Nineteenth-Century French Studies provides scholars and students with the opportunity to examine new trends, review promising research findings, and become better acquainted with professional developments in the field. Scholarly articles on all aspects of nineteenth-century French literature and criticism are invited. Published articles are peer-reviewed to insure scholarly integrity. The journal has an extensive book review section covering a variety of disciplines.
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Volume 33, Number 3 & 4, Spring-Summer 2005
CONTENTS:
Note:
Lloyd, Rosemary : Remembering Claude Pichois
Articles:
Knight, Diana : From Gobseck's Chamber to Derville's Chambers: Retention in Balzac's Gobseck
Abstract : This article approaches the text of Balzac's Gobseck through Barthes's general reflections, in Comment vivre ensemble, on the private room as a symbolic space of seclusion. Barthes's comments on the value of excrement in Gide's La Séquestrée de Poitiers are used to set up a Freudian reading of the anal sadism of Gobseck the usurer, as revealed in his speech, behaviour, and body language. The contrasting rooms of Fanny and Anastasie are subsumed into the closing juxtaposition of Gobseck's clean, bare, cell-like death chamber with the squalid accumulation of putrid matter in the next-door room, formerly that of the lawyer Derville. Cleanliness and moral fastidiousness are analyzed as reaction-formations masking an active anal eroticism in both men and underpinning their superficially unlikely friendship. Gobseck's chamber emerges as the symbolic center of an anal economy in which Derville is shown to play a key role, both as narrator and protagonist. (DK)
Smart, Annie: The École Saint-Simonienne's Outrage to Public Morals
Abstract: On August 27 and 28, 1832, the Saint-Simonians were tried for outrage to public morals. I analyze the August trial and caricatures of the Ecole in the light of Carole Pateman's notion of the sexual contract, to argue that the Saint-Simonians' "outrage" lay in their challenge to the founding fiction of social order: the social contract. By proclaiming that the social individual is man and woman, and by positing that the social pact is predicated on a sexual contract, the Saint-Simonians questioned not only the structure of the public sphere during the Bourgeois Monarchy, but also its underlying ideology. (AS)
Fortin, Jutta E. : Intellectualization in Mérimée's "La vénus d'ille"
Abstract: In Mérimée's "La Vénus d'Ille" (1837), the archaeologist-narrator enthusi-astically discusses a supposedly evil statue of Venus. The scholar's excessive interest in the sculpture, combined with his insistence on his disinterest in women, indicates that he is not asexual but that he shies away from the sensual and takes refuge in the intellectual. Psychoanalysis refers to the defensive replacement of an instinctual problem with an intellectual one as intel-lectualization. But the fantastic subverts this process: as the fantastic translates the narrator's intellectualization into reality, it provokes the very anxiety which the mechanism of intellectualization was originally designed to resolve. (JEF)
Lintz, Bernadette C. : Concocting La Dame aux camélias: Blood, Tears, and Other Fluids
Abstract: This essay examines the ingredients used by Dumas fils to concoct his popular novel La Dame aux camélias. Setting out to write a best-seller, Dumas employs a complex textual strategy whose various strands are tied together by a medical narrative centered on notions of disease, contagion, and bodily fluids of various kinds. Fluids permeate Dumas's novel and fuel the narrative logic of a text whose success – its capacity to generate mass consumption – is predicated on the notion of influence. Tracing these notions in the novel one finds a gendered medical discourse that constructs "fallen women" as diseased and contagious. Sexually transgressive female pathologies and their bloody symptoms become the ingredients needed to concoct this story of female sacrifice and to turn it into a cautionary tale meant to discourage diseased desire and to safeguard patriarchy. Dumas fils refashions the literary trope of passion fatale as poison and disease, injecting it with new blood, the blood of the contaminated and contagious courtesan. (BCL)
Lyu, Claire: Unswathing the Mummy: Body, Knowledge, and Writing in Gautier's Le Roman de la momie
Abstract: Through a reading of Théophile Gautier's Le Roman de la momie, my paper explores nineteenth-century France's fascination with unwrapping mummies, performed as public spectacles at universal exhibitions, against the backdrop of previous centuries' practice of public dissections. Gautier's tale stages various types of openings (of the landscape, tomb, sarcophagus, mummy, and papyrus roll), in which a complex interplay of different models of openings, or "coupe," is at work: of the Parnassian poetics, the sculptural ideal, and of the scientific/medical dissection. The cross-examination between scientific and literary/artistic openings of the body reveals two competing structures of knowledge: one that cuts right through the surface and reaches depth in a straight line according to the mathematical principle of shortest path between two points, and one that moves along the surface in a horizontal path of circular tour, detour, and contour. (CL)
Pappas, Sara: Managing Imitation: Translation and Baudelaire's Art Criticism
Abstract: This article examines in the role of the concept of translation in Baudelaire's art criticism. By focusing on those aspects of Baudelaire's Salon writings that privilege originality and imagination in the arts, the role of imitation in his aesthetic theory has been largely overlooked or necessarily dismissed. I argue that Baudelaire uses the notion of translation in his art critical writings as part of a more general strategy to rid the art he admired of any traces of imitation. At the same time, translation allows Baudelaire covertly to accept the very practice of imitation in the arts that he condemns. (SP)
Phillips, Jennifer : Relative Color: Baudelaire, Chevreul, and the Reconsideration of Critical Methodology
