Henry Brulard Research Articles

The "I" as Autobiographical Eye: Reading Notes on a Few Pages of Stendhal's "Life of Henry Brulard"

This essay is the result of research I have pursued for some years on autobiography. In my undertaking, autobiographical texts such as Augustine's or Rousseau's Confessions, Descartes's Discours de la Methode, and Retz's Memoirs gave me the opportunity to approach, in various ways and at simultaneously theoretical and methodological levels, the problem of kenonciation that Emile Benveniste raised in contemporary semiotics and semantics. At the same time, it seemed to me more and more obvious that the very position of such a problem refers both implicitly and explicitly to some of the basic presuppositions concerning the syntheses of time and subject that were articulated in Western philosophy by Plato and Aristotle and taken up again in Descartes, Kant, and Husserl. However perennial such a problematic might seem, it appears that literary texts, in their utmost singularity, would exemplify the way in which an individual being, immersed in his own history, is concerned with the enigmas of his existence, birth, and death, and how he attempts through writing to shape, express, and transcend them in a work of art. Working in the past years on Stendhal and his endeavor to grasp and articulate those existential aporias that are, on another level, the same as the contradictions encountered by a theory of enunciation, I found a determinant role played in his Life of Henry Brulard' by other means of expression such as visual arts or music; paintings or arias cited as titles simultaneously interrupt the autobiographical narration and take it up again at some of its strategic turning points. In my attempt to understand the functions that paintings (and arias) fulfill in Stendhal's autobiographical writing as solutions to its basic aporias, I introduced the notion of syncopation or interruption-reprise whose definitions,

The Autobiographical Interruption: About Stendhal's Life of Henry Brulard

The Autobiographical Interruption: About Stendhal's Life of Henry Brulard

Fictions of Art and Life: Tristram Shandy and Henry Brulard

TRAM SHANDY AND HENRY BRULARD a DENNIS PORTER m To consider jointly Sterne's novel and Stendhal's autobiography is to bring together two apparently heterogeneous works written at a distance of roughly three quarters of a century by two authors who have deep roots in very different national cultural traditions. Yet it is immediately clear that both authors were also genuinely cosmopolitan men of letters with a comparable range of references in the European literary past, in general, and an intimate knowledge of the development of the novel, in particular. In fact, as far as prose fiction is concerned, they are both heirs to a tradition that extends back to sixteenthcentury Spain, and Stendhal was certainly familiar with the works of Sterne whose popularity on the Continent is a well documented fact of literary history. Consequently, a coupling of the names of Sterne and Stendhal turns out to be less an exercise in Shandean