Subversions of Verisimilitude: Reading Narrative from Balzac to Sartre
Subversions of Verisimilitude: Reading Narrative from Balzac to Sartre
Lawrence R. Schehr
Copyright Date: 2009
Published by: Fordham University Press
Pages: 272
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13wzw9x
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Book Info
Subversions of Verisimilitude: Reading Narrative from Balzac to Sartre
Book Description:

Subversions of Verisimilitude focuses on the ways in which a number of French literary narratives written in the realist tradition show a dynamic balance between the desire of the author/narrator to present a verisimilar world and the need for aesthetic balance. While the works studied-narratives by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Colette, Proust, and Sartre-range over the course of a century, from 1835 to 1938, they share a perspective on the relations between and the need to engage questions of realist verisimilitude and narrative interest and aesthetics. The book discusses some of the subversive paths taken in realism and, specifically, in canonical narratives solidly anchored in the tradition. The goal here is to analyze these realist texts, regardless of the narrative mode chosen, in order to see the deviations and detours from realism, mostly for aesthetic ends.The book contributes to our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative and furthers our knowledge of the ways in which critical theory illuminates such canonical works.

eISBN: 978-0-8232-4914-5
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. Preface
    Preface (pp. ix-xii)
  4. Introduction
    Introduction (pp. 1-10)

    Even a cursory glance at theMLA Bibliographyonline reveals an interesting pattern in the conjunction of the terms “verisimilitude,” “French,” and “realism.” As might be expected by any literary critic familiar with Erich Auerbach’s epoch-makingMimesis, when the first two terms are searched with an AND operator, most of the articles and book chapters that appear on the list are about pre-nineteenth-century texts. Verisimilitude has a long literary history that crosses time, borders, and genres, though its particularities were defined differently according to when and where it was applied. A search of “realism” and “French” leads to spectacularly different...

  5. 1. Balzac: Enallages and Twists
    1. Balzac: Enallages and Twists (pp. 11-57)

    In this chapter on Balzac, I would like to focus on two of the less studied works inLa Comédie humaine: Le Contrat de Mariage, an 1835 novel that is anétude de mœursincluded in theScènes de la vie privée, and the very cynical 1837 workLa Maison Nucingen, published the following year as anotherétude de mœurs, but part of theScènes de la vie parisienne. I will conclude the chapter with a somewhat revisionist reading of “Sarrasine.” While there are clear reasons to revisit “Sarrasine,” it is perhaps not as clear why I am choosing these...

  6. 2. Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude
    2. Flaubert and Zola: Challenges to Verisimilitude (pp. 58-123)

    Each of the canonic realist novelists—Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola—takes a pessimistic view of human happiness. This position is consonant with the representation of the changing world of the nineteenth century in which the ever-advancing institutions of capitalism and the bourgeoisie as well as the ideological state apparatuses supporting them, not least the effects of urbanization, lead many novelists of the time to paint rather bleak pictures of the world surrounding them. Despite the negative pictures they often paint, Balzac and Zola do believe in progress and progress narratives. For the latter, of course, this progress is often...

  7. 3. Colette and Proust: Queering Modernism
    3. Colette and Proust: Queering Modernism (pp. 124-168)

    Despite serious differences in approaching narrative between the mainstream novelists of the nineteenth century and the high modernists of the early twentieth century and even the young Sartre who will follow them, there remains a seeming allegiance to verisimilitude and a reasoned, logical approach to narrative. Many nineteenth-century authors try to reproduce reality through an objective approach; early twentieth-century narratives, ushered in by the publication of André Gide’s workL’Immoraliste, take a more subjective approach, whether it is through the use of a first-person narrator or through the imposition of a third-person narrator who does not pretend to be the...

  8. 4. Sartre’s Bodies
    4. Sartre’s Bodies (pp. 169-197)

    In the filmSartre par lui-même, directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat, Jean-Paul Sartre, along with the fastest talker in the universe, Simone de Beauvoir, reminisces about his life, work, and engagement in the politics and culture of the twentieth century. In telling that there was a real-life model for the Autodidact, Sartre allows that part of the model was himself:

    The first time I talked about contingency was in a notebook I had found in the subway. It was a new notebook, with “Midy Suppositories” writing on it; it was obviously a notebook given to doctors. It was...

  9. Epilogue
    Epilogue (pp. 198-200)

    To move from the retrospective and nostalgic view of the Restoration that is Balzac’s to the world leading to the Second World War that is Sartre’s is to cover a bit over a century of tumultuous change, industrial and economic revolution, and social evolution in mores, class structure, and demographics to an extent that the West had never before seen. It is a movement away from a relatively unchanging agrarian society to an urban and industrial one marked by the advent of photography, available electricity, cinema, apartment houses, department stores, urban anonymity, and sexual revolutions. And yet, while there are...

  10. Notes
    Notes (pp. 201-230)
  11. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 231-236)
  12. Index
    Index (pp. 237-242)
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