The Dialogics of Satire: Foci and Faultlines in Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four This thesis uses Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, as well as postmodernism, to open up faultlines in satire, and to explore and challenge various perceptions and discourses surrounding and related to it. Both dialogism and postmodernism are used to suggest fresh approaches to satire, by repositioning it in relation to other discourses and reframing it as a complex dynamic, rather than a closed and inflexible system. Chapter 1 of the thesis opens with an historical survey of the beginnings and subsequent development of satire. It also contains a general discussion of the nature of satiric strategies and opens the door for the incorporation of postmodern perspectives into the argument. Chapter 2 contrasts the issues of morality and re-presentation in satire, arguing that satirists do not simply invite their audience to condemn, but offer them an opportunity to discover alternative worlds. The affinity between satire and postmodernism is emphasised by the postmodern predilection for modes highly favoured by satire: allegory, parody and fantasy. In Chapter 3 the issue of language and its referents is explored, starting with Saussure's theory of how the signifier and the signified function. It is argued that satire has never respected this fixed relationship, and that it is in this respect similar to deconstruction. The last part of the chapter is devoted to examining four key socio-political discourses psychoanalysis, ideology, propaganda and political myth in relation to satire. These four discourses are, like satire, intent on influencing the perceptions which people have of the world. The intention in juxtaposing these discourses is to create a dialogic process which will throw a fresh light on all of them, including satire itself. The four socio-political discourses named above play an important part in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and are relevant to the subsequent discussion of these novels. Chapter 4 consists of a detailed discussion of Animal Farm, in which the various layers comprising the work are examined. The satirical aspects of the novel are closely related to the fabular and fairy tale elements which are an important part of its constitution. These elements Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za

The dialogics of satire : foci and faultlines in George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four

iii The pre-revolutionary period in Europe is often called the age of enlightenment and experiment: an epoch marked by Bacon’s scientific experimentum, Locke and Hume’s experiential empiricism, and Diderot’s experimental fiction (to name but a few). But expérience, both “experiment” and “experience” in French, could refer to experimentations of all kinds, spanning from the scientific to the sexual, and thus raised serious concerns about what kinds of experiments ought to be undertaken and by whom. Which experiences are socially acceptable, and which are not? Who has the right to experiment/experience? When it comes to the education of “young women” in early modern France, it will not be experience but inexperience —a “lack of experience”— that becomes a regulatory ideal preconized in many old regime didactic treatises and educational tracts. In what ways is experience regulated by gender norms circumscribing who qualifies as a subject of experience, who can and cannot have experience, as well as what does and does not count as experience? How is experience distinguished from inexperience, and when do such distinctions founder? This philosophical inquiry follows the trope of “inexperience” from its appearance in select writings of early modern France to its contemporary legacies, exploring how discourses of experience/experiment will have always been inextricable from the question of gender norms. After touching upon theories of experience in the history of western philosophy (Chapter 1), this work then moves to certain early modern texts — by Crenne (Chapter 2), Du Plaisir (Chapter 3), Ducos (Chapter 4), and others— which theorize amorous experience in terms of its unlivedness and by the ways in which it cannot be experienced in presence or in person. Subverting the distinction between experience and its inexperience, these theories of unlived love suggest that experience, most especially amorous experience, is ultimately impossible to delimit and define. A closing coda, engaging with these early modern texts philosophically and reading them in terms of the history of philosophy, contends that these theories of unlived love prefigure the interrogation of self-present experience credited to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and others, by laying siege to the metaphysical presuppositions that have long structured conceits of “experience,” from the Cartesian cogito to Husserl’s transcendental Ego.

