Emma Bovary Research Articles

„Regentka”: w poszukiwaniu dróg ucieczki ze świata-więzienia

The Regent’s Wife is a 19th century novel by Clarin, i.e. Leopoldo Alas, considered the second most important Spanish novel after Don Quixote. It is also representative of the Spanish variety of Naturalism. Within the Spanish culture, its main character, Ana Ozores, is the most popular and commonly recognizable character similar to Emma Bovary. The paper presents the similarities and differences between the two characters. Ana is shown as a victim of the society she is part of. She tries to free herself from the boredom of a life without purpose, to make sense of it by means of religion or love. Nevertheless, her endeavours turn out to be futile for a she is but a 19th century lady from some Spanish province. The article focuses on two potential escape routes from the world in which Ana feels oppressed and presents the reasons of her failure. The protagonist of The Regent’s Wife can also be interpreted (in accordance with previous scholarship) as a symbol of trans-historic Spain.

Teresa, Giacinta i Helena – włoskie siostry Emmy, czyli „Pani Bovary” Gustave’a Flauberta w literaturze włoskiej XIX wieku

Through a comparative study, the author tries to outline the differences and similarities between Madame Bovary and three 19th century Italian novels by De Roberto, Verga and Capuana along with an intertextual game the writers engage in with the French original. By a close analysis of the protagonists’ childhood, marriage/adultery, literary education and psychological disorders, the author argues that whilst Emma Bovary falls victim of her illusions, and Elena with Giacinta are only partially Mesdames Bovary, Teresa comes to realise the male power of novels.

Emma, Luiza i inne, czyli bovaryzm w Portugalii i Brazylii

The author uses the traditional methodology of literary history, making references to the critics of the myth and phantoms and the history of ideas. Based on the ideas of the theorists and writers of the West (George Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Vladimir Nabokov, Frederic Brown) and prominent Polish scholars (Maria Janion, among others), the author analyses the notion of le bovarysme within the realm of tragic „romantic dream taken out from romantic oeuvres” (MJ). The moral collapse of Emma Bovary and Luiza Mendonca as the heroines of Gustave Flaubert and Eca de Queiroz (in the novel Cousin Bazilio, 1878) would have a relation with the exhaustion of the pattern of the romantic poetics of dreaming (la reverie) and with undertaking by the Portuguese and Brazilian writers of the tasks outlined before the realistic literature „of a thesis” –what is summoned up is the thesis of the susceptibility of a woman to adultery. The Lusopohone metamorphoses and continuations of Emma Bovary are in a close relationship with the literary creation of Eca de Queiroz (in the novel in question and in the tale In the Windmill) as well as of Machado de Assis – the predecessor of the Brazilian realism and of numerous writers who use Portuguese and Spanish in Europe and Latin America.

An Ambition of Infidelity �Emma Bovary� as Wife: Sexuality Problems

Abstract Objective This paper analyzes sexuality problem of the main character: An ambition of infidelity Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857. Methods In analyzing sexuality problems, the writers related some issues in the novel that used psychoanalytic. Results Psychology sexuality problems of Emma Bovary it also an ambition of infidelity with 3 men that the friends male of her husband. Conclusion Emma Bovary has a psychological problem that sexuality and ambition to satisfaction her sexuality, which gives an illusion of how these problems appeared to Emma Bovary as wife.

Una lectura de Madame Bovary (o la imposible satisfacción)

Tras contrastar Madame Bovary con el telón de fondo romántico, se considera la presentación de la vulgaridad y del espacio de lo mediocre en la novela, para analizar a continuación la personalidad de Emma Bovary. Ésta vendría definida, más que por la rebeldía frente a las limitaciones sociales del entorno, por la perpetua contraposición entre fantasía y realidad, que torna imposible cualquier satisfacción

‘<i>The return of the native by Thomas Hardy</i>: Eustacia Vye or the bovarysme embodied in Wessex”

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is one of the great English novelists of the late Victorian era. Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are among his most famous novels. If he was not directly influenced by Gustave Flaubert’s aesthetics, Hardy was very much inspired by the heroine of Madame Bovary. Indeed, quite a few of Hardy’s female characters, whether in his novels or in his short stories, suffer with varying degrees from “bovarysme’, the disease of imagination and affectivity which is one of Emma Bovary’s central features. This paper aims to shed light on the posterity of Flaubert’s character through Eustacia Vye, the heroine of The Return of the Native, to show to what extent she represents not a pale imitation but an original variation on an essential model of Western literature.

Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Bored: Echoes of Flaubert’s Egyptian Travel Writing in Madame Bovary

Studies of Gustave Flaubert have explicated his representations of boredom as a malady of the modern subject and, as in Jacques Rancière’s essay, “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,” have often interpreted Emma Bovary’s ennui as a sign of her addictive, inartistic personality. Meanwhile, studies of Flaubert’s orientalism have analyzed his peculiar rendering of North African places as both mysterious and over-mediated by prior texts. This article juxtaposes Madame Bovary (1856) with Flaubert’s account of his journey to Egypt (1849–1850). Resonances across these texts allow me to read Emma as the foil to the oriental traveler who bears the burden of his displaced sensory alienation and ennui while also being linked to him by a profound affinity. Second, I argue that Flaubert transposes sensory images from his travel writing into the novel form, thus distancing them from the mediating discourses of orientalism that inhere in the travelogue.

Drawn from the Classics: Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works ed. by Stephen E. Tabachnick, Saltzman, Esther Bendit

Reviewed by: Drawn from the Classics: Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works ed. by Stephen E. Tabachnick, Saltzman, Esther Bendit Edward Brunner Tabachnick, Stephen E., and Saltzman, Esther Bendit, eds. Drawn from the Classics: Essays on Graphic Adaptations of Literary Works. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books, 2015. 283pp. $45.00 paperback. Readers who appreciated Stephen Tabachnick’s words as guest editor of Studies in the Novel in fall 2015, proposing that the “graphic novel is capable of treating any subject that is within the purview of the best literature and art not only with the same level of artistry, but with the exciting addition of innovative techniques” (290), will find that affirmation tested through a focus on adaptation studies in these essays collected and edited by Tabachnick and Esther Bendit Saltzman. Graphic novels, as media products that combine verbal and visual formats that painters and novelists tend to keep separate, are predisposed to work interactively, so engaging with predecessor texts is not unfamiliar work. For scholars to study, then, graphic novels as they reproduce, transform, or imitate literary writings is not an unusual turn but one that is positively intriguing. The collection’s tutelary spirit is Linda Hutcheon whose A Theory of Adaptation offered a capacious description of adaptation as a process that includes three accumulative traits. At their most basic, adaptations operate to link a new work to an older work in a way that remains “recognizable”; in more intricate versions, adaptations reveal a new work as a “creative and interpretive act” that engages with a prior text; and finally, most intricate of all, adaptations develop surprising interrelations between products that affirm “an extended intertextual engagement” (Hutcheon 8). The fourteen essays in Drawn from the Classics find examples that explore all these options. Individual essayists take up writings that span The Odyssey to Ray Bradbury and offer comments on versions of Beowulf, Othello, various tales by Edgar Allan Poe, Moby-Dick, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Emma Bovary, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness, The Metamorphosis, and The Great Gatsby, as well as two lesser-known pieces: Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Though we are a long way from the Classics Illustrated series of the 1940s and 1950s that always ended by urging readers to investigate the original, several essayists offer descriptions with a useful pedagogical slant, and these consider the kind of adaptations Hutcheon might call “recognizable.” J. Caitlin Finlayson ponders graphic novel versions of the scene depicting Othello suffocating Desdemona that fail to capture the sexual violence in Shakespeare, possibly to spare the sensibilities of a young audience. This is a problem that some classrooms might take up as a talking point. By contrast, Derek Parker Royal locates Poe stories “particularly suited to translate, and even transcend, the conventions in which Poe writes” (60), and he even finds literary terms—“romantic irony” and “ambiguity”—to be useful descriptors. Short stories slip most gracefully from print culture into graphics art, as is evident [End Page 255] in Darren Harris-Fain’s tracing of Ray Bradbury’s writings from a first appearance in EC Comics in the 1950s to large-scale productions legitimated by Bradbury, who oversaw them. But adaptations of The Odyssey hold commercial appeal, too, reading “much like a superhero comic of the mid to late 20th century” (19), Paul D. Streufert convincingly argues, describing episodes involving Circe and Polyphemus as demonstrating the “social disconnection” that marks supervillains. By contrast, in reviewing versions of Beowulf Jason Tondro finds adaptations that vary widely, with at least one “firmly rooted in anthropological and archeological detail” (38) but another verging on decisions made for largely-commercial reasons, the prequel series entitled Kid Beowulf. When Dirk Vanderbeke confronts multiple versions of Moby-Dick so different they transform Melville’s novel “into an open metaphor,” we near adaptations that exemplify Hutcheon’s second major trait, engagements both “interpretive and creative.” This group of essays, then, more freely questions the success of adaptations that move toward balancing interpretation and creativity. Ahab becomes an icon, as Vanderbeke successfully argues, no less identifiable and malleable than Batman. More successful creative-and-interpretive mixes hinge on...

