Bachelors, Bastards, and Nomadic Masculinity is, firstly, a thematic exploration of bachelor figures and male bastards in literary works by Guy de Maupassant and André Gide. The coupling of ...Maupassant and Gide is appropriate for such an analysis, not only because of their mutual treatment of illegitimacy, but also because each writer represents varieties of bachelors and bastards from disparate social classes and subcultures, each writing during contiguous moments of socio-legal changes parti.
Maupassant Greimas, Algirdas Julien; Perron, Paul; de Maupassant, Guy
1988, 1988-01-01, Letnik:
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Translated by Paul Perron Maupassant's short story, "Two Friends", is examined in order to test methodological tools and to hone them for their application in the analysis of narrative discourse, ...starting from the oral tale (Propp) and ending with the written tale instituted as literary genre. Complex procedures of textual production are identified: among which entire sequences as well as the "evenemential" level of narrative fade away in favor of its cognitive dimension. This semiotic investigation is accompanied by a challenge to certain conventions of literary criticism: dialogue, the locus of Realist stereotypes, appears laden with paradoxical truths; the description of nature, inherited from the Romantics, bristles with narrative intent, and entire sections of a valorized figurative universe unfold before us. Thematic readings are linked up with semantic analysis: the figure of Water exerts its profound fascination. A Christian symbolics is uncovered which traverses the text and invites us to read it as a new Gospel Parable. New readings complement older ones and remain as so many suspended possibilities. The tale appears somewhat as a sonnet, that is to say as a "fixed-form" genre, where the closure of the text would be a necessary condition for transcending it.
The result of formal and thematic research undertaken by the author in the1880s, Maupassant's Le Horla (1887), owing to its originality, became a fantastic literature classic. Constituted from the ...recycling of several passages of independent texts among which La Lettre d'un fou (1885) and Le Horla published in 1886, the tale, built by recoveries and variations, offers a completely relevant exploratory way for genetic research. By studying the differences between the Horla manuscript (1887) and short stories which present themselves as genesis elements of the text, we will perform the genetic rise of the famous text in order to refine our knowledge of Maupassant's thematic and stylistic evolution as well as clarifying the poetics of his fantastic.
In this thesis entitled "Guy de Maupassant: l'engendrement du romanesque", the author proposes to demonstrate that Maupassant's six novels constitute a "trajectory", a progression driven and informed ...by an underlying logic. Proceeding from a psychoanalytical point of view, the author has uncovered another novel, an unspoken novel, that unfolds with Maupassant's novelistic production. This "other novel" expresses the engendering of the subject, which can be defined as the son-subject's liberation from the primal maternal dominion, thanks to the process of identification with the father.
Maupassant's six novels mark various stages in this trajectory. The primal novel Une vie establishes the problematics of the maternal dominion. In Bel-Ami can be seen the formation of the matrix of identity, which coincides with the emergence of the son-subject. The two central novels, Mont-Oriol and Pierre et Jean, illustrate the traumatic experience of paternity and filiation; the latter novel shows the relinquishment of narcissistic defense mechanism. Subsequently, in Fort comme la mort, the repressed narcissistic wound can be analysed. With the final novel, Notre coeur, the son-subject achieves the father position, thus escaping the madness associated with the double-bind of the ambivalent mother.
Previous criticism devoted to the works of Guy de Maupassant has focussed on the thematic obsession of paternity and filiation. This thesis sets out to demonstrate that this obsession is also the very principle driving the engenderment of the novel.
Generally labelled as fantastic in nature, Maupassant's short stories pose a serious problem. The very term "fantastic" is itself highly ambiguous; there have been many attemps to define what makes a ...work of literature "fantastic" in nature, but none of these attempts have managed to capture the essence of the genre in its entirety.
What is most striking in Maupassant's narratives is precisely his rejection of the fantastic almost as soon as it occurs. Contrary to the more traditional literature of the fantastic, his narratives remain anchored in a realistic world, rendering the reader's experience even more unsettling. In a sense, Maupassant manages to tame the fantastic by normalizing it.
We intend, therefore, to position our work at the meeting point of these two concepts---realism and fantasy---in order to determine if the definition of "fantastic realism" we will be striving for can be verified through our analysis of the following stories: "Apparition", "La chevelure", "Le Horla" (first version), "La main", "La peur", "Magnetisme" and "Sur 1'eau". (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
This master's thesis on literary writing consists of two separate parts. The first is a critique which discusses the problem of perceiving madness through reason in a selection of Guy de Maupassant's ...short stories. An analysis of the dialogue of the characters who represent reason will reveal that there are strong, strategic ties linking madness and reason.
This critique is followed by a creative work. The story focuses on a recluse who prefers the company of objects to that of people. He is, however, subjected to frequent visits from his "family of fools".