The Age of Inexperience: Theories of Unlived Love in Early Modern France

Writers have relentlessly acknowledged the influence of water on their poetic vision. The Romantic "malaise" found its solace in the proximity of a body of water. Offering the same ambiguity as the human character, the influence of the sea can be both beneficial and detrimental. My dissertation discusses the multivalence of a Romantic Sea in French, Italian and Spanish Literatures. Through a thematic as well as a comparative approach, I study numerous transnational examples revolving around the importance of the sea in the lives of a series of protagonists. The vicinity of the sea induces either an implicit or explicit dialogue between the character and the liquid element, triggering a deeper understanding of self, and providing an alleviation of the pressures burdening the psyche of the protagonist. Since the sea can represent death as well as salvation, the first chapter describes its ambiguity in the representations of a series of writings. Holding in its depths the power of Good and Evil, the sea can either save or threaten. The second chapter indicates how the unrestrained freedom of the waves could motivate the characters to liberate themselves from the burden of social constraints while recovering their own identity. The liquid element, assuming the role of a mentor, guides the character on the path of an emotional recovery. The third chapter focuses on the reflective properties of the water, which at times leads to a symbiosis, highlighting the communion between the character and the sea. The fourth chapter shows how the sea appeases the nostalgia of exile by filling the void left by the "destierro" from one's native land, thus bridging the gap of memory. The fifth and last chapter studies the sea as an agent of transcendence, going beyond the limitations of mortality, perception, as well as cognition. The human being and the Sea have a lot in common: depth, ambiguity, and ultimately, irrationality. Just like humans, the sea represents a mysterious realm, whose incommensurable depth triggers endless suppositions.

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The Echo of Solitude in the Romantic Representations of the Sea: Multivalence of a Motif in Romance Literatures

"Avec rage": Flaubert's Revenge "J'ai rempoigne la Bovary avec rage," Flaubert wrote to Louis Bouilhet two months after the end of his relationship with Louise Colet, the woman who had been lover, correspondent, and--perhaps most importantly--rival writer in Flaubert's eyes until the couple separated definitively in 1854. (1) The letters to Colet, written over nearly a decade, attune us to the height of Flaubert's artistic aspirations and the extent of his insecurities. They also reveal the degree to which questions of aesthetic power and artistic identity become embroiled in Flaubert's problematic construction of the feminine, a construction that culminates in his writing of Madame Bovary as a portrait of female artistic failure. Throughout the letters, Flaubert expresses his desire to remake Colet in his image. "Je ne veux de toi, comme femme, que la chair. Que tout le reste donc soit a moi, ou mieux, soit moi, de meme pate et la meme pate," he writes, adding some months later, "Oh si je pouvais faire de toi ce que j'en reve, quelle femme, quelle etre tu serais!" (2) Flaubert did not, however, get his wish. Although Colet's letters to Flaubert have been lost, the stylistic elements of her published works demonstrate her refusal to conform to the edicts and declarations he directed at her. (3) Principal among these pronouncements was Flaubert's railing against the excessive effusiveness and fluidity that he associated with her womanhood. "Tu t'abimes avec l'element femelle," he warns, and he counsels elsewhere, "tu arriveras a la plenitude de ton talent en depouillant ton sexe." (4) Even more scathingly, he criticizes what he saw as her stylistic faults by accusing her of excessive femininity: "Il ne faut pas, quand on est arrive a ton degre, que le linge sente le lait ... comprime les seins de ton coeur, qu'on y voie des muscles et non une glande." (5) Later, we will see how Flaubert's focus on excess in Colet's writing--and her linen--points to his anxiety that there might be a whiff of milk from his pages as well. For now, though, Flaubert's basic message is plain: if Colet was to be any kind of writer, she ought to write like a man, preferably like Flaubert himself. Yet Colet continued, vexingly, to be a writer and not to be Flaubert. Failing to rewrite Colet or shape her aesthetic convictions after his own, Flaubert wrote Emma Bovary with a vengeance. Indeed, Janet Beizer argues persuasively that Madame Bovary is Flaubert's "most bitter note of revenge" to Colet, "his longest letter in a correspondence already officially ended." (6) Written from the start as what Jacques Ranciere calls the "embodiment of the wrong way," Emma the failed writer functions as a critical element in Flaubert's elaborate attempts at self-definition against "feminine" writing. (7) If Flaubert permits a reading of Madame Bovary as "the portrait of an artist ... as a young woman," as Naomi Schor suggests, this is nevertheless a degraded portrait strategically conceived so that more credit and acclaim can accrue to the male author. (8) Put another way, Flaubert presents Emma as an incompetent writer so as to highlight the unique accomplishments of his narrative technique. Madame Bovary as a showpiece of originality, then, depends for its success on the denigration of a degraded representation of ecriture feminine as literary practice and performance. "Les oceans laiteux": Emma's Models The novel's thematic treatment of sentimental narratives--specifically as a force that destroys originality and artistic potential--is one of Flaubert's strategies for ridiculing the inferior literary company pursued by women, as exemplified by Emma. Flaubert first figures her bad taste and laughable fantasies in his depiction of her growing disillusionment with her marriage: "Emma cherchait a savoir ce que l'on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de felicite, de passion et d'ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres". …

