Reading Realism in Stendhal

This book poses the question: what happens when reading enters the realist process?

Ann Jefferson (Author)

9780521066969, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 June 2008

284 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.6 cm, 0.36 kg

This book poses the question: what happens when reading enters the realist process? and answers it by way of a critical study of Stendhal's writing. Ann Jefferson argues that a recognition of the role of reading in representation is particularly crucial to an understanding of Stendhal's realism, and her account includes substantial discussions of De l'Amour, Le Rouge et le Noir, the Vie de Henry Brulard and La Chartreuse de Parme. Her study also draws a number of illuminating parallels between Stendhal and aspects of modern critical theory, and uses them in order to reveal the high degree of sophistication and self-consciousness in Stendhal's writing, qualities which are attributed here to the intensity of his preoccupation with his readers. By focusing on the issue of reading in Stendhal this book not only proposes a reassessment of Stendhal's own work, but also opens up lines of enquiry on the critical problem that is realism.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Mimesis and the reader: some historical considerations
2. Part II. De l'amour: 2. Love and the wayward text
Part III. Le Rouge et le Noir: 3. Unexpressing the expressible
4. The speaking of the quoted word: authors, ironies and epigraphs
5. The uses of reading
Part IV. Vie de Henry Brulard
6. The reader and the life
Part V. La Chartruese de Parme: 7. The representation of politics and the politics of representation
8. A hero without qualities
9. Forgery, plagerism and the operatic text
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]