Guy De Maupassant Research Articles

An Anthology of interracial literature: black-white contacts in the Old World and the New

A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature. This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross-or are crossed by-what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus' ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume. An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespread the ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning. Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O'Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

A Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France

Representations of Mediterranean and Latin culture as linked to traditions of freedom and harmony in the writings of Élisée Reclus, Pierre Kropotkin, Guy de Maupassant, and Stendhal suggest an alternative to the usual association between the political right and the Latin ideal. I argue that this cultural geography informed Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac's vision of an anarchist future to be situated on France's Mediterranean shore. With such an alternative cultural construct, Signac reconfigured the classical pastoral, using its inherent capacity for juxtaposition to claim the Mediterranean coast as a site for politically critical avant-garde art.

The African Writers Series--Celebrating Forty Years of Publishing Distinction

First, let me put my presentation 1 within the larger context of Heinemann's publishing history. Heinemann has had a long history, one that goes back to 1890, of giving world writers a voice. Besides publishing periodicals and journals, Heinemann also published British authors such as John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, and John Masefield in addition to publishing non-English European literature in translation. Bjornson and Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, George Brandes, Guy de Maupassant, and Gabriele d'Annunzio were all given voice in places other than their home countries and linguistic regions by the imprint.

Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857-1894

From the crude battlefield surgery of Revolutionary times to the birth of modern clinical medicine, the nineteenth century witnessed impressive developments in the medical sciences and a concomitant growth in the prestige of the medical practitioner. In France this phenomenon had important implications for literature as writers scrambled to give legitimacy to their enterprise by allying themselves with science. Overflowing its traditional banks, medical discourse inundated the field of French literature, particularly in the realist and naturalist movements. The literati's enthralment with medicine and their subservient adoption of a medical model in the creation of their plots and characters have not previously been seriously questioned. In Medical Examinations, Mary Donaldson-Evans corrects this oversight. Exploring six novels and two short stories published during the Second Empire and the early Third Republic, she argues that there was a growing resistance to medicine's linguistic and professional hegemony, a resistance fraught with ideological implications. Tainted by a subtle - and sometimes not so subtle - anti-Semitism, some of the fiction of this period adopts counter-discursive strategies to tar the physician with his own brush. Featured authors include Gustave Flaubert, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Emile Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Guy de Maupassant, and Alphonse and Leon Daudet. Mary Donaldson-Evans is a professor of French at the University of Delaware. Her works include Modernity and Revolution in Late-Nineteenth-Century France.

Writing the Train: Imperial Visions, Masculinity and Nationalism in the Work of French writers in the Last Third of the Nineteenth Century

This article examines the responses of the Medan group of French writers – adherents to the aesthetics of the naturalist novel centered around Gustave Flaubert, Edmond Goncourt, Guyde Maupassant, and Emile Zola – to railway construction as a component of the project of nationalism. Existing scholarship, and Eugen Weber in particular, have emphasized how the French educated elite welcomed the creation of a united railway network, considering it essential for the spread of Republican and modern values. However, in defining railway construction as a Republican project, the intellectuals had to compete with the legacy of the Second Empire, which itself had sought to turn the modernization of transport into a sacred symbol of its civilizing mission. Because of the attachment of imperial symbolism to the railway, Flaubert, Goncourt, Maupassant and Zola doubted the benefits of railroads as the agent of civilizing mission. In his Labete humaine (1890), which portrays the life of railway station employees in Le Havre during the late 1860s, Zola underlined that economic modernization and fast transportation did not succeed in disseminating refined culture and civility among the French. The positive aspects of modern technology had failed to compete with the corruption of morality provoked by the politicians of the Second Empire. These same authors, however, recognized that detailed knowledge of modern technological phenomena would become the essence of a modern masculinity, and redefined an emotional attachment to the symbols of this technology (including the railway) as a part of the subjectivities of the modern Frenchman.

Le fantastique clinique dans les récits de l’étrangeté psychique de Guy de Maupassant

The present work is a study of the clinic fantastic literature in the short stories by one of the most famous 19th century authors Guy de Maupassant. In 19th century the tendency to reject the traditional fantastic literature consisting in unexpected and sudden interference of the supernatural powers into the real world.

