Unwrapping Balzac : A Reading of La Peau de Chagrin / Samuel Weber.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weber, Samuel, author.

Series:

University of Toronto romance series ; 39.

Heritage

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850. Peau de chagrin.

Balzac, Honoré de.

Peau de chagrin (Balzac, Honoré de).

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (184 pages).

Place of Publication:

Toronto : University of Toronto Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This radically new reading of La peau de charin presents a case for Balzac as a modern rather than a traditional, realist writer. Using the principles and languages of Marx, Derrida, Freud, Barthea, and others who have contributed to a redefinition of modern criticism, Samuel Weber presents a detailed and intricate explication of the text that challenges all standard interpretations of the novel. Traditional readings of La peau de chagrin, and of Balzac in general, have pursued a message in the novel, a reality beneath the allegory. Weber demonstrates that Balzac's text can be grasped both as a mise en scène and as a play of representations that reflects no original truth, reality, or meaning beneath the text to which the representation can be referred and by which they can be authenticated. To unwrap Balzac in this manner is to discover that there is no thing inside, that there is only the 'wrapping.' Weber's conclusions are not only startingly original, but they also solve problems which have puzzled traditional readers of the novel since the earliest commentators of 1831. Unwrapping Balzac is a brilliant tour de force that will create controversy among Balzac scholars for years to come.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

1. Introduction

2. 'La tres spirituelle epigraphe du livre... '

3. Work and Play

4. The Entry

5. Postponement

6. The Store

7. The Truce of a Text

8. The Canard

9. A Burst of Laughter

10. Patrimony

11. The Broken Net

12. The Matrix

13. 'Ces riens qui ont tant de prix ... '

14. Speculation

15. Going (for) Broke

16. The 'Dissipational System'

17. The Signature and the Voice

18. Antiphrasis

19. A Remark on Reading

20. Origen, or the Automat

21. Revue 1: The Perils of Pauline Raphael's

22. Revue 2: Diagnosis

23. Homecoming

24. Finale: Projection

25. Epilogue

Postface: Et que devint S/Z?

Notes

Index of Proper Names

Notes:

"Reprinted in 2018"--Title page verso.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 25. Sep 2019)

ISBN:

1-4875-8480-6

OCLC:

1121053751