Deleuze, Style and Literature

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes At this point, it is worth remarking a deep, though largely unexplored, correspondence here between Deleuze's work and that of Stanley Cavell. For a reading of Dubliners that identifies it with the work of Sacher-Masoch, see Edward Brandabar. Deleuze's ideas of becoming are perhaps most helpfully to be approached though a reading of Dialogues. “The Affective World of Charlotte Brontë's Villette,” pp. 711–26. Clearly this could be further expanded through a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's account of rhythm in the chapter, “Of The Refrain,” in A Thousand Plateaus (310–50). Penny Boumelha is eloquent on this last point, remarking that “Villette is among the strangest of nineteenth-century novels to read. Its fictional world is strikingly unstable…It is peopled by name-changers—virtually all the major characters have a variety of names, as Marie Beck is also Modest Kint, or as the more conventional of the novel's romantic heroes migrates between the names Graham Bretton, Dr John and Isidore—and by shape-changers, characters who apparently become unrecognisable to one another in the course of a few chapters, as Lucy does to her surrogate family, the Brettons” (100). The second part of my essay on Villette is concerned with developing this typology as it is evident in the temporal, psychological, dramatic, and linguistic dimensions of the text. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn HughesJohn Hughes is a Reader in English at the University of Gloucestershire. He has published widely on the literature of the long nineteenth century (particularly Hardy, Tennyson, and Wordsworth), and on literary theory.