The descriptive mode : Flaubert, Verga, Huysmans, D'Annunzio
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Looking at novels by Flaubert, Verga, Huysmans, and D'Annunzio, this project charts the increasing role of subjectivity in novelistic descriptions from mid- to late- nineteenth century France and Italy. This extended analysis of literary techniques that express subjectivity reveals that description was increasingly seen as a field of experimentation in which the parameters of an individual's access to the observable world could be adjusted to the concerns of a particular novel. Earlier approaches to description in the nineteenth century had used the proliferation of individual details as a way of ensuring fidelity to the observable world. An unobtrusive describing voice was considered a mark of the objectivity of a description. Adaptations of this concept to new types of projects -- projects in which the distinctive perspective of figures within the world of the novel are key to the novel's plot -- produced different results, however, in the second half of the century: the issue became not only whether or not one could describe sufficiently and in as objective a way as possible, but how a description could adapt to accommodate observational subjectivity while maintaining the referential basis of the descriptive mode. In some cases the use of techniques that imply the presence of a filtering subjectivity leads to what seems like a greater impersonality, as the observing descriptor is redistributed and reabsorbed into the reality of the novel's characters. In contrast, in others the overabundance of subjectivity techniques and the influence they have on sentence and paragraph structure overwhelms the composition and the novel moves into relativism and even idiolect. This dissertation traces a progression from the former tendency to the latter over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century in France and Italy, thus showing a continuity between 'realist' tropes of observation integrated in description and the 'decadent' style that appropriated those tropes in the interest of individual expression.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Copyright date | 2011 |
| Publication date | 2010, c2011; 2010 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Elghoroury, Amy Lilah |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of French & Italian |
| Primary advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Primary advisor | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Moretti, Franco, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Wittman, Laura |
| Advisor | Wittman, Laura |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Amy Lilah Elghoroury. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of French and Italian. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2011. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Amy Lilah Elghoroury
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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