About Medicine and the Arts Charcot and French Literature at the fin-de-siècle

The relationship between medicine and the arts, literature in particular, has many aspects. One of the most obvious relations is the use of literature as a source for historical studies. Jean-Martin Charcot and his school often appear in French literature at the end of the 19th century. Several aspects will be highlighted in this study, including (1) the ideas about degenerative diseases in the work of Emile Zola, the main author of the naturalistic movement; (2) decadence and spiritism in two transitional novels by Joris Karl Huysmans, who, once supporter of the naturalistic movement, changed his ideas following observations of disease and cure that could not be explained in a scientific way. Charcots work on hysteria and hypnosis, as well as Brown-Séquards rejuvenation experiments with testicular extracts played an important role with this respect; (3) Charcots relationship with the Daudets, in particular his treatment of Alphonses tabes dorsalis and the ambivalent attitude of his son Léon Daudet towards Charcot; (4) the influence of the lectures at the Salptrire on the work of Guy de Maupassant, who attended the lessons in the mid-1880s. The reading of novels and biographies of these authors provides a part of the social context and the cultural atmosphere in Paris at the “fin-de-siècle” when Charcot and his school played an important role in medicine. Moreover, it shows the influence of medicine and science on society as recorded by writers.

The Table

The Table Alyce Miller My mother owns a smaU end table that's never officiaUy been used. It was crafted by a furniture-maker friend ofher father's and presented to her on the day of her wedding in Washington, D.C, exactly fifty years ago. It's a lightweight plain table, without adornment, made of ordinary hardwood, and stained reddish to resemble mahogany. As a kid, I would lie underneath it for long stretches of time, staring up at the smaU white envelope taped to its underside. The envelope had been placed there by the table maker with instructions that it not be opened for one hundred years, the length oftime Sleeping Beauty slumbered as ifdead. A troubling oxymoron, a gift that could not be enjoyed in my mother's lifetime. Lying there, staring up, I was made crazy by the possibflities. I did my very best to penetrate the contents ofthe envelope with focused concentration. The table maker's instructions rang in my head Uke the interdiction from a fairy tale. Don't go into the woods. Please, please, I used to beg in my frenzy ofinsatiable curiosity. Aren't you dying to know what's in there? I imagined the two ofus, conspirators, sneaking into the room where the table sat, and together peeling the envelope away and discovering the secret inside. It was something we would share, something that would bind us together. Curiosity killed the cat. My mother shook her head and bUthely said she "wasn't, and I knew better than to press. We were opposites—she the stoic, who found my obsession self-indulgent; I who so couldn't bear anything hidden that I spent half my chüdhood eavesdropping at partiaUy cracked doors, and spying, shaking, and feeUng packages at hoUdays, rifling cupboards and dresser drawers, my own youthful, unarticulated version of the existential journey in fuU swing. What if the envelopejust accidentallyfell off? What ifwejust steamed it openfor a second and put it back? 187 188Fourth Genre Sometimes when I was alone in the house I would go into the room and stare at the table. If I looked long enough, the secret would be revealed without my having to violate the table maker's charge. Driven to a frenzy ofimagination, I considered this possibility: ifI opened the envelope, which might contain riches, they would paradoxically vanish as my punishment. So that my knowledge would be a burden of regret. We had very Utde money when I was growing up, and I was convinced for some time that the solution to financial happiness lay in that envelope. How ironic, like something out of one of those excruciating tales by Guy de Maupassant or O. Henry if years later, when it was too late, it was discovered that the envelope contained a surprise inheritance from a rich relation , with college tuition for aU five ofus! Wouldn't I be doing the famüy a favor to open the envelope now? IfI were caught. ... I ran my fingers over the edges of the envelope, testing the tape in hopes that it had cracked and would now flake off easily in brittle pieces, releasing the envelope. I could accept this as a form ofpermission to at least glance, nothing lingering, just a quick and ferret-like look—certainly the table maker couldn't object to an innocent peek! Then anger would set in. Why honor the wishes of a man my mother claimed to have barely known? Why wouldn't he have wanted her to know what he'd placed inside? How could he have borne his own secret? Over the years the securely attached envelope remained just that— attached—its only metamorphosis was that it grew faintly discolored, from bright white to faded white, tinged light gray-yeUow, aging gracefiflly Speculation at age five: the envelope contained exactly five hundred dollars , an enormous sum of money in my child's imagination and certainly a fortune for the candy store. Five hundred doUars was as good as a mfllion. It was the largest amount my imagination could summon, my relationship to money having been shaped by hours at the Monopoly board with one of...

