Deux lignes de force se dégagent du volume que nous allons présenter ici : d'une part, il s'impose une réflexion théorique profonde sur la création littéraire, les influences et la définition même de ...roman populaire ou de littérature populaire envisagées du point de vue de l'écrivain et de son entourage. Attirés par le roman dit populaire, Gide et lui se proposent de travailler aussi en tant que critiques littéraires pour analyser les oeuvres de romanciers tels que Charles-Louis Philippe ou Eugène Dabit. En fait, l'influence que ce dernier exerce sur l'oeuvre de Martin du Gard est telle, qu'elle ne se limite pas à la production romanesque de celui-là, mais embrasse aussi certains de ses articles : ainsi, dans Les Thibault, Une Vie de Saint ou Jean Barois par exemple, s'étale non seulement l'ombre de La Bête humaine, de La faute de l'abbé Mouret ou du Docteur Pascal, mais aussi celle du fameux J'accuse.
Thanks to novelistic writing, Rolland constructs possibilities: actions and events that might have happened, or that could happen, principally in the form of conversations or dialogues that might ...have taken place between opposing parties within France. Rolland thereby proposes a different form of communication, perhaps destined more to touch his readers, to have an impact on them. In this form, his writing is much freer, much more sensitive, and gets straight to the point without detours. His writing is no longer diplomatic, as it had been in the articles collected in Above the Battle. In particular, Rolland could say exactly how despicable and pathetic he found "the Press, the Arch-liar."56 As Aristotle rightly observed, the role of the writer, unlike the historian, "is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would either probably or inevitably happen."57 If history is compelled to report that which has already, rightly or wrongly, occurred, fiction permits a space possible for persuasion, for "what is possible carries conviction."58 The philosopher Paul Ricceur took a great interest in the imaginary possible, writing that "the world of fiction is a laboratory of forms where we try out possible configurations of action in order to test their consistency and plausibility. That type of experimentation with paradigms comes from what we would call productive imagination."59 Clerambault functions as an imaginative laboratory for Rolland: the novel is the manifestation of a personal and creative experimentation, "an intimate meditation, but in a way which suffocates life too much."60 Recognizing this aspect did not, however, prevent Rolland from unfolding possibilities according to his aspirations, enabling him, thanks to the imagination, to access "a game open and free to possibilities," in what Ricceur defines as "a state of non-engagement in regard to the world of perception or action. It is within that state of nonengagement that we try out new ideas, new values, and new ways of being in the world."61 Rolland, taking leave of Geneva and reestablishing himself within the domain of art, attempted by other means to emit the pacifist message, one favouring dialogue: with Clerambault he again attempts the possible. One of the most difficult revelations for Rolland to accept might be summarized in the following observation, especially after all the wars that have followed the first World War: "The more cultured, eloquent and sophisticated we become, the greater, it seems, our capacity for allowing our societal and animal aggressions to gravitate towards brutality."69 In the course of the novel, Clerambault suffers a "crisis of acute pessimism,"70 when the possible seems definitively out of reach, and the hope for progress through dialogue among intellectuals in view of peace seems lost on men "devoted to a murderous destiny."71 However, as the novel progresses and Clerambault has more and more encounters with others, his dialogues (sometimes epistolary, as in the case of Rolland) lead to the constitution of a group of disciples attracted by his pacifist fervor. These dialogues enrich the reflection on what is possible for the intellectual as well as for the fiction writer. Although the work of Pierre Sipriot consecrated to Rolland and the war remains debatable and sometimes insufficient, the author rightly summarizes Rolland s project during the time of his withdrawal from public life: "Why terrorize States that, themselves, live in a period of utter and total terror? Offer them instead the pacifist's imagination. Even if it does not yet have a political existence, the only thing that remains is that it be given its embodiment."72 In one of the final dialogues of the novel, one of Clerambault's interlocutors declares that "even to strive after the impossible has a concrete value. But that does not mean that we shall succeed in what we undertake."73 Clerambault then responds that "it is possible that we may not succeed for ourselves and our children; it is, even more, probable."74 Thus, up to the very end, Rolland reflects on the problem of the possible, leaving several possibilities open to the reader, who might either believe that it is necessary to attempt the impossible or hold firm to the extraordinary possibilities that exist within the domain of literature.
In the early twentieth century, Leo Tolstoy was regarded as one of the most influential pacifists in the world. In my paper, I will argue that Stefan Zweig's literary development from tacitly ...supporting Austrian nationalism to showing active commitment to the pacifist cause owes much to the influence of Tolstoy's writings on peace and civil disobedience. Focusing particularly on the period spanning WWI and the late 1920s, I will draw on Zweig's works of fiction, essays and autobiographical documents to show how closely Zweig studied Tolstoy's works and to what extent he developed the essentially religious ideas to contribute to a humanistic pacifist discourse. Drawing also on the reception of Zweig's secularized version of Tolstoy's pacifism, I set out to demonstrate the limitations of Zweig's commitment to politics and social change.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
The foundation of such a religious thinking was laid by what Rolland later described as three spiritual revelations, or éclairs, which provided a vivid, experiential counterpoint to the abstraction ...of the Catholic Mass that he attended during his childhood years.1 Rolland gives a detailed account of these flashes of intuition into the nature of existence in Le Voyage intérieur: a penetrating vision of the wide expanse of nature on a terrace in the town of Ferney; his reading of "les mots de feu de Spinoza," which provided him with a direct taste of the divine life; and "l'éclair Tolstoyen," which gave him the sensation of being one with the universe (28). The Deconstruction of Christianity and Jean-Christophe's Crisis of Faith Jean-Luc Nancy is a contemporary French philosopher whose career has involved an engagement with a wide spectrum of topics, from community, art, the body, psychoanalysis, globalization, and German Romanticism, to political thought.
