Representations of Invisibility in Victor Hugo’s L’homme qui rit

Abstract

REPRESENTATIONSOF INVISIBILITY VICTOR HUGO'S L'HOMME QUI RIT C. Cdmille Collins is a doctoml candidate al IN Columbia University. It has been argued that Hugo's modernity Hes in his fascination with mirror effects, dissolving processes, and traces. This fascination is generally studied in terms of literary motifs or themes: the grotesque, the tower of Babel, and exile to few. I name a would the like to discuss bypass motifs and thematic concerns to essential quality of Hugo's aforementioned is fascination, which another fascination, a fascination with invisibility. In the literary text, this fascination channels itself in textual moments where things, happenings or occurrences, which have solid form or are considered visible entities on the level of mimesis, are later, through a semiotic process of textual transformation, recognized to be entirely invisible. Invisible here signifies an invisibility proper to the Hugolian corpus and will be will defined negatively through periphrasis. Before passing to the text, I present mimesis, representation and semiosis using is definitions provided level by Michael reality Riffaterre.' Mimesis the literary representation of and as such establishes a verisimilitude the which and by opposition to which we can perceive departures. The most general definition of representation has it that representation 1) presupposes the becomes norm for a given text existence of its object outside of the text and preexistent to it, and the reader's response to mimesis or the literary representation of reality consists in a rationalization tending to and complete the mimesis and to expand on it in sensory terms. Both of these processes assume that referentiality is the verify