Narrating the Gender Riddle: The Case of Maupassant’s Yvette, “M. Jocaste,” and “L’Ermite”

Literary theory in general, and the various idioms of feminist theory in particular, have frequently portrayed the male relationship to discourse in powerful terms. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the majority of formulations on this topic have cast a rather unfavorable light on the dominant role that man has assumed in manipulating language and its signifying processes. Helene Cixous' landmark essay, Laugh of the Medusa, ranks at once among both the most well-known and the most virulent condemnations of the male's usurpation of semiotic primacy. Cixous contends that this situation has produced highly deleterious effects for women and their ability to write their own stories: Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs. They have made for women an antinarcicissism! A narcissism which loves only to be loved for what women haven't got! (878) Such messages are not limited to the essentialist feminist idiom Cixous espouses; they can be round in numerous readings and re-readings of patriarchal and/or phallocentric tendencies in male-authored texts. Shoshana Felman determines from her deconstructive reading of Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or that [m]an alone has [...] the privilege of proper meaning, of literal identity: femininity as signifier, cannot signify itself (25). And Domna C. Stanton articulates the sort of displacement of the female locus of signification that Felman describes as an integral component in the development of ideologies, especially apparent in the intimate relationship between man and nomenclature established in the Bible. Man's function in Judeo-Christian dogma as the namer of things prefigures his purportedly privileged role in producing language and controlling its interpretation: The myth of creation sets forth an etiology of naming which every culture has dramatized in praxis and upheld in ideology. By God-given right, man assigned words to things, defined their meanings, and thereby determined our reading, our interpretation of the real. (107) The typology of reading proposed in texts such as those from which the above excerpts are taken has become familiar to all literary scholars: the dominance of male-oriented textual transmission is predicated upon the male's appropriation and objectification of the female. In the following pages, I would like to examine these assertions and the contingencies of male narrative dominance in a selection of works by Guy de Maupassant. Maupassant seems to be an especially appropriate author for a study of this sort in that he has often been criticized for precisely the reasons that Cixous, Felman, and Stanton cite in their commentaries on the male's signifying authority. Mary Donaldson-Evans characterizes Maupassant's attitudes toward nineteenth-century feminist activities as typical of realite d'une epoque misogyne (64). Donaldson-Evans opines that the woman remains jusqu'a la fin du siecle emprisonnee dans un discours paternaliste (64) which Maupassant replicates, if not endorses. Moreover, Maupassant's own remarks seem to confirm and legitimate Donaldson-Evans' observations; indeed, Maupassant's terms are, on many occasions, glaringly incendiary. In his Chroniques, Maupassant portrays women as generally lacking in the capacities required to produce a great artwork: Les femmes, par millions, etudient la musique et la peinture, sans avoir jamais pu produire une oeuvre complete et originale, parce qu'il leur manque justement cette objectivite de l'esprit, qui est indispensable dans tous les travaux intellectuels. Tout cela me semble irrefutable. On pourrait amasser, dans ce sens, des montagnes d'arguments, aussi inutiles, puisqu'on ne fait que deplacer la question, et par consequent, raisonner dans le faux, a mon avis du moins. …

