Optiques : the science of the eye and the birth of modern French fiction / Andrea Goulet.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goulet, Andrea.

Series:

Critical authors & issues

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

French fiction.

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

Vision in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (281 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Andrea Goulet takes the study of the novel into the realm of the visual by situating it in the context of nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical discourse about the nature of sight. She argues that French realism, detective fiction, science fiction, and literature of the fantastic from 1830 to 1910 reflected competition between two modern visual modes: a not-yet-outdated idealism and an empiricism that located truth in the body. More specifically, the book argues that key narrative forms of the nineteenth century were shaped by a set of scientific debates: between idealism and materialism in Honoré Balzac's Comédie humaine, between deduction and induction in early French detective fiction, and between objective vision and subjective vision in the "optogram" fictions of Jules Verne and others. Goulet aims to revise critical views on the modern novel in a number of ways. For instance, although many literary studies focus on the impact of cinema, photography, and painting, Optiques asserts the materialist bases of realism by establishing a genealogy of popular fictional genres as fundamentally optical, that is, as articulated according to bodily notions of sight. With its chronological and interdisciplinary scope, Optiques stands to contribute an important chapter to the study of literary modernity in its scientific context.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction. The Epistemology of Optics: Seeing Subjects, Modern Minds

Part I. Realism and the Visionary Eye: Balzac's Optics of Narration

Chapter 1. Second Sight and the Authorial chambre noire: Les Chouans, Louis Lambert

Chapter 2. "Tom her dans le phenomene ": Mterimages in La Maison Nucingen and Le Bal de Sceaux

Chapter 3. Alternative Optics: Seraphita, La Recherche de l'absolu, and La Peau de chagrin

Chapter 4. "Effets de lumiere," or a "Second" Second Sight: La Fille aux yeux d'or

Part II. Tenebrous Mfairs: Romans policiers and the Detecting Eye

Chapter 5. Cuvier, Helmholtz, and the Visual Logics of Deduction: Poe, Doyle, Gaboriau

Chapter 6. Learning to See: Monsieur Lecoq and Empiricist Theories of Vision

Chapter 7. Sealed Chambers and Open Eyes: Leroux's Mystere de la chambre jaune

Part III. Villiers, Verne, and Claretie: Toward a Fin-de-Siecle "Optogrammatology"

Chapter 8. Death and the Retina: Claire Lenoir, L 'Accusateur, and Les Freres Kip

Chapter 9. Optogram Fiction: Communication, Doubt, and the Fantastic

Chapter 10. Tropical Piercings: Nationalism, Atavism, and the Eye of the Corpse

Chapter 11. The Fin-de-Siecle Logic of the Mterimage: Hysteria, Hallucination, and Villiers's L'Eve future

Epilogue. The Afterimage of Reference: Optics and the nouveau roman

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [227]-259) and index.

ISBN:

9780812202052

0812202058

OCLC:

859160850