Everyone agrees that Balzac is a realistic writer, but what do we
actually mean when we say that? This book examines the richness and
variety of Balzac's approaches to realism, employing several
...different interpretive methods. Taking love and money as the "Prime
Movers" of the world of La Comédie humaine, twenty-one
chapters provide detailed analyses of the many strategies by which
the writing forges the powerful impression of reality, the
construction we famously think of as Balzacian realism. Each
chapter sets the methods and aims of its analysis, with particular
attention to the language that conveys the sense of reality. Plots,
devices, or interpretive systems (including genealogies) function
as images or reflections of how the novels make their meanings. The
analyses converge on the central point: how did Balzac invent
realism? No less than this fundamental question lies behind the
interpretations this book provides, a question to which the
conclusion provides a full answer. A major book in English devoted
entirely to Balzac was overdue. Here is the American voice of
Balzac studies, an engaging, insightful, and revealing excursion
among the masterworks of one of the most important authors of all
time.
His is a name synonymous with seduction. His was a life lived without limits. Giacomo Casanova left behind thousands of pages detailing his years among Europe's notable and noble. In Casanova the ...Irresistible , Philippe Sollers--prolific intellectual and revered visionary of the French avant-garde--proffers a lively reading of and guide to the famed libertine's sprawling memoir. Armine Kotin Mortimer's translation of Sollers's reading tracks the alluring Venetian through the whole of his astounding and disreputable life. Eschewing myth, Sollers dares to present the plain realities of a man "simple, direct, courageous, cultivated, seductive, funny. A philosopher in action." The lovers are here, and the ruses and adventures. But Sollers also rescues Casanova the writer, a gifted composer of words who reigns as a titan of eighteenth-century literature. As always, Sollers seeks to shame society for its failure to recognize its failings. By admiring those of Casanova's admirable qualities present in himself, Sollers spurns bourgeois hypocrisy and cliché to affirm a jocund philosophy of life devoted to the twinned pursuits of pleasure and joy. A masterful translation that captures Sollers's idiosyncratic style, Casanova the Irresistible escorts readers on a journey into the heads and hearts of two singular personalities.
Under cover of a love story,
Trésor d'amour is actually a highly personal essay about Stendhal, its plot merely a thin pretext to quote extensively from Stendhal's writings and to discuss his life ...and his love affairs. Sollers's autobiographical protagonist channels Stendhal throughout, expanding the horizon of Stendhal's continuing presence and surreptitiously placing Stendhal before a twenty-first-century readership. Adding to his own multiple self-portrait, Sollers now gives us to understand a changed and richer Stendhal: Sollers shows us a Stendhal for our time that even Stendhal did not realize he could be, because Sollers sees himself in the nineteenth-century writer and takes the trouble to illustrate this resurrection in a long work. In his idiosyncratic manner, Sollers shows how Stendhal's presence has never been more persuasive than it is today.
Introduction : the prime movers -- Mimetic figures of semiosis -- From heteronomy to unity : Les Chouans -- Tenebrous affairs and necessary explications -- Self-narration and the fakery of imitation ...-- The double representation of the history of César Birotteau -- La maison Nucingen, a financial narrative -- Myth and mendacity : Pierrette and Beatrice Cenci -- The corset of La vieille fille -- Genealogy and the unmarried in La rabouilleuse -- Ursule Mirouët : genealogy and inheritance -- Un prince de la bohème and Pierre Grassou, or how love makes money -- Voyages of reflection, reflections on voyages -- Balzac and Poe : realizing magnetism -- Chemistry and composition : la recherche de l'absolu -- The capital of money and the science of magnetism : Melmoth réconcilié -- Love, music, and opium : medical semiotics of Massimilla Doni -- The languages of sex -- Composed past and historical present -- Problems of closure -- Conclusion : Balzac's invention of realism.
The Masked Baron’s Louvre Sollers, Philippe; Kotin Mortimer, Armine
The Massachusetts review,
06/2022, Letnik:
63, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this essay in translation from French, Sollers writes about Vivant Denon, the first director of The Louvre Museum in the early nineteenth century who is responsible. He uses letters and history to ...construct an examination of art and colonialism and empire. Sollers also writes about the relationship between Napoleon and Denon when changing the image of The Louvre Museum as a means of examining the relationship between art and the state. He follows Denon through Napoleon's exile and the reinstatement of the monarchy in France. While little is know about Denon's personal life, Sollers addresses some of the speculation surrounding Denon's dandyism and rumored affair with Josephine de Beauharnais.
Upon publication of the first volume of Paradis in 1981, a book lacking capital letters, paragraphs, and punctuation and printed in small, dark italic type, the absence of punctuation was invariably ...mentioned by professional critics and ordinary readers alike. Il ne s'agissait pas du tout d'un vomissement répétitif ou intestinal de langage, mais de quelque chose qui doit être dit très vite, mais lu de façon très lente et très attentive, comme cela a été écrit" (97). ...the oral and the later visual versions of the project are in response to the misreading that greeted the publication of the book; they made the invisible punctuation audible and visible.
...the "thesis-novel" treatment of an often hidden reality of the art world: the booming traffic in stolen paintings, forgeries, fakes, frauds, and other deceits. ...the structures of the art-theft ...plot are suggestive of the structure of the novel; the embedded narrative doubles narrative discourse.
The concept of “allofiction” contributes to the definition of the hybrid, multiple genre of autofiction. In L’Après-vivre , the autofictional narrative is applied to Henri Weitzmann, uncle of the ...narrator; the role of the other provides a constituent of the autofictive account of the self.
Mortimer talks about Philippe Sollers's novel Portrait du joueur. Portrait du joueur is the most autobiographical of Sollers' novels, featuring a first-person narrator-protagonist named Philippe ...Diamant, a writer very much like Sollers. The addition of Martin Veyron's humorous illustrations underscores this intellectual clownishness.