Abstract: This article addresses the connection between Charles Baudelaire's evocation of color in the Salon de 1846 and the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul's theory of color modification set forth in De la loi du contraste simultané (1839). Chevreul's work is read as the theoretical context for the scientific dimension of Baudelaire's conception of color, an aspect of his color theory that is central to his thinking about the nature and structure of harmony and analogy. But the parallel between Chevreul and Baudelaire extends beyond their representations of color. They are further connected by the way in which they use color as an impetus to rethink the critical perspective of the scientist or art critic. (JP)
Rabbitt, Kara M. : Reading and Otherness: The Interpretative Triangle in Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose
Abstract: "Les Yeux des pauvres" and "Les Fênetres," among other of Baudelaire's prose poems, dramatize a speaking subject's interpretive acts in a way that mimics the reading process itself. Mirroring the ways in which we read ourselves in others, these poems also make evident a triangulation of interpretation that problematizes any straightforward identification of self and other. This article explores the critical triangle that develops within the poems among the interpreting subject, the third-person object of interpretation, and the second-person interlocutor who challenges the subject's perceptions. It argues that the radical other of this formation is the second person and studies the implications of the dynamic intersubjective tension between speaker and interlocutor for our own critical processes. (KMR)
Grossman, Kathryn M. : Grotesque Desires in Hugo's L'Homme qui rit
Abstract: Victor Hugo's L'Homme qui rit (1869) presents a powerful, nightmarish vision of human longing and corruption. Recurrent imagery of aspiration and asphyxiation ties the romantic subplot, which focuses on the protagonist's divided affections, to a much wider vortex of desires. At the same time, the use of similar topoi to figure polar opposites calls into question the antithetical relationships themselves. This essay looks at the ways in which desire operates in Hugo's text, inscribing the struggle between good and evil within more global social issues. Whereas the representation of women might appear to adhere to the virgin-whore dichotomy, and so to reflect an anti-feminist stance, this dichotomy is deconstructed by Hugo's use of metaphorical lattices and multilevel symmetries to figure his own unspeakable (republican) yearning. (KMG)
Shryock, Richard, 1958- : Becoming Political: Symbolist Literature and the Third Republic
Abstract: Beginning in the early 1880s, the Third Republic pursued a cultural politics that increasingly placed the Symbolist esthetic in an oppositional position to norms promulgated by the government. The interest of Symbolists in the revolutionary politics of Boulangism in the late 1880s and in anarchism in the 1890s is a manifestation of Symbolism's oppositional place relative to Third Republic norms. The political dimension of Symbolism arose not because of its relationship to anarchism in the 1890s, but as a result of changes in the Third Republic. (RS)
Book reviews:
NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE:
Iandoli, Louis J. : The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (review)
Lastinger, Michael: Confrontations: Politics and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century France (review)
Guiney, Mortimer: Latin et latinité dans l'oeuvre de Léon Bloy (review)
Miller, Paul B., 1964- : To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic (review)
POETRY:
Metzidakis, Stamos: The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry (review)
BALZAC STUDIES:
Harder, Hollie Markland : Balzac, peintre de corps: La Comédie humaine ou le sens du détail (review)
Mortimer, Armine Kotin, 1943- : À la recherche des Illusions perdues (review)
Edelstein, Dan: Balzac, romancier du regard (review)
Kelly, Dorothy, 1952- : The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (review)
Berg, Keri A: Weaving Balzac's Web: Spinning Tales and Creating the Whole of La Comédie humaine (review)
Heathcote, Owen: Les Métamorphoses du pacte diabolique dans l'oeuvre de Balzac (review)
Berg, Keri A: Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées d'Honoré de Balzac: Un roman de l'identité (review)
Perciali, Irene: Balzac: La Littérature réfléchie. Discours et autoreprésentations (review)
BANVILLE STUDIES:
Pakenham, Michael: Critique littéraire, artistique et musicale choisie (review)
BAUDELAIRE STUDIES:
Guillard, Cécile: Les Fleurs du mal. Actes du colloque de la Sorbonne des 10 et 11 janvier 2003 (review)
GONCOURT STUDIES:
Goetz, Thomas H., 1936- : Les Goncourt et la collection. De l'objet d'art à l'art d'écrire (review)
HUGO STUDIES:
Young, Regina M. (Regina Moeller) :Victor Hugo--Le Temps de la contemplation (review)
Lintz, Bernadette C. : Hernani (review)
HUYSMANS STUDIES:
Smeets, Marc : Le Drageoir aux épices, suivi de textes inédits (review)
MALLARMÉ STUDIES:
Mamoon, Sayeeda H. : Le Sacrifice de la sirène: "Un coup de dés" et la poétique de Stéphane Mallarmé (review)
NODIER STUDIES:
Jovicic, Jelena : Promenade de Dieppe aux montagnes d'Écosse (review)
RACHILDE STUDIES:
Hawthorne, Melanie : Eros décadent: Sexe et identité chez Rachilde (review)
STENDHAL STUDIES:
Vanderheyden, Jennifer : Le Désir selon l'Autre: étude du Rouge et le noir et de la Chartreause de Parme à la lumière du "désir triangulaire" de René Girard (review)
Algazi, Lisa G. : Dictionnaire de Stendhal (review)
Day, James T., 1948- : Stendhal: La Chartreuse de Parme, and: Concordances des Chroniques italiennes (review)
Schoolcraft, Ralph W. : L'Année Stendhalienne 1 (review)
TRISTAN STUDIES:
Hart, Kathleen, 1960- : La Paria et son rêve, and: Pérégrinations d'une paria (review)
VERLAINE STUDIES:
Lutz, Jay: Marges du premier Verlaine (review)
ZOLA STUDIES:
Best, Janice: La Religion de Zola: naturalisme et déchristianisation (review)