The nothing machine : the fiction of Octave Mirbeau / Robert Ziegler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ziegler, Robert.

Series:

Faux titre ; 298.

Faux titre ; 298

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French fiction.

Mirbeau, Octave, 1848-1917--Criticism and interpretation.

Mirbeau, Octave.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (251 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; New York : Rodopi, 2007.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In an era when reality was aestheticized as collectibles, Octave Mirbeau unleashed his fiction like a destructive machine, setting fire to stale material and discredited ideologies, burning them as fuel and expelling texts as clean emissions. In this first English-language overview of all the novels published under Mirbeau’s name, this study argues that Mirbeau is unique among his fin-de-siècle peers. Unlike the Decadents, whose art was a reliquary in which dead inspiration was preserved, Mirbeau disengaged himself from the corpses of past works. Abhorring tradition and complacency, Mirbeau elaborated a kinetics of fiction that made the novel into an agent of violent transformation. Contrasting the Decadents’ aesthetic of elegant morbidity with Mirbeau’s vitalistic view of fiction, this volume shows Mirbeau modeling himself on the figure of the torture artist, cutting up his finished works, building novels to disassemble them, fitting them together in revolutionary ways. Creativity for Mirbeau fertilizes un jardin des supplices , a cemetery smoldering with decomposing texts that are resolved into their constituent parts and then reemerge in different guises. In Mirbeau’s writing, lives and art works are only transient aggregates of material, and creativity is immortalized through the perishing of old forms.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Art as Repair: Le Calvaire

Iconoclasm: L’Abbé Jules

The Perfect Death: Sébastien Roch

Reaching Up: Dans le ciel

A Way Out: Un gentilhomme

The Undifferentiated Bed: Le Jardin des supplices

Fetish and Meaning: Le Journal d’une femme de chambre

From Matter to Motion: Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique

The Novel as Machine: La 628-E8

Non-human Narrative: Dingo

Conclusion

References

Index.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [243]-248) and index.

ISBN:

1-282-26542-3

9786612265426

94-012-0468-3

1-4356-1192-6

OCLC:

191955300

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789401204682 DOI