Sur les pas de Flaubert: approches sensibles du paysage éd. par Philippe Antoine

the lack of a clearly articulated focal point, this volume should interest a wide range of scholars. Regrettably, formatting inconsistencies (for example, only some chapters have bibliographies) and numerous typographical errors might prove distracting. University of Mary Washington Brooke D. Di Lauro Antoine, Philippe, éd. Sur les pas de Flaubert: approches sensibles du paysage. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. ISBN 978-90-420-3897-4. Pp. 216. 54 a. This motley collection of twelve essays examines the travel writings of Flaubert and a number of other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French authors like Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Dumas, Mérimée, Sand, Gautier, the Goncourt brothers, and J.H. Rosny the Elder. Using a variety of stylistic, sociological, historical, thematic, psychoanalytic, and comparative approaches, the book pays attention to the authors’ sensory perceptions of landscape, thus affirming the role of the body and the totality of the senses (not just sight) in the experience of travel. The essays share the common belief in the special authenticity, sincerity, and transparency of the travel narrative, as opposed to the more staged and deliberate fictional account. Indeed, often travel writings are not expected to be read as literature per se and, as such offer a unique and intimate perspective on the writer as a person. In her essay on nineteenth-century scientific writings about Tenerife Island, Anne-Gaëlle Weber shows how the senses of taste, touch, and smell served the needs of practical experimentation and were used to mark the difference between seekers of empirical truth versus armchair travelers. In his reading of texts of French explorers of Tibet, Samuel Thévoz analyses the complex sensory-motor processes entering into play when the voyager-writer confronts a totally unfamiliar, unmapped environment. Frédéric Calas studies the vast corpus of literary “voyages en Orient”from Chateaubriand to Loti, concluding that sight is far from the predominant sense, especially in Flaubert, whose travel writings, part of his correspondence that he did not expect to be read as literature, are peppered with examples of synesthesia. Thierry Poyet further develops these insights by showing how Flaubert’s youthful travels awakened his sexuality and opened him, if only briefly, to new sensory experience. The next two contributors, Sarga Moussa and Alain Guyot, examine sonic landscapes. Moussa explores constructions of Oriental nighttime (when the voyager is figuratively blind thus more reliant on the other senses) in the works of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Flaubert, while Guyot demonstrates how Chateaubriand enlarged the scope of sensory possibilities in the travel narrative compared to his predecessors, Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Nathalie Solomon shows how seemingly trivial sensory perceptions, in Dumas and Gautier, are in fact an essential tool in understanding their special brand of irony and the Romantic voyage in general. Odile Gannier examines the Romantic traveler’s culinary adventures with local cuisine, while Sophie Lécole, Philippe Antoine, and Pierre Dufief study Gautier in Spain, Flaubert in 190 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 191 Brittany, and the Goncourt Brothers in Algeria, respectively. Laurie Guillaud, in the final essay of the volume, opens new vistas on sensory studies with her interesting look at the marvelous creatures, hybrid fauna, and neo-primitive landscapes peopling the works of the science fiction visionary J.H. Rosny the Elder. The collection is a highly diverse and stimulating addition to the body of scholarship devoted to exoticism, landscapes, and travel narratives during the major century of French colonialism. University of New Orleans Juliana Starr Baudry, Marie. Lectrices romanesques: représentations et théorie de la lecture aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2542-4. Pp. 471. 49 a. This book examines how mid-nineteenth century novels systematically represent flawed readers as female, and argues that this gendering pervades the ways reading has been theorized in the late twentieth century. Why, Baudry asks, did the emblematic figure of the reader shift from Don Quixote to Emma Bovary? And how has the long shadow of Flaubert’s heroine structured various theories of reading? Until the nineteenth century, in a pan-European tradition that dates back to Cervantes, novels depicted characters of both genders falling prey to naïve or excessive reading; yet...

