Although Balzac's work has been much studied, practically nothing has been written on his use of linguistic concepts. Applying a new approach, this perceptive book demonstrates that the theme and ...theory of language were central to Balzac's fiction. In considering how the novelist was influenced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century speculation on language, Martin Kanes traces the development of Balzac's own linguistic ideas from his early to his later writings.
Originally published in 1976.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Sandy Petrey here looks at the emergence of nineteenth-century French realism in the light of the concept of speech acts as defined by J. L. Austin and as exemplified by the history of the French ...Revolution. Through analysis of the techniques of representation in works by Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola, Petrey suggests that the expression of a truth depends on the same collective forces necessary to change a regime. According to Petrey, political legitimacy in the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration was established by means of a series of demonstrations that what words say cannot be interpreted without reference to the community to which they speak. Petrey first discusses the creation of France's National Assembly in 1789 as a foundational example of how speech acts can bring about historical transformation. He then challenges the most powerful twentieth-century assault on realist aesthetics, Roland Barthes's S/Z , and also considers the views of such contemporary critics as Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, and Stanley Fish. During the Revolution, Petrey says, statements of truth were not descriptions of what was, but rather exhortations to produce what was not. Nineteenth-century French fiction represents in literary form a similar collectively authorized linguistic performance; the real in realism comes from representing facts not as they are in themselves but as they are produced and rejected in society. In the course of illuminating readings of three central realist works—Balzac's Pere Goriot , Stendhal's The Red and the Black , and Zola's Germinal —Petrey takes the position that the dilemmas of representation, far from being one of realism's blind spots, figure among its major narrative subjects.
The romances of Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, Sailor, are usually examined from some setting almost exclusively American. European or other planetary contexts are subordinated ...to local considerations. But while this isolated approach plays well in an arena constructed on American exclusiveness, it does not express the reality of the literary processes swirling around Melville in the middle of the nineteenth century. A series of expanding literary and technological networks was active that made his writing part of a global complex. Honoré de Balzac, popular French writer and creator of realism in the novel, was also in the web of these same networks, both preceding and at the height of Melville’s creativity. Because they engaged in similar intentions, there developed an almost inevitable attraction that brought their works together. Until recently, however, Balzac has not been recognized as a significant influence on Melville during his most creative period. Over the last decade, scholars began to explore literary networks by new methodologies, and the criticism developed out of these strategies pertains usually to modernist, postcolonial, contemporary situations. Remarkably, however, the intertextuality of Melville with Balzac is quite exactly a casebook study in transcultural comparativism. Looking at Melville’s innovative environment reveals meaningful results where the networks take on significant roles equivalent to what have been traditionally classed as genetic contacts.
Every writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, showing how the business of literature affects even ...storytelling devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. In this new model of criticism, the text is a record of its author’s sales pitch.
In Real Time David F. Bell explores the decisive impact the accelerated movement of people and information had on the fictions of four giants of French realism--Balzac, Stendhal, Dumas, and Zola. ..._x000B__x000B_Nineteenth-century technological advances radically altered the infrastructure of France, changing the ways ordinary citizens--and literary characters--viewed time, space, distance, and speed. The most influential of these advances included the improvement of the stagecoach, the growth of road and canal networks leading to the advent of the railway, and the increasing use of mail, and of the optical telegraph. Citing examples from a wide range of novels and stories, Bell demonstrates the numerous ways in which these trends of acceleration became not just literary devices and themes but also structuring principles of the novels themselves. _x000B__x000B_Beginning with both the provincial and the Parisian communications networks of Balzac, Bell proceeds to discuss the roles of horses and optical telegraphs in Stendhal and the importance of domination of communication channels to the characters of Dumas, whose Count of Monte-Cristo might be seen as the ultimate fictional master of this accelerated culture. Finally, Bell analyzes the cinematic vision created by the arrival of the railroad, as depicted by Zola in La Bete Humaine.
The one vs. the many Woloch, Alex; Woloch, Alex
2003., 20090209, 2009, 2003, c2003.
eBook
Does a novel focus on one life or many? Alex Woloch uses this simple question to develop a powerful new theory of the realist novel, based on how narratives distribute limited attention among a ...crowded field of characters. His argument has important implications for both literary studies and narrative theory. Characterization has long been a troubled and neglected problem within literary theory. Through close readings of such novels as Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Le Pre Goriot, Woloch demonstrates that the representation of any character takes place within a shifting field of narrative attention and obscurity. Each individual--whether the central figure or a radically subordinated one--emerges as a character only through his or her distinct and contingent space within the narrative as a whole. The "character-space," as Woloch defines it, marks the dramatic interaction between an implied person and his or her delimited position within a narrative structure. The organization of, and clashes between, many character-spaces within a single narrative totality is essential to the novel’s very achievement and concerns, striking at issues central to narrative poetics, the aesthetics of realism, and the dynamics of literary representation.
Wie antwortet der Roman, die Leitgattung der modernen Literatur, auf die Krisen politischer Ordnungen und ökonomischer Systeme zwischen Französischer Revolution und Erstem Weltkrieg? Gegenstand der ...Interpretation sind französische und englische Romane zwischen dem Realismus und der Moderne. Die Fragestellung zielt auf die fiktionale Verarbeitung des kritischen Verhältnisses ethischer Orientierungen, politischer Instabilität und ökonomischer Transformation vor dem Hintergrund der neuen Formen gesellschaftlicher Differenzierung. Die vier ausgewählten Autoren (Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Joseph Conrad, Henry James) reagieren auf spezifische epochale Problemlagen. Sie stehen über die Grenzen der jeweiligen nationalliterarischen Traditionen hinaus in intensiven Wirkungs- und Rezeptionsverhältnissen, in denen sich die dynamische Evolution der Gattung Roman abbildet.
Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust investigates human curiosity and its representation in eavesdropping scenes in nineteenth-century English and French novels. Ann Gaylin argues that ...eavesdropping dramatizes a primal human urge to know and offers a paradigm of narrative transmission and reception of information among characters, narrators and readers. Gaylin sheds light on the social and psychological effects of the nineteenth-century rise of information technology and accelerated flow of information, as manifested in the anxieties about - and delight in - displays of private life and its secrets. Analysing eavesdropping in Austen, Balzac, Collins, Dickens and Proust, Gaylin demonstrates the flexibility of the scene to produce narrative complication or resolution; to foreground questions of gender and narrative agency; to place the debates of privacy and publicity within the literal and metaphoric spaces of the nineteenth-century novel. This 2003 study will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century English and European literature.
Considerations of Balzac's reiterated plots or characters are common, though there seems little awareness that they represent an important device that should be termed "types" that the novelist ...regularly exploited. Balzac's short but magnificent La Femme abandonnee provides an excellent example of typology, whether derived from Balzac's own work and life, Judeo-Christian theology, or Jungian psychology, and variously identified with archetypes like lambs and orphans or classical characters like Werther and Oedipus. Once one recognizes the existence of the "abandoned woman" type, it is difficult to ignore the imposing implications of the title of Balzac's story.
Empiricism and empire : La peau de chagrin -- Marginal realism in Le père Goriot -- Realism, romance, and La fille aux yeux d'or -- Economies of romance and history in Phineas Finn -- Mapping and ...unmapping Phineas Finn and Phineas redux -- Global London and the way we live now -- "Berlin wird Weltstadt" : nation, city, and world in Cécile -- The imaginative geography of Effi Briest -- Conclusion : the limits of "realism"
