Download or read book Octave Mirbeau s Fictions of the Transcendental written by Robert Ziegler and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political firebrand, tireless reformer, champion of the avant-garde, Octave Mirbeau embraced his role as disturber of the peace. Inspired by Kropotkin and Dostoyevsky, Mirbeau became the social conscience of the era, speaking in a clear voice to impugn capitalist ideology, to defend the cause of the worker, the child, the pauper, the prostitute, and the soldier sacrificed as cannon fodder. Mirbeau’s critiques of society seethe with indictments of indoctrinating agencies: the family, which stifled the child’s freedom and expressive creativity, the school, which besotted students with the aridity of its curriculum, the army, which privileged patriotism over the sanctity of life, the church, which sanctified suffering, perverted instinct, and alienated the faithful from nature. Yet Mirbeau shared the admiration of fin-de-siècle zealots for the pariahs, tramps, and beggars rehabilitated in the Scripture. The personal trials of the misbegotten became an insignia of election. Those marginalized by society experienced damnation here below yet had glimpses of the bliss they hoped might await them somewhere higher. Yet it was not just in the less fortunate that Mirbeau sought evidence of the supra-rational. Generally neglected by critics, Mirbeau’s interest in the unknown and the inexpressible informed virtually all of his writing and helped shape his views on artistic work and political struggle. For this reason, this study sets out to analyze the spiritual politics of the author. As Mirbeau was becoming involved in the escalating controversy over the Dreyfus case and cementing his alliance with prominent anarchists, he was also undergoing a uniquely personal spiritual evolution. This volume breaks new ground, exploring the author’s secular metaphysic, charting his investigation of the spiritually transfiguring experience that redeems man’s desolate existence. What begins as Mirbeau’s indictment of Catholicism’s death-glorifying ethos, his attempt to find refuge from life’s pain in the blessedness of Nirvana, becomes a pursuit of mystical diffusion into the community of others. Showing how Mirbeau controverts the existence of a Christian god, this study argues that Mirbeau never abandons his exploration of life’s mysteries, apprehensions of the infinite that come from a refinement of his art and an identification with his brothers.
Download or read book The Diary of a Chambermaid written by Octave Mirbeau and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2021-05-07 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel presents itself as the diary of Mademoiselle Célestine R., a chambermaid. Her first employer fetishizes her boots, and she later discovers the elderly man dead, with one of her boots stuffed into his mouth. Later on, Célestine becomes the maid of an upper class couple, Lanlaire, and is perfectly aware that she is entangled in the power struggles of their marriage. Célestine ends by becoming a café hostess, who mistreats her servants in turn! Excerpt: "To-day, September 14, at three o'clock in the afternoon, in mild, gray, and rainy weather, I have entered upon my new place. It is the twelfth in two years. Of course I say nothing of the places which I held in previous years. It would be impossible for me to count them. Ah! I can boast of having seen interiors and faces, and dirty souls. And the end is not yet. Judging from the really extraordinary and dizzy way in which I have rolled, here and there, successively, from houses to employment-bureaus, and from employment-bureaus to houses, from the Bois de Boulogne to the Bastille, from the Observatory to Montmartre, from the Ternes to the Gobelins, everywhere, without ever succeeding in establishing myself anywhere, the masters in these days must be hard to please. It is incredible..."
Download or read book The Ridpath Library of Universal Literature written by John Clark Ridpath and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Pariahs of Yesterday written by Leslie Page Moch and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-30 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work looks at the surge of Bretons who left their homes in Western France in the latter half of the 19th century to live and work in Paris. Portrayed as backward, ignorant peasants they found no welcome until after WWII. Moch positions her work within immigration theory, connecting migration studies to theories about state projects of assimilation and about cultures of inclusion and exclusion.
Download or read book The Nothing Machine written by Robert Ziegler and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era when reality was aestheticized as collectibles, Octave Mirbeau unleashed his fiction like a destructive machine, setting fire to stale material and discredited ideologies, burning them as fuel and expelling texts as clean emissions. In this first English-language overview of all the novels published under Mirbeau's name, this study argues that Mirbeau is unique among his fin-de-siècle peers. Unlike the Decadents, whose art was a reliquary in which dead inspiration was preserved, Mirbeau disengaged himself from the corpses of past works. Abhorring tradition and complacency, Mirbeau elaborated a kinetics of fiction that made the novel into an agent of violent transformation. Contrasting the Decadents' aesthetic of elegant morbidity with Mirbeau's vitalistic view of fiction, this volume shows Mirbeau modeling himself on the figure of the torture artist, cutting up his finished works, building novels to disassemble them, fitting them together in revolutionary ways. Creativity for Mirbeau fertilizes un jardin des supplices, a cemetery smoldering with decomposing texts that are resolved into their constituent parts and then reemerge in different guises. In Mirbeau's writing, lives and art works are only transient aggregates of material, and creativity is immortalized through the perishing of old forms.
Download or read book Name and Naming written by Oliviu Felecan and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Name and Naming: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives aims to analyse names and the act of naming from an intercultural perspective, both synchronically and diachronically. The volume is divided into four main parts (Theory of Names, Anthroponomastics, Toponomastics, Names in Society), which are, in turn, organised into thematic chapters and subchapters. The book sets to offer a bird’s-eye view of names and naming; this synthesis is made possible, on the one hand, by the blending of synchronic and diachronic viewpoints in the investigation of language facts and, on the other, by the fruitful conjunction of modern and classic theories. The originality and the novelty of the subject lies in the multi-disciplinary approach, in which the field of onomastics merges with that of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, pragmatics, history, literature, stylistics, religion, etc. The thematic diversity also derives from the meeting, within the pages of this book, of specialists (35 linguists and literati) from 11 countries on three continents.
