The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel
09 Feb 2009-
About: The article was published on 2009-02-09. It has received 315 citations till now.
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01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: The secret societies depicted in Balzac's The Human Comedy as mentioned in this paper have been studied extensively in the last few decades, with a focus on the development of secret societies in the early 20th century.
Abstract: SECRET SOCIETIES IN BALZAC’S NOVELS by Maria Jose Moore Balzac employs a kaleidoscopic form of novel writing by introducing his characters in a mosaic fashion, allowing the reader to come to know them as in real life through various encounters. This provides numerous glimpses into the development of secret societies, an important theme in Romanticism. This thesis showed that the novel as a genre is itself a secret society, in which Balzac uses the secrets in the novel not only to drive the plot, but also to express himself in a veiled fashion to the reader who looks for a more intimate connection with the Balzacian text. This thesis first explored the metamorphosis of Balzac’s The Human Comedy. Then textual analysis showed that throughout the structure of Balzac’s literary edifice there is a deep consistency that also runs through his political life. In the third chapter, based on research of the Balzacian diegesis and later scholarly criticism, I looked past the veil created by Balzac to make several new discoveries about the secret societies depicted in The Human Comedy. Finally, since literature awakens in the reader a commitment to utopia, this thesis is ended by establishing a connection between the secret societies and the utopia that they represent.
10 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice Charlotte Lucas and Elizabeth Bennet exemplify competing claims about the development of personhood through conjugal intimacy.
Abstract: This essay argues that in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Charlotte Lucas and Elizabeth Bennet exemplify competing claims about the development of personhood through conjugal intimacy. Charlotte and Elizabeth’s contrasting views are often translated by critics into a narrative of cultural modernization that foregrounds the development of Elizabeth Bennet as an exemplary modern subject. I read the disagreement between the two friends as a highly conflicted moral drama about the relationship between marriage and individual fulfillment. This essay contends that Charlotte’s stance is important to consider two hundred years later as a reminder of the multiplicity of attitudes toward intimacy, conjugality, and self-fulfillment in Austen’s fiction. This multiplicity remains overlooked by a tradition of Austen criticism that is often bound, even in contemporary feminist forms, to the analytic and prescriptive parameters of liberal personhood as those are understood to have emerged at the end of the eighteenth century.
10 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show how the unexpected problem of "redundant women" reshaped the Victorian novel and argue that this peculiar hypothesis of female surplus population takes form in sensation narratives and permanently destabilizes domestic fiction.
Abstract: Reinterpreting the controversy surrounding such bestsellers as Lady Audley's Secret , this essay shows how the unexpected problem of "redundant women" reshaped the Victorian novel. It argues that this peculiar hypothesis of female surplus population takes form in sensation narratives and permanently destabilizes domestic fiction. By overpopulating households and eroding qualitative distinctions among characters, these narratives created a new paradigm. The redundancy paradigm infiltrates realist classics (notably, George Eliot's novels) against which Mary Braddon's notorious novels were regularly contrasted. It further transforms critical discourse, which echoes sensation plots in representing popular fiction itself as a surplus that literary culture cannot contain.
10 citations
TL;DR: For instance, this paper explored the ways readers enthusiastically commit to the minor characters of Williamson's novels and argued that plurality might better be located in the dynamism of the reading person.
Abstract: This essay approaches the cultures of reading anthropologically, drawing on my ethnographic research with the Henry Williamson Society to excavate the ways readers enthusiastically commit to the minor characters of Williamson's novels. It places Alex Woloch's literary analysis of minor characterization in dialogue with the anthropological theory of “distributed agency” developed by Alfred Gell in order to examine the idea of the reader as someone who “gives” and may in turn “receive” attention. The essay asks whether it might be more helpful to conceive of readers’ activities as a form of reading without “culture”—whether plurality, if it must be invoked, might better be located in the dynamism of the reading person.
10 citations
TL;DR: In a recent survey of the literature on genre in the novel, this article pointed out that the novel is not only a mixed genre but also a modernizing mixture of genres and world-views, subjecting other genres to itself, taking them in, examining them, relegating them to the status of the old and outworn or the partial and fragmentary.
Abstract: ach of the papers I selected reminds us that the matter of genre is never an issue of definition or taxonomy, but of dynamic formation. With the novel, this issue of formation, through gestures of inclusion and exclusion, is particularly acute. If the “law of genre” seems to insist that genres are not to be mixed, that law is clearly made to be broken. And the novel is not only a mixed genre but a modernizing mixture. Through inclusion, ironization, and sublation, the novel subjects other genres and world-views to itself, taking them in, examining them, relegating them to the status of the old and outworn or the partial and fragmentary, within its voracious, comprehensive new order. The novel—certainly by the Victorian period—is not so much a loose, baggy monster as a dialectical engine for making these distinctions. Analysis of generic formation always brings with it the ghost of an intentional effect, the suggestion of purposiveness that confirms our critical alertness to aesthetic form and to historical formation. In the papers I’ve selected, generic forces come together and pull apart, sometimes delicately, sometimes violently. Thus these papers help us to see questions of genre inflecting other matters. But they also help us to see some of the ways genre matters, especially to the novel. David Kurnick distinguishes between domesticity and theater to argue against the received historical narrative of the novel’s triumph and the theater’s defeat. Using Thackeray’s failed 1854 play, The Wolves and the Lamb, as his example, Kurnick proposes another model, of mutually internalized interrelation. Performed only once, at the “W. M. T. House Theatricals,” the play’s failure provides Kurnick with the “M. T. House” of his title. In what sense is the domestic interior “empty”? This is part of the conundrum that Kurnick poses. Providing a wonderful close reading of the stage set, with its “two drawing rooms opening into one another,” he discovers the visual representation of an excessive, redundant domesticity folding into itself (260). This setting becomes the brilliantly turned pretext for Kurnick’s parable of generic conversion. E
10 citations