Showing how Octave Mirbeau controverts the existence of a Christian god, this study argues that Mirbeau never abandons his exploration of life's mysteries, apprehensions of the infinite that come ...from a refinement of his art and an identification with his brothers.
In an era when reality was aestheticized as collectibles, Octave Mirbeau unleashed his fiction like a destructive machine, setting fire to stale material and discredited ideologies, burning them as ...fuel and expelling texts as clean emissions. In this first English-language overview of all the novels published under Mirbeau's name, this study argues that Mirbeau is unique among his fin-de-siècle peers. Unlike the Decadents, whose art was a reliquary in which dead inspiration was preserved, Mirbeau disengaged himself from the corpses of past works. Abhorring tradition and complacency, Mirbeau elaborated a kinetics of fiction that made the novel into an agent of violent transformation. Contrasting the Decadents' aesthetic of elegant morbidity with Mirbeau's vitalistic view of fiction, this volume shows Mirbeau modeling himself on the figure of the torture artist, cutting up his finished works, building novels to disassemble them, fitting them together in revolutionary ways. Creativity for Mirbeau fertilizes un jardin des supplices, a cemetery smoldering with decomposing texts that are resolved into their constituent parts and then reemerge in different guises. In Mirbeau's writing, lives and art works are only transient aggregates of material, and creativity is immortalized through the perishing of old forms.
L’obiettivo del presente articolo è di paragonarel’immagine della pedofilia in due romanzi : Sébastien Roch di Octave Mirbeau e L’agneau chaste di Franck Varjac. Mentre il primo ha contribuito a ...costruire la matrice romanzesca della pedofilia, il secondo prova a decostruirla.
Octave Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices and Barbey d'Aurevilly's L'Ensorcelée and Les Diaboliques depict a range of cruel attacks on the human body. These examples of violence, hitherto neglected by ...critical readers of the texts, have much to tell us not only about the authors' approach to violence, but also about the relationships between author, reader, and text that such representations of violence foreground. The notion of readerly pleasure theorized by Roland Barthes and linked to identity formation by Emma Wilson is associated with the witnessing or experiencing of pain in these texts. The reader is problematically positioned as both sadist, vicariously enjoying the suffering he or she is forced to witness, and masochist, taking pleasure in the authors' manipulations of them. These depictions of violated bodies ask whether and by what means violence can be represented in language, and this discussion leads to an analysis of the impact that such representations of violence have on the reader's experience of a text.
This study explores a recurring pattern in Russian decadent narrative that I call the “merged polarity.” Each of these texts generates a sharp binary between two elements that are clearly marked as ...negative and positive. However, the binary driving the story is simultaneously undermined by a network of parallels suggesting that the positive element is a latent repetition of its negative counterpart. This intertwining of opposites encourages a relentless questioning of binaries on the part of the reader and thus constitutes a special ethic on its own terms. Its message is one of caution—namely, that constant vigilance be invested in one's scrutiny of the seemingly most straightforward oppositions that organize the world. This study devotes four chapters to the examination of this narrative pattern. Chapter One describes how Sologub's first novel, Bad Dreams (1895), offers us the Sologubian merged polarity in its embryonic form. Chapter Two demonstrates how Petty Demon (1907) builds upon the aesthetic developed by Bad Dreams and expands the merged polarity, allowing this pattern to penetrate multiple layers of the text's artistic code. Chapter Three focuses on Mikhail Artsybashev's At the Brink (1911–12), a novel that generates a strikingly similar proliferation of merged polarities. Chapter Four discusses another contemporary of Sologub's, Leonid Andreev, whose short stories testify to his enduring obsession with a structural paradigm that closely resembles the merged polarities in Sologub's and Artsybashev's novels. This study concludes by pointing out how this recurring pattern in decadent prose embodies a form of skepticism that testifies to deeply moral concerns—even though decadent literature is typically associated with an amoral outlook. In connection with this idea, I suggest some reasons for comparing the works of Sologub and Zamyatin, whose dystopian novel We (1921) reactivates this structural paradigm.
Octave Mirbeau reflects the prevailing orientation of the Decadents toward death, thematizes the sterility of art, yet revalorizes literature as a tool for social change.
An examination of Octave Mirbeau's works offers an insight into a curious anarchist form of misogynist thinking. While his writings on sexuality and gender are marked by their profoundly ...contradictory nature, Mirbeau's works show how an anarchist polemicist might make use of misogynistic images and concepts to suggest an unsettling, critical vision of social relations and how, at times, such images could be used in a manner which challenged patriarchal values.
Journaliste, critique d’art, romancier et dramaturge, Octave Mirbeau a été un dreyfusard éminent, mais c’est tardivement que son rôle a été reconnu. Écrivain engagé dans les luttes de la cité depuis ...1885, il a mis sa plume au service de tous les humiliés, opprimés, exploités et sans-voix de cet enfer social qu’est la France de la Belle Époque. C’est tout naturellement qu’il a pris fait et cause, avec sa fougue habituelle, pour le capitaine Dreyfus, victime de la coalition des institutions opp...
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