BiblioVault - Books about French and English

Architexts of Memory

Literature, Science, and Autobiography

Evelyne Ender

University of Michigan Press, 2005

In this impressively interdisciplinary study, Evelyne Ender revisits master literary works to suggest that literature can serve as an experimental laboratory for the study of human remembrance. She shows how memory not only has a factual basis but is inseparable from fictional and aesthetic elements. Beautifully written in accessible prose, and impressive in its scope, the book takes up works by Proust, Woolf, George Eliot, Nerval, Lou Andreas-Salome, and Sigmund Freud, getting to the heart of essential questions about mental images, empirical knowledge, and the devastations of memory loss in ways that are suggestive and profound. Architexts of Memory joins a growing body of work in the lively field of memory studies, drawing from clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology as well as literary studies.

"An important, cogently argued, subtle and rich study of a topic of great interest."
--Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam

"A work of literary studies positioned at the intersection of tradition and innovation. Evelyne Ender's book brings fashionable cultural concerns to bear on traditional literary texts-her superb pedagogical skills lure and guide the reader through the most difficult psychoanalytical concepts."
--Nelly Furman, Cornell University

Evelyne Ender is Professor of French Studies, University of Washington. She is the author of Sexing the Mind: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Hysteria.

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English Romanticism and the French Tradition

Margery Sabin

Harvard University Press, 1976

There are separate languages to be understood in the writings of French and English Romantics, Margery Sabin tells us. Instead of minimizing the importance of national characteristics, as comparatistes frequently do, she demonstrates that national traditions of thought and language have a determining influence throughout the Romantic period. In tracking the differing courses pursued by the best French and English writers of the period, she shows that the idea of the transcendental imagination never took hold among the French-Romantics; that Wordsworth's ideal of the marriage between mind and nature did not inform the vision of the French, who were preoccupied with the isolated human spirit thrown back on its own resources of conscience or faith.

A detailed and far-ranging comparison of Rousseau's Confessions and Wordsworth's Prelude establishes her provocative argument. The idea gains force from the wealth of examples that follow. Sabin examines Wordsworth, Coleridge, and George Eliot as representative of varieties of English Romanticism in the genres of lyric poetry, critical theory, and the novel. Contrasts between these writers and Hugo, Baudelaire, and Flaubert offer new and more precise ways of understanding both Romanticism and later departures from it. Her sensitive readings of Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and others yield further evidence. This fresh critical perspective will generate further thought about major writers and about national differences in literature.

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INTERSECTING REALITIES FICTIONS WOOLF

& COLETTE

HELEN SOUTHWORTH

The Ohio State University Press, 2004

Politicizing Gender

Narrative Strategies in the Aftermath of the French Revolution

Kadish, Doris Y

Rutgers University Press, 1991

It is Doris Kadish's contention in this book that gender and politics went hand-in-hand in the nineteenth century; that nineteenth-century works can often be read as retellings of the French Revolution; and that the political meanings of these works can be gleaned through the study of narrative strategies that she chooses to call "semiotic readings." Building on the work of Marina Warner, Lynn Hunt, Joan Landes, Nancy Armstrong, Foucault and others, she shows how the strategy of politicizing gender during and after the revolution served many functions--among them to articulate representations of revolution, to form the nineteenth-century public sphere, to constitute bourgeois ideology, to distance the unruly masses, and ultimately, perhaps, to express a deep seated fear of women as a threat to the status quo. Looking at the French and English novel, and even selected relevant paintings in this way, she is able to read much-read texts in new and refreshing ways. She shows us how a collective story or master narrative of the revolution was retold and refashioned throughout the century, even where we might least expect to find it. She looks first at small details in order to see the larger patterns, and is among the first to show us how semiotics may make a contribution to gender studies.

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The Surprising Effects of Sympathy

Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley

David Marshall

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Through readings of works by Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley, David Marshall provides a new interpretation of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with theatricality and sympathy. Sympathy is seen not as an instance of sensibility or natural benevolence but rather as an aesthetic and epistemological problem that must be understood in relation to the problem of theatricality.

Placing novels in the context of eighteenth-century writing about theater, fiction, and painting, Marshall argues that an unusual variety of authors and texts were concerned with the possibility of entering into someone else's thoughts and feelings. He shows how key eighteenth-century works reflect on the problem of how to move, touch, and secure the sympathy of readers and beholders in the realm of both "art" and "life." Marshall discusses the demands placed upon novels to achieve certain effects, the ambivalence of writers and readers about those effects, and the ways in which these texts can be read as philosophical meditations on the differences and analogies between the experiences of reading a novel, watching a play, beholding a painting, and witnessing the spectacle of someone suffering. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy traces the interaction of sympathy and theater and the artistic and philosophical problems that these terms represent in dialogues about aesthetics, moral philosophy, epistemology, psychology, autobiography, the novel, and society.

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