Against Écriture Féminine: Flaubert's Narrative Aggression in Madame Bovary

introduction: contexts for identity In the twentieth century the term ‘identity’ has been heavily worked to denote linkage between culture and society. Although the word keeps losing its edge, new generations periodically resharpen it. The term is so loose that one can apply it to anything from mankind at large to a single person seeking self-knowledge via psychotherapy. Artists, poets, historians, anthropologists, philosophers and politicians entertain versions of identity even when not consciously in quest of it or not confident of the term’s utility. This chapter will consider identity primarily with reference to national societies, to aggregations of national societies (Latin America), and to sub-national societies or groups. Two distinctions are important. First, identity, which implies linkage to or manifestation of collective conscience, is not the same as ‘reality’, a word widely used in Latin America to mean historical, socio-geographic factors that might be recognized as creating a circumambient reality. Both terms fluctuate between a descriptive, empirical meaning and a prospective or promissory one. ‘Reality’ may signify what ‘really’ exists or else, in a quasi-Hegelian sense, a ‘higher’ reality to be ascertained as a sine qua non for pursuit of the historic vocation of a people or nation (e.g., essays of interpretation of the ‘Peruvian reality’). Identity is not ‘national character’ as diagnosed by detached socio-psychiatry but collective awareness of historic vocation. Reality starts with environment, identity with tacit self-recognition.

The multiverse of Latin American identity, c. 1920– c . 1970

Victor Hugo and the visionary novel

Novels of Flaubert: A Study of Themes and Techniques

Flaubert: The Making of the Master@@@The Novels of Flaubert: A Study of Themes and Techniques

Through critical readings of key works of modern European literature, Victor Brombert shows how a new kind of hero - the antihero - has arisen to replace the toppled heroic model. Though they fail, by design, to live up to conventional expectations of mythic heroes, antiheroes are not necessarily "failures." They display different kinds of courage more in tune with our time and our needs: deficiency translated into strength, failure experienced as honesty, dignity achieved through humiliation. Brombert explores these paradoxes in the works of Buchner, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Svevo, Hasek, Frisch, Camus, and Levi. Coming from diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, these writers all use the figure of the antihero to question handed-down assumptions, to re-examine moral categories, and to raise issues of survival and renewal embodying the spirit of an uneasy age.

In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830-1980

Approaches Opening Signals in Narrative Natalie, or Balzac's Hidden Reader La Peau de chagrin: The Novel as Threshold Hugo's William Shakespeare: The Promontory and the Infinite The Edifice of the Book V.H.: The Effaced Author or the "I" of Infinity Sartre, Hugo, a Grandfather The Will to Ecstasy: Baudelaire's "La Chevelure" "Le Cygne": The Artifact of Memory Lyricism and Impersonality: The Example of Baudelaire Erosion and Discontinuity in Flaubert's Novembre From Novembre to L'Education sentimentale: Communication and the Commonplace Idyll and Upheaval in L'Education sentimentale Flaubcrt and the Articulations of Polyvalence The Temptation of the Subject Stendhal, Reader of Rousseau Vie de Henry Brulard: Irony and Continuity T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Heresy Notes Credits Index

Victor H. Brombert

Papers

Victor Hugo and the visionary novel

Novels of Flaubert: A Study of Themes and Techniques

Flaubert: The Making of the Master@@@The Novels of Flaubert: A Study of Themes and Techniques

In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830-1980

The Hidden Reader: Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert