DOCSLIB.ORG

Middlebrow Matters: Women's Reading and the Literary Canon in France

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Middlebrow Matters: Women's Reading and the Literary Canon in France Middlebrow Matters Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 57 Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editor CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool Editorial Board TOM CONLEY JACQUELINE DUTTON LYNN A. HIGGINS Harvard University University of Melbourne Dartmouth College MIREILLE ROSELLO DAVID WALKER University of Amsterdam University of Sheffield This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contem- porary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture. Recent titles in the series: 41 Leslie Kealhofer-Kemp, Muslim 49 Colin Davis, Traces of War: Women in French Cinema: Voices Interpreting Ethics and Trauma in of Maghrebi Migrants in France Twentieth-Century French Writing 42 Katelyn E. Knox, Race on Display 50 Alison J. Murray Levine, Vivre Ici: in 20th- and 21st Century France Space, Place and Experience in Contemporary French Documentary 43 Bruno Chaouat, Is Theory Good for the Jews?: French Thought and the 51 Louise Hardwick, Joseph Zobel: Challenge of the New Antisemitism Négritude and the Novel 44 Denis M. Provencher, Queer Maghrebi 52 Jennifer Solheim, The Performance French: Language, Temporalities, of Listening in Postcolonial Transfiliations Francophone Culture 45 Nicholas Hewitt, Montmartre: A 53 Sarah Wood and Catriona MacLeod Cultural History Locating Guyane 46 Oana Panaïté, The Colonial Fortune in 54 Adrian May, From Bataille to Badiou: Contemporary Fiction in French Lignes, the preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987–2017 47 Jason Herbeck, Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature 55 Charlotte Hammond, Entangled and Literary Identity in the French Otherness: Cross-gender Fabrications Caribbean in the Francophone Caribbean 48 Yasser Elhariry, Pacifist Invasions: 56 Julia Waters, The Francophone Arabic, Translation and the Mauritian Novel: Fictions of Belonging Postfrancophone Lyric DIANA HOLMES Middlebrow Matters Women’s reading and the literary canon in France since the Belle Époque Middlebrow Matters LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2018 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2018 Diana Holmes The right of Diana Holmes to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78694-156-5 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78694-952-3 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Contents Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 Reclaiming the Middlebrow 5 2 The Birth of French Middlebrow 32 3 Colette: The Middlebrow Modernist 60 4 Interwar France: The Case of the Missing Middlebrow 91 5 The ‘little world’ of Françoise Sagan 126 6 Literary Prizes, Women and the Middlebrow 150 7 Realism, Romance and Self-reflexivity: Twenty-first-century Middlebrow 178 Conclusion: Marie NDiaye’s femme puissante – a Double Reading 207 Bibliography 223 Index 239 Acknowledgements Acknowledgements This book has taken some years to complete, interspersed as its writing has been with other, shorter projects, with teaching and with what might be summed up as Life. Over that time, I have drawn on parts of it for teaching, and presented papers on elements of my research at conferences and seminars in the UK, France, Spain and the USA. I am grateful to the students and fellow academics who have listened, commented, asked pertinent questions and enriched my thinking with theirs. Thanks too to Anthony Cond and Chloe Johnson at Liverpool University Press for their invaluable support, and to the anonymous readers they enlisted to review the draft manuscript. The readers’ reports were not only hugely encouraging, but also exceptionally detailed and helpful. And, finally, I want to thank the friends and family members who have read and discussed parts of the work in progress – and those who have just provided the support of love, friendship, fun and the belief that it was a book worth writing. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated. Earlier, partial versions of some chapters were published in the following books and journals: ‘Mapping modernity: The feminine middlebrow and the belle époque’, French Cultural Studies August/November 2014, 25, pp. 262–70 was based on part of Chapter 2; ‘Literary prizes, women and the middlebrow’, Contemporary French Civilization, 41:3–4, pp. 437–48 used material from Chapter 6; ‘Modernisme et genre à la Belle Époque: Daniel Lesueur, Marcelle Tinayre, Colette’, in Fictions modernistes du masculin-féminin 1900–1940, ed. Andrea Oberhuber, Alexandra Arvisais, Marie-Claude Dugas (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), pp. 49–62, drew on parts of Chapter 2. Introduction Introduction Modern French literature is strongly identified with ‘high’ culture, with complex and challenging philosophies, experimental forms and sophis- ticated eloquence. France has celebrated somewhat less its rich seam of popular literature – from the late nineteenth-century roman-feuilleton to today’s Harlequin romance series – but this too has begun to be studied rather than simply deplored. However, between what Bourdieu termed the ‘restricted’ sphere of the literary field, in which the value of a literary work is essentially symbolic (‘high’ literature), and the commercial sphere of the mass market (‘low’), there lies a wide domain composed of all those hybrid novels read by most readers for a – usually unexamined – mix of reasons. These include the desire to be entertained, the wish to expand one’s own knowledge and understanding, the appeal of venturing, through simulated experience, beyond the confines of the self. The novels that satisfy this demand are beguiling but serious, pleasurable but instructive, singular – not formulaic – but accessible. They constitute the subfield of the middlebrow. So far, the question of what the average regular reader reads has scarcely figured inFrench literary criticism, despite a growing interest in cultural hierarchies. This book, then, represents the first extended study of the middlebrow French novel. My focus is mainly on women writers and readers. Of course men also read and, as we shall see, write fiction that is classified as middlebrow, and men’s middlebrow would be a worthy subject in its own right.1 But as I shall explain, since the beginnings of the middlebrow novel in Belle Époque France, women have formed a majority of the nation’s reading public, and this feminisation of reading has become more rather than less marked in the contemporary era. Once we define the literature of an 1 See Macdonald (2011). 2 Middlebrow Matters age in terms of ‘what did most people choose to read?’, women as readers and as writers immediately assume a more central place. Moreover, if middlebrow as a cultural category is disdained by highbrow critics, this is partly because the ‘brows’ of culture have become implicitly gendered. Across Western cultures, and conspicuously in France, modernism has been the dominant aesthetic of high culture since (at least) the beginning of the twentieth century. This is still the case in the twenty-first, since postmodernism has inherited modernism’s mistrust of mimesis, realism and established (hence easily legible) artistic form. Modernism prizes the demanding, the unexpected and the difficult (on thedifficulty of modernism see Diepeveen, 2003), aligning difficulty with seriousness and a heroic moral stance. Literature that is accessible, because it deploys techniques that have become familiar, is correspondingly downgraded. In the case of narrative fiction, this deprecation of established practice means a disregard for plot and character, and a sceptical view of the mainstream novel’s traditional concern with love, romance, family, the social filtered through domestic dramas. As Suzanne Clark shows, in liberating culture from ‘the banal, the old’, modernism cast an ironic light on emotion or pathos in the novel, and made ‘sentimentality’ a mark of shame (Clark, 1991, 2, 11). The sort of fiction associated with women readers – which, though often itself oppositional and ironic, tends to take seriously both domesticity and romance – became the antithesis of authentic high art, the middlebrow. Middlebrow as a term has no direct equivalent in French, but the word’s dismissive charge is strongly present in the way that literature, and specifically the novel, is evaluated in France. To turn critical attention to the middlebrow constitutes a feminist gesture, for it questions the gendered nature of the assumptions that govern the literary field, whilst also resituating women-authored texts and women as readers in the literary foreground. Chapter One provides a fuller introduction to my subject, examining and accounting for France’s privileging
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Lesbian Experience and Masculinity in Bryher's Historical Fiction Haley M
    Marshall University Marshall Digital Scholar Theses, Dissertations and Capstones 1-1-2013 Historical Butches: Lesbian Experience and Masculinity in Bryher's Historical Fiction Haley M. Fedor [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://mds.marshall.edu/etd Part of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Fedor, Haley M., "Historical Butches: Lesbian Experience and Masculinity in Bryher's Historical Fiction" (2013). Theses, Dissertations and Capstones. Paper 726. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Marshall Digital Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses, Dissertations and Capstones by an authorized administrator of Marshall Digital Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Historical Butches: Lesbian Experience and Masculinity in Bryher's Historical Fiction A thesis submitted to the Graduate College of Marshall University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts In English by Haley M. Fedor Approved by John Young, Ph.D., Committee Chairperson Jill Treftz, Ph.D Alan Gravano, Ph.D Marshall University August, 2013 Acknowledgments First and foremost, thanks to John Young for trusting me to work on my thesis my own way, for providing invaluable feedback on my chapters, and for sparking my interest in modern writers and the shadowy figure that is Bryher. Sincerest thanks to Alan Gravano and Jill Treftz, my committee readers, who provided expert advice on queer theory, women writers, and historical fiction. Those office visits and chats not only helped my research, but my entire way of thinking about writers like Bryher.
