NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH STUDIES最新文献

Abstract:

In his "Études sur Poe," Charles Baudelaire makes the following provocative remark: "Si la première phrase n'est pas écrite en vue de préparer cette impression finale, l'œuvre est manquée dès le début." This essay seeks to disinter the dialectical contradictory logic at the core of this sentence—its identification of first and final in the work of art—by submitting the injunction contained within it to Baudelaire's own work. Attending to three underexplored elements of the first sentence of "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," I claim that the 1863 text provides us with the paradigmatic example of Baudelaire's response to the injunction. The first sentence is replete with an entanglement of unresolvable contradictions that are constitutive of the forms of perception, experience, and subjectivation immanent to modern life. The "impression finale" of the work is that it extends this entanglement of contradictions to the level of a general systemic operation of irony. What the exaggerated, anatomical analysis to the opening sentence will show is that at the center of the text is the attempt to give sense to the possibility of holding fast to the experience of modern life as an experience in a constant state of disappearance that plays out at the level of form.

Abstract:

Sarah Bernhardt's first American tour (1880–81) is one of the most publicized cultural events in France and the United States. The controversial actress's performances are commented at length by the Parisian press and the American newspapers, as well as the account of the actress Marie Colombier, fragments of which appear in the press. In my study of this vast corpus of publications from a discourse analysis perspective, I focus on the transatlantic media discourse: a specific discourse based on socio-cultural stereotypes, highlighting new relationships and commonalities in the French and American media systems. While emphasizing the impact of the concepts of distance and circulation on transatlantic media discourse and its enunciators, this article will also point out the similarities between this particular discourse and that of the French colonial press at the end of the nineteenth century. (In French)

Abstract:

In an essay on "Phenomenological Aesthetics," the philosopher Roman Ingarden asserted that "works of art have the right to expect to be properly apprehended by observers who are in communion with them and to have their special value justly treated" (269). What does it mean to "properly apprehend" a novel? How do we know how to read something "justly"? What would it mean to claim that something has become "unreadable"? Can books somehow show us how they want to be read? Can lost forms of intelligibility and appreciation be recovered? How do we know whether the way we are reading a book is the way it asks to be read or is the product of our own, differently structured habitus? In this article, I ask these kinds of questions about novels by Sand, Gautier, and a few others with the help of Ingarden and Bourdieu as well as some recent critics.

Abstract:

In 1875, Parisian daily Le Figaro introduced a personal advertising column called the petite correspondance, which allowed people to write to each other using the newspaper as mediator, avoiding home addresses and the watchful parents or spouses who lived at them. The often-amorous exchanges this facilitated, some fictional (commissioned by the newspaper to entice readers), some real, drew on older forms, such as epistolary novels. In this way, they catered to readers' established taste for voyeurism while drawing them into a new erotic temporality, as these notes were simultaneously exchanged and voyeuristically read. Created in the very years that witnessed the conception of laws granting press freedom and setting the stage for a redefinition of "pornography," the section brought together press and sexuality in novel ways, laying the groundwork for the forms of voyeuristic reading and exhibitionist living we—through social media—are steeped in today.

Abstract:

In La Petite Fadette, one of George Sand's romans champêtres, the relationship that Fadette shares with the natural world is rooted in ancestral, embodied knowledge as well as close attention and observation. These relationships demonstrate connection and reciprocity which defies the common ideology of the time that positioned humans as superior to the nonhuman world. The present project argues that throughout the novel, Fadette is able to pass along her unique worldview to Landry, which changes his relationships to the nonhuman worlds. On the other hand, Sylvinet fails to take in Fadette's teachings, which ultimately harms the nonhuman world around him and contributes to his inability to find companionship. This essay demonstrates how the relationships between the human characters and the animal world significantly shape one's understanding of the novel and give a fuller picture of Sand's social and political aims.

Abstract:

The panoramic literature of the July Monarchy (1830–48) depicts the rat or ballet girl to be destined for prostitution, her dream of becoming a star a mere pretext used to exploit her. In my analysis of journalists writing about the young female dancer, I interrogate the neutrality of such sources, contextualizing the dance profession in relation to other employment options available to female women workers of the lower classes and reconsidering the rat as an icon of women's economic and artistic ambitions. While dance was described as essentializing femininity, it promised a transformation of the body and the self that allowed for social mobility, self-expression, and artistic renown. Including accounts from former rats (including Berthe Bernay, Cléo de Mérode, and Judith Gautier) I show how dancing informed their identities, allowing them to imagine alternative realities and giving form to the articulation of their desires for the future.

Abstract:

This article analyzes the decorated turtle in Huysmans's 1884 À rebours. It argues that des Esseintes's unfortunate animal, which perishes under its heavy ornamentation, plays out the apprehensions of its owner and embodies the psychological and physical perils that await him. Turtles—fundamental to nineteenth-century discoveries in developmental biology as well as to Darwin's theories of evolution—are at once instructive specimens and labile signifiers in competing narratives: sites and objects of theorization. The narrator's use of this animal thus also amounts to an insertion of naturalism within the novel's storied decadence. To make this argument, this article examines the turtle episode in the context of late nineteenth-century scientific and fictional writings about turtles, including Jules Hosch's 1878 short story "Histoire d'une tortue et d'un étudiant."

Abstract:

Pedigreed by hyperesthesia, purified by an anorexia of the real, the Decadents strove to perfect an art positioned on the threshold of death where vitality's flame shone brightest before guttering and going out. Heralded by Denis Neveu as "le roman bible de la Dėcadence," Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas (1901) shows how the repetition compulsion takes life with its disharmony and suffering, and stylizes it in works that are dead and thus immune to pain. Lorrain's hero, le duc de Fréneuse, encounters life's horrors as the undead who proliferate as the wax dolls, mannequins, and eyeless statues which remain after living being are replaced with their simulacra. Expressing a desire for escape from the compulsion to create, Monsieur de Phocas is a text in search of the one who can absolve it of the need to write in the first place.