Download or read book A Companion to Luis Bu uel written by Rob Stone and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 804 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Luis Buñuel presents a collection of critical readings by many of the foremost film scholars that examines and reassesses myriad facets of world-renowned filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s life, works, and cinematic themes. A collection of critical readings that examine and reassess the controversial filmmaker’s life, works, and cinematic themes Features readings from several of the most highly-regarded experts on the cinema of Buñuel Includes a multidisciplinary range of approaches from experts in film studies, Hispanic studies, Surrealism, and theoretical concepts such as those of Gilles Deleuze Presents a previously unpublished interview with Luis Buñuel’s son, Juan Luis Buñuel
Download or read book Asymptote written by Robert Ziegler and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asymptote: An Approach to Decadent Fiction offers a radically new approach to the psychology of Decadent creation. Rejecting traditional arguments that Decadence is a celebration of deviance and exhaustion, this study presents the fin-de-siecle novel as a transformative process, a quest for health. By allowing the writer to project into fiction unwanted traits and destructive tendencies - by permitting the playful invention of provisional identities -, Decadent creation itself becomes a dynamic act of creative regeneration. In describing the interrelationship of Decadent authors and their fictions, Asymptote uses the mathematical figure of the asymptote to show how they converge, then split apart, and grow distant. The author's approach to the facsimile selves he plays with and discards is the curve that never merges with his authorial identity. In successive chapters, this study describes the Decadents' experimentation with perversion (Huysmans's A rebours and Mendes's Zo'har), and their subsequent validation of social regulation and creative discipline. It examines magic and its appeal to fantasies of elitism and omnipotence (Péladan's Le Vice supreme and Villiers's Axël ), then shows authors embracing the values of community and service. It considers the Decadent text as a vehicle of change in which an artist ventilates fantasies of aggression and revenge (Mirbeau's Le Journal d'une femme de chamber and Rachilde's La Marquise de Sade) then employs writing as the means by which these feelings are discharged. It examines creation as a form of play, "une aliénation grâce à laquelle l'esprit se récupère sous la forme des autres" (Schwob's Vies imaginaries and Lorrain's Histoires de masques), yet notes the Decadents' decision to return to a single generative center. Finally, it examines creation as an expression of artistic transience and failure, yet shows the Decadents' success in commemorating the very forces of disintegration (Rodenbach's L'Art en exil). In considering the Decadents' insistence on subjectivism and aloneness, this study concludes (Gourmont's Sixtine) by showing their wish to escape the prison of identity and to redefine their art as cooperative creation.
Download or read book Opening Bazin written by Dudley Andrew and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the full range of his voluminous writings finally viewable, André Bazin seems more deserving than ever to be considered the most influential of all writers on film. His brief career, 1943-58, helped bring about the leap from classical cinema to the modern art of Renoir, Welles, and neorealism. Founder of Cahiers du Cinéma, he encouraged the future New Wave directors to confront his telltale question, What is Cinema? This collection considers another vital question, Who is Bazin? In it, thirty three renowned film scholars--including de Baecque, Elsaesser, Gunning, and MacCabe--tackle Bazin's meaning for the 2st century. They have found in his writings unmistakable traces of Flaubert, Bergson, Breton, and Benjamin and they have pursued this vein to the gold mine of Deleuze and Derrida. They have probed and assessed his ideas on film history, style, and technique, measuring him against today's media regime, while measuring that regime against him. They have located the precious ore of his thought couched within striations of French postwar politics and culture, and they have revealed the unexpected effects of that thought on filmmakers and film culture on four continents. Open Bazin; you will find a treasure.
Download or read book Glorious Perversity written by Brian M. Stableford and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the decadent literary movements in England and France, focusing upon such poets and authors as Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.
Download or read book Form and Function in the Diary Novel written by Trevor Field and published by Springer. This book was released on 1989-06-18 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of novels written in the form of diaries. Some 75 fictional diarists are followed, with examples ranging from light-hearted works to those of Nobel prize-winners like Sartre and Golding, which the author uses to illustrate the versatility of this literary form.
Download or read book Cincinnati Public Library written by and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 980 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book On Translating French Literature and Film written by Geoffrey T. Harris and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1996 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is of particular relevance to literary and filmic translators, to translation theorists and to anyone with an interest in translation as an art. Throughout the majority of essays in the volume, translation is projected as a complex creative task and not as an exercise in simply re-encoding the meaning of a source text. The received superiority of the original is ultimately questioned here. The customary binary divide between original and translation or copy, and between author and translator is forcefully challenged as cinematic and literary translation is presented as an essentially creative process. Whether highlighting specific author-related problems or whether focusing on the broader issues of the ethics of translation, of cultural transmissibility or of obsolescence, the general thrust of these essays seeks to demonstrate the authorial credentials of the translator. Despite the cogent counter-arguments advanced by a minority of the contributors, the dominant discourse here is one which replaces the stereotypical, virtually anonymous translator with a high-profile, creative figure.
Download or read book Fathers Daughters and Slaves written by Doris Y. Kadish and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fathers, Daughters, and Slaves explores the unique contribution by French women writers to Haitian politics and culture during the early nineteenth century, when Haiti was on the verge of reestablishing slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. It offers in-depth readings of works by Germaine de Staël, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes- Valmore, as well as two lesserknown but important writers, Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin, all of whom were writers living in France commenting on Haiti from afar, and all of whom were staunch opponents of slavery. Exploring the similarities between the works of these French women and twentiethand twenty-first-century francophone texts, it offers a much-needed new voice to the exploration of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism, undercutting the neat distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies, as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing.
Download or read book Monthly Bulletin written by San Francisco (Calif.). Free Public Library and published by . This book was released on 1897 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
