Figures of alterity : French realism and its others / Lawrence R. Schehr.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schehr, Lawrence R.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

French fiction.

French fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Realism in literature.

Outsiders in literature.

Identity (Psychology) in literature.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xii, 251 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2003.

Summary:

This book focuses on the extension of realist writing toward alterity, toward otherness, in its ongoing efforts to enable individuals to speak and be heard correctly. Through a series of close readings of six authors from Balzac to Proust, the author shows the ways realist narrative engages the problem of bringing the other into the realm of the discursively representable. The acts of representation involved in that development were not necessarily coterminous with either the representation of the exotic and its attendant stereotypes or with the representation of individuals themselves. The representation of the other was the extension of discourse to what was previously unrepresentable. The author argues that the unrepresentable is often perceived as oppositional because of the structuring of discourse by hierarchies and metaphysics, whereby any bivalent pair is made into an oppositional pair.

Contents:

Introduction: The Place of the Other 1

Just Balzac 34

Flaubert's Figures 96

Naturalist Ultraviolence 144

Proust and Gide 178.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [239]-247) and index.

Local Notes:

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy has dustjacket retained.

Gotham Book Mart Collection copy is "original printing 2003."

ISBN:

0804743339

OCLC:

50155667