Les pêchers par Claire Castillon

stolen manuscript,Derrida is murdered on the Cornell campus and Searle subsequently commits suicide. As the investigation broadens, a mysterious Logos Club becomes increasingly important. This is a debating society of sorts, whose Grand Master is Umberto Eco who, due to his own rhetorical effusions, once had an opponent urinate on his leg. The Logos Club is a place where verbal dexterity occasionally triumphs over content—Socrate“est un peu le Elvis de la rhétorique”(198)—yet the jousting is not really friendly. A loser risks having a finger chopped off, or, if the stakes are high enough, a more significant part of the anatomy. As the police enquiry lurches toward its conclusion, it becomes increasingly apparent that the culprits are among Barthes’s friends, and while nobody is arrested, a rough type of justice is done.Although the fate of the purloined manuscript remains unclear, it seems to have figured in Mitterrand’s surprise victory over Giscard in 1981, and in the blossoming American academic career of a former male prostitute. Binet’s novel also explores the blurred line between fiction and reality—“I think I’m trapped in a novel” (348)—but the initial reading is simply a prolonged experience of wicked delight. Florida State University, emeritus William Cloonan Castillon,Claire. Les pêchers.Paris: L’Olivier,2015.ISBN 978-2-82-360790-1.Pp.203. 17,50 a. This novel explores the punitive nature of romantic love, from the perspectives of three women in sentimentally-challenging situations. The phrase“la guerre des sexes” is often used to describe the thematic of Castillon’s novels. Indeed, this novel finds some of its characters in conflict with people of the opposite sex. They are often in love with people unattainable, recalling Flaubert’s concept of bovarysme. Thirteen chapters are told by Tamara, the first of three pécheresses (supposedly sinners because they love) and narrators, and wife to the class-conscious doctor, Claude. Eight chapters are recounted through the eyes of Claude’s materialistic ex-wife, Aimée, who now lives with Quick, Aimée’s former lover. Lastly, nine are told by Esther (“Terra”), daughter to Aimée and Claude. The sufferings of Tamara, pining for Quick, and of Aimée, preferring Claude to Quick, are compounded by jealousy. Sartre’s Huis clos comes to mind, in that these four characters punish each other through their relationships, if not purposefully, carelessly. Not only is there a guerre des sexes, but there are also civil wars among men, and among women. The exclusivity of romantic relationships, as well as their ability to confer social status, can be cruel to interested outsiders. Tamara faces a third challenge as she feels trapped in her marriage to Claude, evoking Emma Bovary’s feelings of enfermement in nineteenth-century France. Comprehensively, some of the interpersonal situations described in this novel overlap with many other stories of romantic disappointment, but Castillon’s depiction of the process by which four characters, in effect, exchange romantic partners among each other accentuates 230 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 231 the tensions inherent to this tale of relational loss. It could be argued that this scenario is implausible, but its depiction is worthwhile as a thought experiment. Moreover, through her portrayal of Esther, Castillon is to be praised for calling attention to the position of single people. This intelligent teenager has romantic feelings for Clarence, who is rude and dismissive to her, and who dotes on the attractive and self-confident Priscille as the three make a film together. Esther concedes that she is disadvantaged in la guerre des sexes because beauty usually triumphs over intelligence in capturing the affections of men. Her circumstances are not as dramatic as those of Tamara or Aimée, yet her predicament, especially as a daughter already blamed for the difficulties of her father’s love life, could be the subject of an entire novel. Is there not violence in the way single people are sometimes stigmatized? Esther’s mother, Aimée, grieving her marriage to Claude, tells her that she is ill-fated for love (184–85). Although it is disconcerting to ponder the extent of the cruelties that can...