Memoirs of a MS-Muntiny Man

MemoryPiece: Memoirs ofa MS-Muntiny Man DOUGLAS WURTELE Carleton University It was Somerset Maugham, I think, who said it, and he— if it was Willie, or was it Oscar Wilde? — said it in, I think, The Razor’s Edge, or was it The Summing Up? You see how it is. Only a couple of years after leaving the editor’s chair, and one gets awfully imprecise (or should I say indeterminate?) So what was it he said? “Be careful what you pray for in your youth because in later life it may be granted.” As to the accuracy of authorship or title or wording, I have not the slightest intention of checking all this out, and if you know, please don’t bother informing me. It’s the sentiment that counts. Or the spirit. What was it I prayed for in my teens? To become an au­ thor like Guy de Maupassant or Somerset Maugham or, I blush to confess, John Galsworthy. Or if that was asking too much, to become an editor. Clearly, eons before making a career of teaching The Canterbury Tales, I knew about the value of sup­ plicatory alternatives. As I was later to tell the bemused stu­ dents, Chaucer makes the Knight make Palamon pray to be granted Emilye or, if he cannot have that, death; she prays to be left a virgin or, if she cannot have that, to be given to the man who loves her best; Arcite prays ony for victory. He gets it but with it, death; P and E get, respectively, first and sec­ ond choices. I have always been sure that Chaucer means us to regard the Knight as meaning all this seriously, but Chaucer himself? Irony, irony! What became of my choices? Chaucer would have liked this: I got both, but neither in the fashion I expected them. How I “wearied Heaven” (Poe, I think? “Pit and the Pendu­ lum” maybe?) with my pleas! Novels and short stories poured from my typewriter (manual, this being long before the advent ESC 26 (2000): 7-10 ESC 26, 2000 of word processors). And some of these, the very short ones, did get paid for. Then TV rose out of the swamp and the markets crashed. Next alternative: Editing! How I wearied, to no avail, the old Montreal Star and the Gazette for a job! Education was my lack, I realized. So back to the books for many, many years of part-time study, with finally a nice respectable honours de­ gree,— and then another alternative. Teaching! Which came to pass, thanks to Carleton’s Munro Beattie, one of the great early stalwarts of ACUTE (so the acronym then was). Then graduate school at McGill, where I learned much about writing and some­ thing about editing from that superb prose stylist Joyce Hemlow (“You’ve got a heavy Germanic style, Mr. Wurtele.” “What shall I do about it, Dr. Hemlow?” “Read the New Yorker.'”) who was then well embarked on the mammoth task of editing the Burney Papers. Not long after doctoral days came fulfillment of another supplication: authorship. Over the years lots of articles poured from my (now electric) typewriter (along with a still uncom­ pleted book), all getting accepted but none generating the big money I had once dreamt of. But now that didn’t matter, thanks to the sterling work of Carleton’s academic union. Then still one more alternative, the best one of all. The day I got the phone call from Tom Cleary appointing me editor of English Studies in Canada was the second happiest event of my life. (The first, of course, was my marriage at McGill to fellow grad­ uate student Anna — and a better student — and subsequently fellow teacher at Carleton— and a better teacher — today, alas, incapacitated.*) Now that the long yearned for period of editing is gone, let me call up some memories of it (or “Memoirs,” if you like: Sassoon, right? Right!). Scanning the eight years of volumes 16 to 23, 1990 to 1997, produced during my tenure, along with the first few issues of 1998, which reflect my legacy to Mary Jane Edwards, a scholar-editor whose immense achievements...

Modeling, Mothering, and the Postpartum Belly in Zola's L'Œuvre

OF THE TITLES THAT ZOLA IMAGINED for his novel of the artist's life, L'ÂŒuvre (1886), several recall the birthing process, including Faire un Enfant, ProcrA©er, Engrosser la Nature, Enfantement, Accouchement, Parturition, Conception, Enfanter and Les Couches saignantes (IV, 1338).2 Many readings of L'ÂŒuvre have focused on Claude Lantier's failed attempt at sustaining a new movement in art. Although some of these readings cite the painter's indictment of the model's body as a factor in this failure, my own reading positions that failure of the female body at center stage.31 will propose that L'ÂŒuvre inscribes the deformations of gestation onto the female belly and then presents the ventre, poses it, before the artist (and reader) as unrepresentable, even as the very sign of unrepresentability. Indeed, one way that Zola works through the problem of the nude is to ask the question Can the postpartum model pose?—this in a novel that repeatedly, even compulsively, stages the pre- and post-partum belly as problem for the artist and metaphor of artistic production. This essay reads naturalism's posers in terms of the relationship between modeling and motherhood and, to a lesser extent, modeling and aging, for both motherhood and aging mark the body of the model in such a way that her posing potential becomes questionable. After the model's youth in Balzac's Le Chef-d'Âœuvre inconnu (1832), she reaches motherhood and middle age in L'ÂŒuvre and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon (1867); her death is then staged in Guy de Maupassant's Fort comme la mort (1889). The evolution of realist literature in France follows this life span of the model (i.e., of her body) from youth to maternity, to decline and death.4 As the terms artist, woman, mother and model took on new meaning in the nineteenth century, the pregnant and postpartum model emerged as the worrisome site of conflicts posed by the intersection of the body, art and gender. It is useful, therefore, to first inquire of these terms. Then, after a brief reading of Octave Mirbeau's tale of the aged model, L'OctogA©naire, and references to Zola's Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon, the strategies centering on the postpartum belly in L'ÂŒuvre can be untangled. I will argue that in L'ÂŒuvre the female ventre inhibits the successful passage from the problem of the model (the real woman) to the problem of the nude

Something in the Water: Self as Other in Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla -- A Barthesian Reading.

