La Comedie Humaine Research Articles

Poétiques à l'épreuve. Balzac, Nerval, Hugo

Through the disruption of the relationship to self-image as well as to the image of the world, the writer-creator's confrontation with photography may affect his creative stance and processes - his poetics. Because the daguerreotype seemed to him to fix the invisible spectre of reality, Balzac saw in that invention the demonstration of his metaphysics and its double mechanism : in 1842, at the time of the birth of La Comedie humaine, he went in front of the Bisson brothers ' lens in order to embody his philosophy of creation. And Nerval, in his own portrait, etched from a daguerreotype, discovered a new mythological avatar, that of Prometheus in the Underworld, which he set out in Pandora and Aurelia and immortalized in Nadar's chair. Lastly, in the case of Hugo, it was a negative taken by his son which revealed to him his identity as an apocalyptic poet.

Pariah and Parasite: La Claque and Historicity in Balzac's La Comedie humaine.

Pariah and Parasite: La Claque and Historicity in Balzac's La Comedie humaine.

The secrecy of Vautrin (the ‘criminal and the enemy’) and his society of ten thousand in Balzac's La Comedie Humaine

(1994). The secrecy of Vautrin (the ‘criminal and the enemy’) and his society of ten thousand in Balzac's La Comedie Humaine. History of European Ideas: Vol. 19, No. 1-3, pp. 87-92.

Balzacian Montage: Configuring 'La Comedie humaine'

Balzac's monumental work, La Comedie humaine, consists of a wide range of novels, stories, and other writings which, he maintained, were to be read and understood as a whole. In this illuminating study Allen H. Pasco explores the work's unifying elements which lend weight to Balzac's claim. Pasco articulates the principles against which he measures the unity of La Comedie humaine: the relation of narrative to description; the relation of description to images and concept; how images are linked to each other and to the whole; the esthetic vision and unchronological arrangement of the work; the relationship between implicit frame and explicit context, and college vs montage. Pasco offers insightful readers of one or more novels as he considers each principle. He concludes that Balzac is the master not of collage - the construction of a whole from isolated pieces - but of montage: he regularly constructs wholes from other wholes.

Balzac and the Drama of Perspective: The Narrator in Selected Works of 'La Comedie humaine'

Balzac and the Drama of Perspective: The Narrator in Selected Works of 'La Comedie humaine'

Interior/Exterior Movement in La Comédie Humaine

INTERIOR/EXTERIOR MOVEMENT JO ELLA IN LA COMEDIE HUMAINE MANALAN Critical studies of Balzac often concentrate on his portrayal of character through detailed physiological description. Henri Gauthier notes that L'homme 'exterieur' est un tableau de It signes de I'homme far 'interieur' selon sa double acception. ^ a has not been sufficiently is appreciated, however, that this exterior representation static, from in the since Balzac's world is dynamic one with movement exterior, physical world, as well as in the interior, psychological or spiritual world. La Comedie Humaine. Actual physical displacement is linked to psychological movement. Charac- ters rarely remain in their rooms to undergo great emotional up- heaval and development. Such interior development occurs as a result of action. The characters move through the world, choosing among the varied paths stretching in front of them. Insight depends Movement in itself is significant in as much upon experience as it does on reflection. As Georges Poulet of restoring I points out, the following Balzacian sentence could begin almost any novel: 'Then one day when I had need my brain injured by too great a wastage of thoughts, went out After the authorial introduction setting the scene, the novels begin in motion, because the characters commence their psychological development by physically making contact with the outside world. Peter Lock categorizes Balzac's characters as either purposeful (possessing momentum and direction) or inert. ^ Charles Affron

William Faulkner and Rabelais: The Dog Story

William Faulkner's epic depiction of the folkways of Yoknapatawpha County is a work which seems to have grown out of the land itself, the author speaking not of and for himself, but in the name and with the voices of all the generations of the deep South. If we judge these novels, as we must, to be works of myth, fable, and legend, if we think of them as evocations of spirit and tradition, then it is indisputable that they are-as Balzac so witlessly called Meyerbeer's operas-as true as history itself. For not facts, but truth, as Faulkner himself has reminded us, is the only province of the novelist's concern, and even if the Yoknapatawpha cycle could be demonstrated to be implausible or impossible in all its historically oriented particulars, it would still stand, like La Comedie humaine, as a series of frescoes more true to the realities of Southern life in their verisimilitude than most of the

Doctors in The Human Comedy

It was in 1833 that Honore de Balzac first had the idea of a great series of novels which would present a complete picture of the human scene, depicting the character of man and society in all its aspects and in every situation. But this grandiose plan was not meant to be merely descriptive, for it was inspired throughout by a unifying philosophy which claimed to show why man is as he is and why the social structure takes the form it does. He had already worked out the number of volumes—48— needed to present this panoramic view of mankind, but it was six years later that he first invited comparison, or contrast, with Dante's great epic by giving the series the title La Comedie Humaine . Balzac was living and writing in Paris, the city which is still for all Frenchmen le monde , as it certainly was in 1833. If

Hoarders and Spendthrifts in "La Comedie Humaine"

Hoarders and Spendthrifts in "La Comedie Humaine"

Italy and La Comedie Humaine

Italy and La Comedie Humaine