Bored to Death: Improvisations on a Theme

Since Petronius and Ovid wrote about the Sybil lamenting the loss of her freedom, which she had traded for eternal life, boredom has not ceased to fascinate and allure. Plato and Aristotle broached the topic philosophically, followed by a whole range of philosophers, writers, painters, and musicians. In this paper, Maria Frendo traces a genealogy of a host of characters in fiction and literary tradition who are afflicted by boredom, from Petronius’ Sybil to Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, from Shakespeare's Antonio to Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters, from Huysmans’ Count des Esseintes to Eliot's Prufrock, but not forgetting woman: signally, through Flaubert's Emma Bovary. The essay's development and focus bear on two further considerations: firstly, the relation of boredom with death and desire, whereby the longing for relief from the situation in which one is trapped is accompanied by disinclination to resist and an accommodation to paralysis; and, secondly, patterns of duality and doubling across a good number of the predicaments depicted. Halfway through, the paper formally performs a boredom and irritation of its own in the process of highlighting existential angst and postmodernist neurosis in literature and the post-literary, and shifts its focus onto the poetry of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. This apparent randomness is deliberate: hence the subtitle ‘Improvisations on a Theme’, suggestive of thematic and structural characteristics to the paper and its argument.

Comfort Women and Emma Bovary: The Historical Construction of the ‘Unspeakable’ in Transnational Subalternity

Comfort Women and Emma Bovary: The Historical Construction of the ‘Unspeakable’ in Transnational Subalternity

Grieta en la pared, carcoma interior. Realidad frente a deseo en Emma Bovary y Ana Ozores. Perspectiva temática

Cet article met en confrontation les personnages d’Emma Bovary et Ana Ozores suivant une optique critique thématique. A travers le mode de perception du réel sur certains éléments d’ordre cosmologique ou matériel, sont envisagées une série d’images récurrentes qui ont une prégnance symbolique. Ces images, qui sont émergence du niveau psychosensoriel du texte, touchent donc à la dimension spécifiquement individuelle concernant le mode de perception et la construction d’une rêverie de la réalité dans l’écriture. Or des parallélismes peuvent être établis entre l’écriture de Flaubert et celle de Clarín.