    [Show full text]
  • COLETTE, Une Artiste En Liberté (1873-1954) Colette, À Son Époque, Est Jugée Comme Une Femme Scandaleuse
    COLETTE, une artiste en liberté (1873-1954) Colette, à son époque, est jugée comme une femme scandaleuse. Dans les « Aventures de Claudine » son héroïne, Claudine, à laquelle elle prête de nombreux traits, apparaît comme une fille délurée et insolente. Sur scène, Colette s’exhibe nue et fait scandale. Colette Ce n’est pas une agitatrice : elle n’est ni dans la revendication ni dans le militantisme. Ce n’est pas une féministe. Femme amoureuse, elle a vécu des histoires passionnelles avec les hommes comme avec les femmes. Sa maison natale 1 - Les années d’enfance Sidonie Gabrielle Colette est née dans le village de Saint- Sauveur-en-Puisaye dans l’Yonne, aux confins de la Bourgogne qu’elle célébrera dans ses livres comme dans La maison de Claudine (1922) et dans Sido (1930). Elle évoque ce village où Ses parents elle a vécu une enfance heureuse. Colette adore la nature en Bourgogne comme en Provence où elle s’achètera une maison, à Saint-Tropez avant l’invasion des touristes, et en Bretagne, à Saint-Coulomb. Ses parents sont Sidonie Landoy (1835-1912) et Jules Joseph Colette dans son jardin Colette (1829-1905). C’est un second mariage pour son père. Celui-ci est un saint-cyrien qui a perdu une jambe dans le conflit avec les Italiens. Il est percepteur. Colette, dernière enfant de la fratrie a une demi-sœur qu’elle n’apprécie guère et deux demi-frères qu’elle préfère. Sa mère appelée Sido sera l’initiatrice de Colette. Colette écrira un livre intitulé Sido (1930). Colette adolescente, n’est ni romanesque ni révoltée.
    [Show full text]
  • Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys' Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar by Jui-An Chou Graduate Pr
    Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys’ Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar by Jui-an Chou Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Anne F. Garréta, Supervisor, Chair ___________________________ Robyn Wiegman, Co-Chair ___________________________ Rey Chow ___________________________ Anne Allison Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 ABSTRACT Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys’ Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar by Jui-an Chou Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Anne F. Garréta, Supervisor, Chair ___________________________ Robyn Wiegman, Co-Chair ___________________________ Rey Chow ___________________________ Anne Allison An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2018 Copyright by Jui-an Chou 2018 Abstract “Between Boys: Fantasy of Male Homosexuality in Boys’ Love, Mary Renault, and Marguerite Yourcenar” examines an unexpected kinship between Boys’ Love, a Japanese male-on-male romance genre, and literary works by Mary Renault and Marguerite Yourcenar, two mid-twentieth century authors who wrote about male homosexuality. Following Eve Sedgwick, who proposed that a “rich tradition of cross- gender inventions of homosexuality” should be studied separately from gay and lesbian literature, this dissertation examines male homoerotic fictions authored by women. These fictions foreground a disjunction between authorial and textual identities in gender and sexuality, and they have often been accused of inauthenticity, appropriation, and exploitation.