Something in the Water: Self as Other in Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla -- A Barthesian Reading.

The Art of Rupture: Narrative Desire and Duplicity in the Tales of Guy de Maupassant

The Art of Rupture: Narrative Desire and Duplicity in the Tales of Guy de Maupassant

Voices of Authority: Criminal Obsession in Guy de Maupassant's Short Works

This book provides a comprehensive look at the obsessive theme of crime, which is most evident in the context of dysfunctional family relationships, in Guy de Maupassant's nearly 300 short works. A study of the narrative structures points to the presence of a jury-like atmosphere throughout, highlights an inherent thematic unity in a fragmentary genre, and details an artistics sophistication on the part of an author whose works have only recently begun to receive this type of critical re-examination in the scholarship of nineteenth-century French literature.

L'avenir de l'information économique

The high School of Colombes (France) - Lycee Guy de Maupassant - has organized a conference where some specialists were invited to debate about L'avenir de l'information economique. This paper reports the main ideas developed during the conference. R.Courbis (GAMA, University Paris 10), L.Fleury (DG Alcatel ex-P.D-G. of Agence France-Presse), M. Michelson (Reuters) and J.M.Vittori (Challenges) have provided a reflection about the role of the economic information in the economic activity according to a pratical and a theoretical point of view. How would it be supplied in the next ten or twenty years considering the technological change ?

Review. 'Mademoiselle Fifi' and Other Stories. Translated with an Introduction by David Coward. Maupassant, Guy de

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access GUY DE MAUPASSANT: ‘Mademoiselle Fifi’ and Other Stories. Translated with an Introduction by DAVID COWARD. (The World's Classics). Oxford-New york, Oxford University Press, 1993. xxv + 252 pp. Pb £4.99. COLIN BURNS COLIN BURNS SOUTHAMPTON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume L, Issue 3, July 1996, Pages 346–347, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/L.3.346 Published: 01 July 1996

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access GUY DE MAUPASSANT: ‘Mademoiselle Fifi’ and Other Stories. Translated with an Introduction by DAVID COWARD. (The World's Classics). Oxford-New york, Oxford University Press, 1993. xxv + 252 pp. Pb £4.99. COLIN BURNS COLIN BURNS SOUTHAMPTON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume L, Issue 3, July 1996, Pages 346–347, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/L.3.346 Published: 01 July 1996

Review. The Art of Rupture: Narrative Desire and Duplicity in the Tales of Guy de Maupassant. Stivale, Charles J.

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access EDGAR POE: Le Corbeau. Traduction de STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ. Illustré par ÉDOUARD MANET. Dossier réalisé par MICHAËL PAKENHAM. Paris, Séguier, 1994. (32) + 102 pp. Pb 180 F. BERTRAND MARCHAL BERTRAND MARCHAL UNIVERSITÉ DE REIMS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume L, Issue 2, April 1996, Pages 218-a–218, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/L.2.218-a Published: 01 April 1996

The Rhetoric of Pessimism and Strategies of Containment in the Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant

This study proposes an overall interpretation based on an analysis of three constants. First, Maupassant accepts that man lives in an objective, contingent world in which he has no purpose, and elevates the notion of chance into an explanation of the human condition. Secondly, this awareness explains the adoption of a view of the world as farce. Thirdly, in order to shape and mitigate the consequences of these positions, Maupassant elaborates a rhetoric of pessimism and strategies of containment. The book argues that this triple approach enables Maupassant to rise above the evidence of his experience and gives the reader access to a work that otherwise might appear inconsequential and disparate. Maupassant's three hundred and six short stories represent a unified series of variations on three constants and offer a coherent, structured response to a personal dilemma that nevertheless has wider application.

The Art of Rupture: Narrative Desire and Duplicity in the Tales of Guy de Maupassant

The Art of Rupture: Narrative Desire and Duplicity in the Tales of Guy de Maupassant