“And Yet the Body Is His Book”: Articles of Incorporation

A & Q 73 psychoanalytic turn in Asian studies is not a reduction of, but rather a return to, an epistēmē of Asia. Meera Lee is assistant professor of Asian/Asian American studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. 6 notes I have taken the term imaginary ethnography from the works of literary critic and psychoanalytic theorist Gabriele Schwab. 1. For a more detailed discussion of psychoanalysis’s transformation, see Oliver (2004, xiii). 2. The notion of “colonizing ratio” appears in the concluding part of Foucault’s (1970) The Order of Things. For an expanded account of “colonizing ratio” and “countertransference,” see also Lambert (2013), who explained the cultural imaginary between a literary critic and the stranger. 6 works Cited Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by Les Mots et les choses. New York: Vintage Books. Lambert, Gregg. 2013. “Strangers, Analysts, and Literary Critics: On the ‘Unhappy’ Marriage of Psychoanalysis and Ethnology.” Keynote address presented at the Affect, Politics, Psychoanalysis: International Conference, National Taiwan University. Oliver, Kelly. 2004. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schwab, Gabriele. 2012. Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press. “And Yet the Body Is His Book”: Articles of Incorporation Haun Saussy The three questions the editors ask are an invitation to Bovaryism, the lure of the lives one hasn’t lived—in Emma Bovary’s case, a poisonous enchantment. Who, in the literary profession, has not felt that lure? Like the rhapsode in Plato’s dialogue Ion, we know all about war, shipbuilding , economics, law, medicine, not from direct practical experience but 74 A & Q by being plunged into the representations of them all. And, because we read the dialogue well enough to see that it is a prolonged send-up of the self-satisfied rhapsode, we often think we ought to have gone into one of those fields that would teach us how to get our hands around something more substantial than a representation. Julie Stone Peters’s (2005) wonderful essay about interdisciplinary envy tells us what happens when we directly confront the objects of our professional “reality hunger”: the practical professionals in law, too, think of their field as overly technical , formal, distanced from reality, and look to us literature specialists to restore the living, breathing, bleeding texture of experience through our magical art. Something similar would probably happen on the other side of whatever interdisciplinary fence you chose. When I think about what “fields or subfields outside my current area of expertise” I could and should have gone into while I had the chance, it is not with the regret of having done the wrong things with the last twenty-five years of my life. I say this at the risk of sounding selfsatisfied . There are languages I should have learned (Russian, Sanskrit, Old Persian, Turkish, Portuguese) and reasons why I should have learned them: to plunge into Acmeist poetry, Chekhov and Formalist criticism; to consider the Vedas and the epics from close up; to understand another huge, multicultural, early empire; to have a handle on Central Asia as it impinges on China and Europe; to read Pessoa; and other reasons I can’t imagine before getting involved in those languages and the paths to which they might lead. That is how languages are. To learn a language is to start on a long-term relationship. In the unlikely event that I could show up (mirror, mirror on the wall) at my first squirrel-infested attic apartment in New Haven in 1983 to speak with my earlier self, the advice I’d want to give would be mainly about personal and sentimental matters—which are outside the scope of this article. About the things of the mind, here’s roughly what I’d say: “Soak up all of that good deconstruction stuff you can—it’s not going to be around forever. Learn a lot of classical philology, because, as you’re already surmising, that’s where the tools of deconstruction were first forged. Take some classes on philosophy with the professional philosophers , despite the flashes of antagonism occupying...

Alma sensible, romanticismo exaltado y suicidio. Sobre la novela <em>Voyleano o la exaltación de las pasiones</em> (1827), de Estanislao de Cosca Vayo y Lamarca

The character Voyleano has models in the suicide Werther, by Goethe, and in the death-desiring Tediato in the Lugubrious Nights, by Cadalso. The creation of the figure of Voyleano depends on the new sensibility of the Enlightenment, romantic cosmic grief, and the exaltation of romantic psychology. In the novel by Vayo the Napoleonic invasion of Spain is depicted, and this atmosphere lends itself to libertine seductions, betrayals, great disillusionments, and the loss of faith. Voyleano, like don Quijote, like Julien Sorel, like Emma Bovary, and like several characters from Larra and Mesonero Romanos has sought a model or logos in an earlier character. After don Quijote Voyleano is the first of all of them. Voyleano considers the physical act of suicide lacking in nobility and cowardly, and although he is inspired by Werther, he is attracted to Tediato’s way of committing suicide while avoiding the physical act of suicide.

