Stendhal's Less-Loved Heroines


Book Description

"Stendhal's most independent heroines are usually disliked or marginalized by critics. However, when gender-neutral criteria are applied, Mina de Vanghel, Vanina Vanini, Mathilde de La Mole, and Lamiel can all be shown to enact extraordinary experiments in freedom. These experiments are all the more remarkable in view of the gender of their agents, the historical situation of the author (1783-1842), and the conventions of the literary movement that his fiction helped to found: realism. Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 study of Stendhal's heroines gives preference to the reserved females over his Amazons. But existentialism, as a philosophy of freedom, also enables a reading of the self-determining heroines that acknowledges the superiority of their choices: their resistance and counter-plots, their paradoxical authenticity, their rejection of seriousness, and their assumption of responsibility for the routes they plot."




Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction


Book Description

Explores how and why narrative fiction engages empathy, including Theory of MindOffers a broad overview of current scientific work on the effects of fiction-reading on empathy, including Theory of MindProvides an original intervention in the field of literary theory, centring on the reflexive properties of the fictional strangerIncludes stand-alone close readings of three novels by important French authorsThis book studies recent psychological findings which suggest that reading fiction cultivates empathy, encouraging us to be critically reflective, suspicious readers as well as participatory, 'nave' readers. Scott draws on literary theory and close readings to argue that engagement with fictional stories also teaches us to resist uncritical forms of empathy and reminds us of the limitations of our ability to understand other people. The book treats figures of the stranger in Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir and Sand's Indiana as emblematic of the strangeness of narrative fiction, both drawing us in and keeping us at a distance.




The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism


Book Description

TThe Oxford Handbook to European Romanticism brings together leading scholars in the field to examine the intellectual, literary, philosophical, and political elements of European Romanticism. The book focuses on the cultural history of the period extending from the French Revolution to the uprisings of 1848. It begins with a series of chapters examining key texts written by major writers in languages including: French; German; Italian; Spanish; Russian; Hungarian; Greek; and Polish amongst others. A second section then explores the naturally inter-disciplinary quality of Romanticism, exemplified by the different discourses with which writers of the time set up an internal, comparative dynamic. These chapters highlight the sense a discourse gives of being written knowledgeably against other pretenders to completeness or comprehensiveness of self-understanding of the time. Discourses typically advance their own claims to resume European culture, collaborating with and at the same time trying to assimilate each other in the process. The main examples featured here are: history; geography; drama; theology; language; philosophy; political theory; the sciences; and the media. Each chapter offers an original and individual interpretation of an inherently comparative world of individual writers and the discursive idioms to which they are historically subject. Together the forty-one chapters provide a comprehensive and provocative overview of European Romanticism.




The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris


Book Description

A comprehensive exploration of Paris through the texts and experiences of a vast and vibrant range of authors.




Approaches to Teaching Baudelaire's Prose Poems


Book Description

A prolific poet, art critic, essayist, and translator, Charles Baudelaire is best known for his volumes of verse (Les Fleurs du Mal [Flowers of Evil]) and prose poems (Le Spleen de Paris [Paris Spleen]). This volume explores his prose poems, which depict Paris during the Second Empire and offer compelling and fraught representations of urban expansion, social change, and modernity. Part 1, "Materials," surveys the valuable resources available for teaching Baudelaire, including editions and translations of his oeuvre, historical accounts of his life and writing, scholarly works, and online databases. In Part 2, "Approaches," experienced instructors present strategies for teaching critical debates on Baudelaire's prose poems, addressing topics such as translation theory, literary genre, alterity, poetics, narrative theory, and ethics as well as the shifting social, economic, and political terrain of the nineteenth century in France and beyond. The essays offer interdisciplinary connections and outline traditional and fresh approaches for teaching Baudelaire's prose poems in a wide range of classroom contexts.




The Red and the Black


Book Description

A Major New Translation The Red and the Black, Stendhal’s masterpiece, is the story of Julien Sorel, a young dreamer from the provinces, fueled by Napoleonic ideals, whose desire to make his fortune sets in motion events both mesmerizing and tragic. Sorel’s quest to find himself, and the doomed love he encounters along the way, are delineated with an unprecedented psychological depth and realism. At the same time, Stendhal weaves together the social life and fraught political intrigues of post–Napoleonic France, bringing that world to unforgettable, full-color life. His portrait of Julien and early-nineteenth-century France remains an unsurpassed creation, one that brilliantly anticipates modern literature. Neglected during its time, The Red and the Black has assumed its rightful place as one of the world’s great books, and Burton Raffel’s extraordinary new translation, coupled with an enlightening Introduction by Diane Johnson, helps it shine more brightly than ever before.




Oaths and Vows


Book Description

Oaths, vows, promises, curses - all share family resemblances. They are performatives, carrying illocutionary force. Oaths have rightly been termed, "conditional self-curses", promises have been argued to be but a more developed form of vows, and oaths and vows are often used interchangeably. This book focuses on private vows and oaths including those publically proclaimed. Through analysis of legal, liturgical, mythical and literary works, it seeks to uncover a phenomenology of oaths and vows. Viewing oaths and vows as the human creative force par excellence, it surveys their role in circumscribing and directing both erotic desire and aggression; and so - in their performative function - as standing at the foundation of society and sociability. As acts of trust which establish new obligations understandings of the role of oaths and vows are compared in the Jewish and Christian contexts, in terms of the importance of intentionality in vow making and oath taking, as well as the nature of the obligations ensuing from such locutionary acts. Analysis of the comic and tragic consequences of the violation of marriage oaths as presented in European literature from the 12th to 19th centuries reveals their perception as "habituating" Eros.




Birth and Death in Nineteenth-Century French Culture


Book Description

This volume draws contributors from around the globe who represent the full range of approaches to scholarship in nineteenth-century French studies: historical, literary, cultural, art historical, philosophical, and comparative. The theme of the volume – Birth and Death – is one with particular resonance for nineteenth-century French studies, since the nineteenth century is commonly perceived as an age of new life and renovation. It is the epoch that witnessed an efflorescence of industrial and artistic progress, the birth of the individual and the birth of the novel, and the creation of an urban population in the major demographic shift from the rural provinces to Paris. At the same time, however, it is the century of Decadence and degeneration theory, marked by a prominent morbid aesthetic in the artistic sphere and a fascination with criminality, moral decay and the pathologization of racial and sexual minorities in the scientific discourses. It is also the century in which reflection on processes of artistic creation begins to problematize concepts of mimetic representation, the function of the author and the status of the text. In the context of the dialectical quality of nineteenth-century French culture, caught between an obsession with the new and innovative and a paranoid sense of its own encroaching decay, the twin themes of birth and death open onto a variety of issues – literary, social, historical, artistic – which are explored, interrogated and reassessed in the essays contained in this volume.




The Fate of Ideas


Book Description

As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society. Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them. In provocative encounters with authority, fidelity, "the other," pleasure, and a wide range of other topics, Boyers tells colorful stories about his own life and, in the process, studies the fate of ideas in a society committed to change and ill equipped to assess the losses entailed in modernity. Among the writers who appear in these pages are Susan Sontag and V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and J. M. Coetzee, as well as figures drawn from all walks of life, including unfaithful husbands, psychoanalysts, terrorists, and besotted beauty lovers.




Alchemies of the Mind


Book Description

A comprehensive book on the emotions considering the full range of theoretical approaches.