaps, and interruptions. The author then reads several works of Balzac, showing how he, while setting up the praxes of continuity on which his oeuvre depends, ruptures the works at various strategic points. In a chapter entitled "Romantic Interruptions," works of Nerval and the younger Dumas, seemingly unrelated to the realist project, are shown to be marked by the ideological, representational, and semiotic assumptions that produced Balzac. The book concludes with Flaubert, looking both at how Flaubert incessantly makes things "unfit" and how critics, even the most perspicacious postmodern ones, often try to smooth over the permanent crisis of rupture that is the sign of Flaubert's writing.

Realism in the Age of Impressionism
Realism in the Age of Impressionism

Author: Marnin Young

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0300208324

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The late 1870s and early 1880s were watershed years in the history of French painting. As outgoing economic and social structures were being replaced by a capitalist, measured time, Impressionist artists sought to create works that could be perceived in an instant, capturing the sensations of rapidly transforming modern life. Yet a generation of artists pushed back against these changes, spearheading a short-lived revival of the Realist practices that had dominated at mid-century and advocating slowness in practice, subject matter, and beholding. In this illuminating book, Marnin Young looks closely at five works by Jules Bastien-Lepage, Gustave Caillebotte, Alfred-Philippe Roll, Jean-Franocois Raffaeelli, and James Ensor, artists who shared a concern with painting and temporality that is all but forgotten today, having been eclipsed by the ideals of Impressionism. Young's highly original study situates later Realism for the first time within the larger social, political, and economic framework and argues for its centrality in understanding the development of modern art.

Figures of Alterity
Figures of Alterity

Author: Lawrence R. Schehr

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780804743334

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This book focuses on the extension of realist writing toward alterity, toward otherness, in its ongoing efforts to enable individuals to speak and be heard correctly. Through a series of close readings of six authors from Balzac to Proust, the author shows the ways realist narrative engages the problem of bringing the other into the realm of the discursively representable. The acts of representation involved in that development were not necessarily coterminous with either the representation of the exotic and its attendant stereotypes or with the representation of individuals themselves. The representation of the other was the extension of discourse to what was previously unrepresentable. The author argues that the unrepresentable is often perceived as oppositional because of the structuring of discourse by hierarchies and metaphysics, whereby any bivalent pair is made into an oppositional pair.

Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature
Models of Collaboration in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

Author: Seth Whidden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1317094840

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Contributing to the current lively discussion of collaboration in French letters, this collection raises fundamental questions about the limits and definition of authorship in the context of the nineteenth century's explosion of collaborative ventures. While the model of the stable single author that prevailed during the Romantic period dominates the beginning of the century, the authority of the speaking subject is increasingly in crisis through the century's political and social upheavals. Chapters consider the breakdown of authorial presence across different constructions of authorship, including the numerous cenacles of the Romantic period; collaborative ventures in poetry through the practice of the "Tombeaux" and as seen in the Album zutique; the interplay of text and image through illustrations for literary works; the collective ventures of literary journals; and multi-author prose works by authors such as the Goncourt brothers and Erckmann-Chatrian. Interdisciplinary in scope, these essays form a cohesive investigation of collaboration that extends beyond literature to include journalism and the relationships and tensions between literature and the arts. The volume will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, and more generally, any scholar interested in what's at stake in redefining the role of the French author

The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature
The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature

Author: Brian Nelson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-06-05

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1316380963

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In this highly accessible introduction, Brian Nelson provides an overview of French literature - its themes and forms, traditions and transformations - from the Middle Ages to the present. Major writers, including Francophone authors writing from areas other than France, are discussed chronologically in the context of their times, to provide a sense of the development of the French literary tradition and the strengths of some of the most influential writers within it. Nelson offers close readings of exemplary passages from key works, presented in English translation and with the original French. The exploration of the work of important writers, including Villon, Racine, Molière, Voltaire, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Proust, Sartre and Beckett, highlights the richness and diversity of French literature.

Stendhal's Less-Loved Heroines
Stendhal's Less-Loved Heroines

Author: Maria C. Scott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-02

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1351191810

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"Stendhal's most independent heroines are usually disliked or marginalized by critics. However, when gender-neutral criteria are applied, Mina de Vanghel, Vanina Vanini, Mathilde de La Mole, and Lamiel can all be shown to enact extraordinary experiments in freedom. These experiments are all the more remarkable in view of the gender of their agents, the historical situation of the author (1783-1842), and the conventions of the literary movement that his fiction helped to found: realism. Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 study of Stendhal's heroines gives preference to the reserved females over his Amazons. But existentialism, as a philosophy of freedom, also enables a reading of the self-determining heroines that acknowledges the superiority of their choices: their resistance and counter-plots, their paradoxical authenticity, their rejection of seriousness, and their assumption of responsibility for the routes they plot."

Rendering French Realism
Rendering French Realism

Author: Lawrence R. Schehr

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1997-07-01

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780804780162

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Realist novels are usually seen as verisimilar representations of the world, and even when that verisimilitude is critically examined (as it has been by Marxist and feminist critics), the criticism has referred to extra-literary matters, such as bourgeois ideology or defects in the portrayal of women. This book takes as its thesis that the point defining realism is the point at which the processes of representation break down, a sort of black hole of textuality, a rent in the tissue. The author argues that our notions of continuity, of readability, of representability, or our ideas about unity and ideological shift—or even our notions of what is hidden, occulted, or absent—all come from the nineteenth-century realist model itself. Instead of assuming representability, the author argues that we should look at places where the texts do not continue the representationalist model, where there is a sudden falling off, an abyss. Instead of seeing that point as a shortcoming, the author argues that it is equal to the mimetic successes of representation. After an initial chapter dealing with the limits and ruptures of textuality, the book considers the work of Stendhal, from its early state as a precursor to the later realism to La Chartreuse de Parme, which shows how the act of communication for Stendhal is always made of silences, gaps, and interruptions. The author then reads several works of Balzac, showing how he, while setting up the praxes of continuity on which his oeuvre depends, ruptures the works at various strategic points. In a chapter entitled "Romantic Interruptions," works of Nerval and the younger Dumas, seemingly unrelated to the realist project, are shown to be marked by the ideological, representational, and semiotic assumptions that produced Balzac. The book concludes with Flaubert, looking both at how Flaubert incessantly makes things "unfit" and how critics, even the most perspicacious postmodern ones, often try to smooth over the permanent crisis of rupture that is the sign of Flaubert's writing.