Never Great, Only Popular: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife and The Literary Marketplace

From the time of its initial publication, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1864 novel The Doctor's Wife (1) has most frequently been read in relation to Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), the plot of which Braddon borrowed for her first serious foray into realist fiction. In terms of style, character, and, for the most part, plot, The Doctor's Wife presents an ostensible departure from the sensation fiction on which Braddon had built her reputation, yet as the Pall Mall Gazette recognized in an 1865 review, the tie to Madame Bovary rather cleverly positioned the novel for success in the literary marketplace: [A] good stroke of business may sometimes be done by taking a clever but improper French novel, omitting the improper incidents or transforming them when they are not hopelessly bad into proper ones, and giving the residuum to the world as an entirely original story. The great advantage of this literary and commercial operation ... lies in the fact that in England the improper original, whatever scandal may say to the contrary, is tolerably sure not to have been read by ladies; and they are the great supporters of novel literature. (4) In his analysis of the commercially-driven motives he assumes were behind Braddon's choice to adapt Flaubert's novel, this reviewer conflates Braddon with Sigismund Smith, her sensation novelist alter-ego within The Doctor's Wife; to Smith, the reviewer attributes the ingenious plan to make money by transforming Flaubert's story for an English audience, while to Braddon, he assigns blame for presenting a corrupting influence to impressionable young ladies through a novel that is superficially 'proper' but altogether unsound (4). The business of novel-writing, the destructive models of behavior fiction provided for women readers, and Braddon's self-representation through Smith are indeed central concerns in The Doctor's Wife, yet these themes work together to quite different ends than the Pall Mall Gazette's reviewer supposes. Braddon's novel certainly resembles Madame Bovary in its use of a romantic heroine who marries a boring country doctor and then engages in an extramarital relationship (albeit an innocent one in Braddon's version of the story) to experience some of the romance she desires in her life, but the two novels are quite different beyond this shared plotline. Reading novels initially feeds Emma Bovary's dreams of a luxurious lifestyle, yet Flaubert shows little interest in chronicling the details of what Emma reads. (2) The Doctor's Wife, on the other hand, is concerned with the specifics of the heroine's reading as well as the business of novel-writing. Unlike Flaubert, Braddon includes references to specific character names and plot points when describing Isabel Gilbert's reading, and she could safely assume that her readers would understand these allusions because she cites only famous, highly-respected authors--Byron, Shelley, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, and Charlotte Bronte are featured most prominently. Braddon moves even farther away from Madame Bovary through her inclusion of Sigismund Smith, who allows her to engage quite pointedly in the heated debate over sensation fiction at the center of which she found herself because of her wildly successful novels. Braddon's contemporaries were confused by her overt references to sensation fiction in The Doctor's Wife. The Bristol Mercury (in a favorable 1864 review) misinterprets Braddon's characterization of Smith as well as the types of works her heroine reads: To show how much she despises the fame of a mere 'sensation' writer, as against the reputation of an author who regards true artistic development, she introduces, as one of the characters of the book before us, Sigismund Smith, a shining light of that 'raw-head and blood-bones' kind of literature which figures in numerous penny publications, and no small pains are taken to hold up the class he represents to ridicule. …

The Epistemology of Fiction and the Question of Invariant Norms

A primary dimension of our engagement with fictional works of art – paradigmatically literary, dramatic, and cinematic narratives – is figuring out what is true in such representations, what the facts are in the fictional world. These facts (or states of affairs) include not only those that ground any genuine understanding of a story – say, that it was his own father whom Oedipus killed – but also those that may be missed in even a largely competent reading, say, that Emma Bovary's desires and dissatisfactions are fed by reading romance novels.

The Thread of the Novel

In The Waves, one of the characters dreams of “a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another.” This essay situates this dream within the problem of modern fiction. Fiction was defined by Aristotle as an arrangement of actions according to necessity or verisimilitude. As such, it was opposed to history, which only told events, as they happened, in their empirical succession. When Virginia Woolf contrasts the tyranny of the plot with the truth of the shower of atoms falling upon the minds at every moment of any ordinary day, she exactly overturns the opposition. Now the problem is: how to organize the shower of atoms in the form of fiction with a beginning, a middle, and an end? Flaubert and Conrad had sorted out the problem by making a compromise between the truth of the interpenetration of sensory microevents and the “lie” of the plot. Through examples borrowed from Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, the essay analyzes the various ways in which Woolf tries to dismiss this compromise. It also focuses on the political implication of the problem: modern fiction opposes the democracy of life to the old hierarchy of action, but it does so at the cost of sacrificing the social and literary character who haunts modern fiction: the child of the plebeian who, like Emma Bovary or Septimus Warren Smith, proves able to live any form of experience.

