LOWRIE, Joyce O., Sightings. Mirrors in Texts - Texts in Mirrors, Amsterdam / New York, Rodopi (At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries), 2008, 228 p.
ISBN 978-90-420-2495-3
RÉSUMÉ
Mirrors are mesmerizing. The rhetorical figure that represents a mirror is called a chiasmus, a pattern derived from the Greek letter X (Chi). This pattern applies to sentences such as “one does not live to eat; one eats to live.”It is found in myths, plays, poems, biblical songs, short stories,novels, epics. Numerous studies have dealt with repetition, difference,and Narcissism in the fields of literature, music, and art. But mirrorstructures, per se, have not received systematic notice. Thisbook analyses mirror imagery, scenes, and characters in French prosetexts, in chronological order, from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Itdoes so in light of literal, metaphoric, and rhetorical structures.Works analysed in the traditional French canon, written by such writersas Laclos, Lafayette, and Balzac, are extended by studies of textscomposed by Barbey d'Aurevilly, Georges Rodenbach, Jean Lorrain, andPieyre de Mandiargues. This work appeals to readers interested inlinguistics, French history, psychology, art, and material culture. Itinvites analyses of historical and ideological contexts, rhetoricalstrategies, symmetry and asymmetry. Ovid's Narcissus and Alice in Wonderlandare paradigms for the study of micro and macro-structures. Analyses ofmirrors as cultural artefacts are significant to Lowrie's sight seeing.
TABLE DES MATIÈRES
Acknowledgements
Veluti in Speculum (As in a Looking Glass)
The Mirror in the Middle: Mme de Thémines's Letter in Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves
The Prévan Cycle as Pre-Text in Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses
The Frame and the Framed: Mirroring Texts in Balzac's Facino Cane
Barbey d'Aurevilly's Une Page d'histoire: Incest as Mirror Image
Reversals and Disappearrance in Georges Rodenbach's L'Ami des miroirs and Bruges-la-morte
Man Mirrors Toad, or Vice-Versa: Decadent Narcissism in Jean Lorrain's Oeuvre
The Wheel of Fortune as Mirror: André Pieyre de Mandiargues's La Motocyclette
Kaleidoscopic Reflections in Guise of a Conclusion: Close, Maupassant, Douglas, and Borges
BIOGRAPHIE
Joyce O. Lowrie has taught French language and literature at WesleyanUniversity, in Middletown, Connecticut, USA since 1966. She receivedher Ph.D. at Yale University, and has received numerous honors thatinclude a Fulbright Grant, a National Endowment for the HumanitiesGrant, a Camargo Foundation at Cassis, France, a Wesleyan ProjectGrant, and various grants from the Thomas and Catharine McMahon Fund atWesleyan University. She has published The Violent Mystique (Droz), a biography of André Pieyre de Mandiargues in Literature in the 20th Century (Frederich Ungar Publishing Co.), a chapter on Mandiargues in The Fantastic in World Literature and the Arts(Greenwood Press), numerous articles on 19th and 20th century Frenchauthors in refereed journals. She has spent many years in France doingresearch, teaching, and directing Wesleyan University's Program in Paris.