    [Show full text]
  • Le Prix Femina : La Consécration Littéraire Au Féminin Femina Prize : a Female Literary Recognition Sylvie Ducas
    Document généré le 27 sept. 2021 10:16 Recherches féministes Le prix Femina : la consécration littéraire au féminin Femina Prize : a Female Literary Recognition Sylvie Ducas Expériences Résumé de l'article Volume 16, numéro 1, 2003 En s’attachant au prix Femina, l’auteure tient compte de la difficile inscription e des écrivaines dans le champ littéraire français au xx siècle. Le prix Femina URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/007343ar est choisi comme lieu de tensions contradictoires. S’il oeuvre pour la DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/007343ar reconnaissance d’un sexe victime d’exclusion, il est aujourd’hui soumis aux réalités marchandes de l’industrie culturelle qui s’est développée durant ce Aller au sommaire du numéro siècle. L’auteure retrace donc l’histoire de cette instance, ses liens avec la presse féminine du début du siècle, sans masquer les crises et les difficultés qui jalonnent son histoire. L’enquête menée auprès de lauréates et de lauréats et de jurées du prix Femina vérifie dans les discours la condition problématique Éditeur(s) des écrivaines. Revue Recherches féministes ISSN 0838-4479 (imprimé) 1705-9240 (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer cet article Ducas, S. (2003). Le prix Femina : la consécration littéraire au féminin. Recherches féministes, 16(1), 43–95. https://doi.org/10.7202/007343ar Tous droits réservés © Recherches féministes, Université Laval, 2003 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. L’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit.
    [Show full text]
  • French Women's Writing 1900-1938
    Overlooked and Overshadowed: French Women’s Writing 1900-1938 Margaret Ann Victoria Goldswain Student No: 18550362 Bachelor of Arts (UNISA). Bachelor of Arts (UWA) Diploma in Modern Languages (French) (UWA) This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Western Australia School of Humanities (Discipline-French) 2014 ABSTRACT Overlooked and Overshadowed: French Women’s Writing 1900-1938 This study examines how women in France between 1900 and 1938 (before during and after the Great War) were represented in the writings of four selected women writers - Marcelle Tinayre (1870-1948), Colette Yver (1874-1953), Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (1874-1945) and Marcelle Capy (1891-1962). These authors, fêted in their time have now been largely excluded from contemporary studies on women in early twentieth-century France. The thesis demonstrates how their personal circumstances and the politico-social events of 1900-1938 influenced the way each writer represented women over time, and reveals that women’s writings were not homogenous in theme or in focus. By reading these texts alongside other contemporaneous texts (newspaper articles, reviews and writings by other women), the analyses show that Tinayre, Yver, Delarue-Madrus and Capy challenge and complicate stereotypical perspectives produced mainly by male authors of the same era. Using a longitudinal approach, the study explores each author’s selected texts across three distinct periods - the belle époque, the Great War and the inter-war. Such a reading makes it possible to assess changes in their writing in response to contemporary social and political events in France. By looking at four writers writing across the same era the diversity of women’s lives is also underlined.
    [Show full text]
  • Nancy Huston in Self-Translation an Aesthetics of Redoublement
    Corso di Dottorato in Studi Umanistici Curriculum: Studi Linguistici e Letterari XXIX ciclo Nancy Huston in Self-translation An Aesthetics of Redoublement Relatore Dottoranda Prof. Andrea Binelli Dott.ssa Giorgia Falceri A.A. 2015-2016 1 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS PART I ............................................................................................... 7 I. AN INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY SELF-TRANSLATION .............. 7 1.1 FRAMING SELF-TRANSLATION STUDIES ................................................... 7 1.2 SELF-TRANSLATION IN THEORY ............................................................. 15 1.2.1 AUTHOR, TRANSLATOR AND TEXT .....................................................................18 1.2.2 RECONSIDERING TRADITIONAL CATEGORIES AND BINARY OPPOSITIONS .......... 23 1.3 SELF-TRANSLATION IN PRACTICE ........................................................... 26 1.3.1 SELF-TRANSLATORS, THESE STRANGERS. .......................................................... 26 1.3.2 TYPOLOGIES OF SELF-TRANSLATED TEXTS ........................................................ 31 1.3.3 TOWARDS A HISTORY OF SELF-TRANSLATION? ................................................. 35 1.3.4 SELF-TRANSLATION IN A SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE ................................. 40 1.4 AGAINST SELF-TRANSLATION ................................................................ 46 1.5 INNOVATIVE THEORETICAL MODELS TO APPROACH THE SELF-TRANSLATED TEXT ............................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Viewed One of the First “Films Parlants” in 1930 in London
    FROM GOLDEN AGE TO SILVER SCREEN: FRENCH MUSIC-HALL CINEMA FROM 1930-1950 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Rebecca H. Bias, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2005 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Judith Mayne, Advisor Professor Diane Birckbichler _________________________ Advisor Professor Charles D. Minahen Graduate Program in French and Italian Copyright by Rebecca H. Bias 2005 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines French music-hall cinema from 1930-1950. The term “music-hall cinema” applies to films that contain any or all of the following: music-hall performers, venues, mise en scène, revues, and music- hall songs or repertoire. The cinema industry in France owes a great debt to the music-hall industry, as the first short films near the turn of the century were actually shown as music-hall acts in popular halls. Nonetheless, the ultimate demise of the music hall was in part due to the growing popularity of cinema. Through close readings of individual films, the dynamics of music-hall films will be related to the relevant historical and cultural notions of the period. The music-hall motif will be examined on its own terms, but also in relation to the context or genre that underlies each particular film. The music-hall motif in films relies overwhelmingly on female performers and relevant feminist film theory of the 1970s will help support the analysis of female performance, exhibition, and relevant questions of spectatorship. Music-hall cinema is an important motif in French film, and the female performer serves as the prominent foundation in these films.
    [Show full text]
  • Literary Prizes, Women, and the Middlebrow
    This is a repository copy of Literary Prizes, Women, and the Middlebrow. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/105302/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Holmes, D orcid.org/0000-0001-9079-3582 (2016) Literary Prizes, Women, and the Middlebrow. Contemporary French Civilization, 41 (3-4). pp. 437-448. ISSN 0147-9156 https://doi.org/10.3828/cfc.2016.29 This is an author produced version of a paper published in Contemporary French Civilization. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ 1 Diana Holmes Literary Prizes, Women and the Middlebrow Annual literary prizes began life in 1903 in France, with the founding of the Prix Goncourt, and they have proliferated there even more than in other nations (Ducas 2013). Yet the prize is not always greeted by its recipient with unalloyed joy: an “antiprize rhetoric” (English 212) is part of the standard response, for to win the Goncourt, for example, “tient à la fois du banc d’infamie et de la légion d’Honneur” (Ducas 183).
    [Show full text]
  • Jonathan Franzen: the Comedy of Rage
    Swarthmore College Works English Literature Faculty Works English Literature 2015 Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy Of Rage Philip M. Weinstein Swarthmore College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits ouy Recommended Citation Philip M. Weinstein. (2015). "Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy Of Rage". Jonathan Franzen: The Comedy Of Rage. https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit/294 This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Literature Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Introductory who is Jonathan Franzen and what is the comedy of rage? The first question is easy. Franzen is perhaps the best-known American novelist of his generation, all but uniquely capable of reaching both highbrow sophisticates and less demanding mainstream readers. A visual answer to the first question is even easier. Seen by untold numbers, the image of Franzen that filled the cover of the August 23, 2010 edition of Time Magazine (“Great American Novelist” plastered on his chest) is mesmerizing. (In case you missed it there, it reappears in this books inset sheaf of photos and images, as well as—slightly stylized—on its dust jacket.) Tousle-headed, bespectacled, looking away from the camera (guarding his privacy), the fifty-year-old Franzen wears a gray shirt and three-day beard. His face and body look outdoorsy, rough-hewn, vaguely all-American.
    [Show full text]
  • Defending Literary Culture in the Fiction of David Foster
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Texas A&M University NOVEL AFFIRMATIONS: DEFENDING LITERARY CULTURE IN THE FICTION OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, JONATHAN FRANZEN, AND RICHARD POWERS A Dissertation by MICHAEL LITTLE Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2004 Major Subject: English NOVEL AFFIRMATIONS: DEFENDING LITERARY CULTURE IN THE FICTION OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, JONATHAN FRANZEN, AND RICHARD POWERS A Dissertation by MICHAEL LITTLE Submitted to Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved as to style and content by: David McWhirter Mary Ann O’Farrell (Chair of Committee) (Member) Sally Robinson Stephen Daniel (Member) (Member) Paul Parrish (Head of Department) May 2004 Major Subject: English iii ABSTRACT Novel Affirmations: Defending Literary Culture in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers. (May 2004) Michael Little, B.A., University of Houston; M.A., University of Houston Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. David McWhirter This dissertation studies the fictional and non-fictional responses of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers to their felt anxieties about the vitality of literature in contemporary culture. The intangible nature of literature’s social value marks the literary as an uneasy, contested, and defensive cultural site. At the same time, the significance of any given cultural artifact or medium, such as television, film, radio, or fiction, is in a continual state of flux.
    [Show full text]
  • Amongst Women: Literary Representations of Female Homosociality in Belle Epoque France, 1880–1914
    Amongst Women: Literary Representations of Female Homosociality in Belle Epoque France, 1880–1914 Submitted by Giada Alessandroni to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French in September 2018 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature: ………………………………………………………….. ABSTRACT This thesis explores fictional representations of female homosociality in a group of female- authored, middlebrow novels published in France between 1880 and 1914 in order to include women’s writing of the Belle Epoque within the narratives of the literary and cultural history of friendship and further our understanding of gender identities in the long nineteenth- century. Novelistic portrayals of female homosociality are compared to the models of female bonding described in didactic or orthodox literature of the time so as to highlight the various innovations made, in relation to this theme, by the texts under consideration. Using the novel as a forum in which ideas about women’s identities and their relationships could be reflected upon and negotiated, some Belle Epoque female authors engage with the limitations and possibilities of female relationships in fiction as a way to participate in contemporary debates about modern and traditional womanhood. In particular, the representation of female homosociality constitutes one of the literary devices through which the figure of the femme moderne comes into being on paper, and reflects the authors’ engagement with a form of female modernism that problematizes the dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ literature, giving shape to women’s experience of modernity.
    [Show full text]
  • Borrowed Forms the Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction
    Borrowed Forms The Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 1 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 2 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Borrowed Forms The Music and Ethics of Transnational Fiction Kathryn Lachman LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 3 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Borrowed Forms First published 2014 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2014 Kathryn Lachman The right of Kathryn Lachman to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78138-030-7 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by Booksfactory.co.uk Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 4 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Contents Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 From Mikhail Bakhtin to Maryse Condé: the Problems of Literary Polyphony 29 2 Edward Said and Assia Djebar: Counterpoint and the Practice of Comparative Literature 59 3 Glenn Gould and the Birth of the Author: Variation and Performance in Nancy Huston’s Les variations Goldberg 89 4 Opera and the Limits of Representation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace 113 Conclusion 137 Notes 147 Works Cited 175 Index 195 Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 5 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Lachman, Borrowed Forms.indd 6 06/05/2014 09:30:15 Acknowledgements Acknowledgements I completed this book at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I have benefited greatly from the support and generosity of my chairs: Julie Hayes, Bill Moebius, Patrick Mensah, David Lenson, and Jim Hicks.
    [Show full text]