Emma And The Others

There are some others whom we will never have the chance to meet because they do not exist: Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Nana, for instance. The reason they are something different from us may seem obvious; they are, after all, fictional entities. But what does it mean when we say that they do not exist? That they are nothing at all, or that they are simply different from us? By assuming a realist ontological perspective we will explain what sort of things fictional literary entities are, comparing them both to existing and to non-existing entities that resemble them in some respects (what is the difference between the historical Napoleon and the Napoleon in War and Peace? Are there similarities between fictional entities as created entities and other artifacts?). Finally, we will determine which theory gives the best account of fictional entities as things other than ourselves.

Reading Phil Watts on Les Bienveillantes

Last fall I asked Vincent Debaene to share Phil Watts's book proposal, of with me. The title of Tragedy had also been title of Phil's essay on Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes included in issue of Yale French Studies devoted to Littell and Irene Nemirovsky that Phil and I had coedited in 2012. I had greatly admired Phil's essay on Les Bienveillantes and wanted to see what plans for larger project looked like. I read proposal of Tragedy with renewed sense of admiration and also one of loss, both personal and intellectual. In our last conversations, Phil and I had talked about tragedy, our shared admiration for Hannah Arendt--about whose work Phil knew much more than I--and Arendt's 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. We had in fact planned conference to commemorate fiftieth anniversary of publication of Arendt's profoundly influential and controversial work, to be held at Glasscock Humanities Center at Texas A&M this year. That conference took place this past January. I am so sorry that Phil couldn't be there. I'm sure he would have enjoyed it as much as I did. of Tragedy remarkable and important project, engaging as it does with crucial philosophical, political, and moral issues in post-Holocaust world, terribly complex subject of contemporary history and its representations, and critical questions concerning cultural appropriateness and longevity of literary genres and tragedy in particular. As Phil writes: examining ways in which literature and film turned to tragedy--or modern remnants of genre--we can better understand relations between fictional narratives and justice, politics, and history in postwar world. From standpoint of genre of tragedy alone--and its very possibility in postwar world--the issue already fraught one, and one that Phil deftly dissects. By definition or by tradition, tragedy an archaic and aristocratic form. Moreover, in postwar world, it has been tainted by its association with totalitarian regimes whose deliberate debasement of through propagandistic excess--what George Steiner refers to as stiffening of language in The Death of Tragedy--has decimated tragedy by stripping it of its true (read linguistic) power. Hence, as Phil notes, Brecht's dismissal of tragedy as an outmoded artifact. And yet historical and human need for tragedy, or tragedy reconceptualized or reconfigured, remains. It may serve as a genre whose rigors are necessary tonic for our postmodern times, as Phil quotes Terry Eagleton as stating. Or it might also be means of enhancing struggles and tragic destiny of common man. In this latter form, it becomes the art of common, figuring fate of Zola's Jacques Lantier, Flaubert's Emma Bovary, or perhaps tragic American Everyman in Arthur Miller's Death of Salesman or View from Bridge. But Phil's project on contemporary tragedy, or its remnants, at once both historically more specific and acute, and analytically more powerful, than either of these options allows. Remnants of Tragedy, Phil writes, is situated along fault line on which archaic literary form confronts modern dictatorships, potentially democratic art tied to abuse of power by state, and Europe's most constantly idealized and de-historicized literary art form confronted with Europe's legacy of violence. Implicit in this broad but succinct description whole host of compelling formal, aesthetic, historical, and theoretical questions, among them: What form, or forms, political or otherwise, can tragic agon assume? Who might tragic hero be? In what does tragic destiny consist? What historical events can be adequately and appropriately represented in tragedy? Can power of tragic be restored? Can traditional definitions or models of tragedy, from Aristotle to Hegel to A. …