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Nineteenth Century French Studies, vol. 36, no 3-4 (printemps-été 2008)

Nineteenth Century French Studies, vol. 36, no 3-4 (printemps-été 2008)

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Projet Muse)

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.


Vol. 36, no 3-4 (printemps-été 2008)


Kathrine M. Bonin
Signs of Origin: Victor Hugo's Bug-Jargal
Victor Hugo's controversial Bug-Jargal (published 1820, revised 1826) is often read as either négrophile or négrophobe, monarchist or pro-revolution: an ongoing critical debate that stems in part from the novel's own fundamental contradictions. The revised Bug-Jargal endeavors to confront the Revolution (both in Haiti and in mainland France) without glossing over its complexities, introducing the formal æsthetic opposition of the sublime and grotesque in an ambitious effort to bring the chaos of revolutionary Terror within the higher order of Romantic art. However, grotesque elements within Bug-Jargal threaten to subvert other antithetical pairs which the novel nonetheless depends upon: black and white, rightful leadership and rebellion, "proper" and "improper" use of colonial discourses of authority. Multiple speakers within the novel conspire to reconfirm the existence of "original" categories of identity that the "cannibal" threat of the grotesque radically calls into question. (KMB)

Angela N. Hunter
Signs of Reading and the Subject of Love in Stendhal's De l'amour
Stendhal's De l'amour (1822) attempts to describe and classify the experience of romantic love. I show that love is a semiotic structure in De l'amour, and that the lover portrayed there becomes a reader through the process of crystallization – the motor of romantic love in Stendhal's analysis. The lover's fundamental dilemma is a negotiation of the semiosis of crystallization. The lack of stable signs of love in this semiotic system creates profound consequences for the lover, revealing the repetitive, mechanistic structure of doubt in his reading, and destabilizing the binary structures upon which he typically relies for securing the subject position. De l'amour does more than portray and analyze the lover's fundemantal dilemma: it enacts it textually, thereby transforming a discourse on love into a crystallizing reading of love. (ANH)

Seth Graebner
The Bird's-Eye View: Looking at the City in Paris and Algiers
In the forty years following 1830, hundreds of travelogues, city descriptions, and histories of Algeria appeared, forming a literary topography for the new colony. This literature, part of the exoticist tradition in North Africa, did not develop in isolation: descriptions of Algiers took shape concurrently and symbiotically with descriptions of Paris published in even greater numbers. Conversely, perspectives and polemics from the metropolitan center were often informed by writing about the city on the colonial periphery. The French learned to describe cities through modes of observation elaborated in both Paris and Algiers. Moving to the supposed antipodes of the modern, to the anti-Paris constructed in the French imagination of Algiers, questions the received history of modernité. It suggests other loci for the tropes and techniques associated with it, and opens a new way to understand the role of the colony in the development of nineteenth-century French culture. (SG)

Raina F. Uhden
"Le Charbon ardent" in Balzac's La Recherche de l'Absolu and "Des artistes"
Honoré de Balzac's manipulation of the biblical term charbon ardent in his 1830 articleentitled "Des artistes" and in his 1834 novel La Recherche de l'Absolu exposes his effortsto redefine the artist. The "live coal" marks the moment of poetic inspiration in "Desartistes" and, in La Recherche de l'Absolu, is applied to the transfer of knowledge fromone alchemist to another. The biblical image of the coal, functioning both metaphorically and literally, thus applied to the artist and to the alchemist, echoes the academicdefinition of the artist. The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française included the alchemistin its definition of the term up through the fifth edition (1798), although this reference is effaced by the sixth edition (1835). Textual analysis of the application of thebiblical image in these two texts demonstrates how Balzac intends to redefine the artistvia the process of creation through decomposition. (RFU)

Susan Blood
The Sonnet as Snapshot: Seizing the Instant in Baudelaire's "A une passante"
"The Sonnet as Snapshot: Seizing the Instant in Baudelaire's 'A une passante'" Through a textual analysis of Baudelaire's sonnet, this essay explores the relationship between poetry and technology in the mid-nineteenth century. The breakdown of lyric poetry that has been associated with Baudelaire is read alongside technological experiments in reencoding and reproducing voice. The resemblance between "A une passante" and an instantaneous photograph is seen as announcing the reencoding of voice as image that will characterize later forms of poetic modernism. The concept of the "optical unconscious" that Walter Benjamin introduced in his "Little History of Photography" (1931) is used to elucidate the subliminal uncanniness of Baudelaire's poem and its connection to the prose poem "Les Veuves." (SB)

Cecilia Beach
Savoir c'est pouvoir: Integral Education in the Novels of André Léo
"Savoir c'est pouvoir: Integral Education in the Novels of André Léo" André Léo (1824–1900), best known as a participant in the Commune, also published over twenty socially conscious novels. Her works not only provide a critique of the educational practices of the second half of the nineteenth century, but also advocate the secularization of public schools, the expansion of education for workers and for women, co-education, and the development of new libertarian methods of teaching. These reforms resemble theories of "integral education" developed by such key figures in nineteenth-century socialism and anarchism as Fourier, Proudhon and Bakunin. In this article, after a brief introduction to theories of "integral education," Beach explores how André Léo used the novel to criticize the French school system and to promote radical educational reform. (CB)

Eduardo A. Febles
The Anarchic Commune as World's Fair in Émile Zola's Travail
"The Anarchic Commune as World's Fair in Émile Zola's Travail" Though Émile Zola's æsthetic shift from naturalism to utopianism began well before the writing of Travail in 1900, Moissan's electric ovens displayed during the Parisian World's Fair of the same year served as a technological solution to the entropic conundrum that had informed his earlier novels. Electricity thus reconfigured allowed the functioning of Beauclair, Travail's anarchic commune, as a utopia. The utopian mode, however, is undermined by a passive subjective relationship to the real inherent in visitors' experiences during the Exposition Universelle and by capitalist fantasies of mass consumption underlying the World's Fair and the anarchic commune of Travail.(EAF)

Louise Lyle
Le Struggleforlife: Contesting Balzac through Darwin in Zola, Bourget, and Barrès
Social Darwinist themes feature in late nineteenth-century French ideological fiction from across the political spectrum. This article considers the evolutionary perspectives underpinning the traditionalist, anti-Republican ideology of the right-wing reactionary authors Maurice Barrès and Paul Bourget in Les Déracinés (1897) and L'Étape (1902 ) respectively. Their appropriation of evolutionary ideas in these texts may be seen as an attempt to wrest the mantle of scientific exclusivity away from both the secular and democratic political establishment of the Third Republic and the literary naturalists led by Émile Zola. It may also, however, be seen as a means by which they assert their claim to be recognized as the true inheritors of the political, scientific and literary legacy of Honoré de Balzac. (LL)