Description
CAMBRIDGE Reading Realism in Stendhal 2009 Edition by Ann Jefferson
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. Table of contents :- 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.