This dissertation asks how a long-established literary culture exposed to the depredations of modernity reinvents itself. In the early twentieth century, Chinese activists and intellectuals, reeling ...from decades of political setbacks since the Opium Wars, sought to drag Chinese society out of an allegedly benighted backwardness into a westernized modernity. I show that modern Chinese realist writers frequently turned to the topic of material poverty—peasants suffering from famine, exploited urban laborers, homeless orphans—to convey their sense of textual poverty and national backwardness. Writers wished to break with a literary and linguistic tradition that for thousands of years had largely been the purview of the ruling scholar-official class. This tradition was, according to modern reformers, woefully impoverished in comparison to Western models, and writing about poverty was a strategy to ameliorate this cultural deficiency. The combination of a radically new subject matter and experimentation with diverse literary resources (indigenous and foreign) generated major innovations in narrative technique and form. Depicting poverty allowed writers to revolutionize the nascent forms of modern Chinese narrative, innovating strategies of representing the nation, the social other, time, and space, while problematizing their deployment of this weighty topic for aesthetic purposes. Though it was contact with Western cultures that produced their sense of backwardness, Chinese intellectuals appropriated from those foreign literary traditions narrative tools to remedy China’s purported textual deficiency by writing about poverty. I examine why Russian literature, itself long preoccupied with a problem of belatedness vis-à-vis Western Europe, occupied a privileged place for Chinese intellectuals of this era. Comparing Chinese fiction about poverty to Russian intertexts by Gogol, Andreev, Chekhov, Turgenev, and others, I show how Chinese writers drew and innovated upon themes (such as madness or human animality) and formal elements (such as metonymy) to invent a new, syncretic realism. In contrast to criticism about the limits of realist writing in China, I argue that it is a heteromodal form, capable of encompassing many modes of narration or literary genres. Here I draw upon on Mikhail Bakhtin’s principle of the omnivorously heteroglossic nature of language and the novel. Chinese writers were so omnivorously intertextual, absorbing different Western genres and -isms simultaneously while continuing to make use of traditional Chinese literary resources, that modern Chinese realism is necessarily informed by a broad spectrum of narrative modes and styles. My dissertation thus contributes to recent critical discussions about peripheral realisms and the transformation of discursive modes or generic conventions when they cross borders.
The rapid expansion of the mass press in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France, along with the concurrent rise of an information-driven style of journalism known as reportage, coincided ...with a shift in literary portrayals of the press. Early to mid-nineteenth-century novels of journalism such as Balzac’s Illusions perdues consistently depict the world of journalism in intensely hostile tones, as do many later novels and works of poetry, at times with even greater vitriol. By contrast, from Baudelaire onwards, some French authors including Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Proust took a more ambivalent approach to the press, pivoting between antipathy and enthusiasm for what became a truly massified and ubiquitous cultural phenomenon during their lifetimes. Their equivocal portrayals of the press in poetry and prose fiction epitomize their broader ambivalence towards modernity itself – a trait that distinguishes these modernist authors from their avant-garde contemporaries, who advocated a radical break with tradition and tended to be more consistently hostile or enthusiastic towards journalism. The thematic prominence of journalism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century French literature reflects its ongoing role as what Marie-Ève Thérenty calls “the laboratory of literature,” whereby authors published poetry and prose fiction in the mass press, for which they also wrote opinion columns, criticism, and other forms of journalism that they then frequently recycled in their literary works. Belying the account of literature’s autonomization found in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who argues that literature and the mass press had grown apart by the end of the nineteenth century, modernist poetry and prose fiction continued to appear in large-circulation, commercially oriented newspapers and magazines into the twentieth century. From the 1880s onwards, the growth of the mass press was paralleled by the emergence of a wave of little magazines known as petites revues that became the primary literary laboratory of literary modernism. These petites revues had many material links to the mass press. Authors often wrote simultaneously for both newspapers and petites revues. Many of the latter courted publicity in the former, even as they denounced those very same publications as the antithesis of true literature. And petites revues published many pieces of reportage – a style of journalism associated with the mass press. These connections to the mass press left their mark on the literary works published in petites revues, which often draw on newspaper articles and confront topical journalistic subjects. Moreover, several petites revues evolved into major publishing houses, including Éditions Gallimard, whose extensive commercial interactions with the mass press further shaped the works they published as modernist authors themselves became intimately involved in publicizing their books. Early to mid-nineteenth-century authors consistently avoid confronting their debts to journalism in their literary works. They thunder against the press but cannot live without it. Anti-journalistic thunder underlain by various kinds of dependence on the press remains a dominant feature of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century French literature and cultural criticism. By contrast, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Proust as well as Gide and Péguy all allude to the ambiguous position of journalism within their prose poetry, poetry, novels, and essays. These authors at once draw on journalism in their literary works and reflect on the significance of their journalistic borrowings within those works themselves. The self-conscious modernist spirit of their writing thus allows them, unlike their precursors and most of their contemporaries, to finally come to terms with the challenge posed by the mass press to literary creation.
