![]() ![]() Cet échantillonnage représentatif du genre archéo-fictif tient compte principalement de la notoriété des romans historiques, de leur diversité géographique et culturelle, et de leur adhérence au sujet de thèse. Eine Indische Dichtung de Hermann Hesse (1922), Der Tod des Vergil de Hermann Broch (1945), Aztec de Gary Jennings (1980) et Creation de Gore Vidal (1981). Bulwer-Lytton (1834), Quo vadis ? de Henryk Sienkiewicz (1895), Siddhartha. Le corpus des œuvres, établi sur une période recouvrant les XIXe et XXe siècles, comprend quatre romans français : Les Martyrs de Chateaubriand (1809), Le Roman de la momie de Théophile Gautier (1858), Salammbô de Gustave Flaubert (1862), Mémoires d'Hadrien de Marguerite Yourcenar (1951) et six romans étrangers : The Last Days of Pompeii d'Edward G. ![]() The coincidence of the new millennium-which in many ways reflects Yourcenar's disquieting vision-and her centenary offers us, instead of an excuse to discard her neoclassical label, the obligation to reassess it.Ce projet de thèse, choisi en vue de l'obtention du doctorat des littératures française, francophones et comparée, consiste en une démarche littéraire comparatiste, axée sur dix romans rattachés, en théorie, au genre historique, et traitant tous de l'Antiquité. The author's drive for aesthetic perfection suggests a nostalgic attempt to overcome the void of meaning and achieve some form of mystic transcendence. Neobaroque "logic" in turn emphasizes the absence of theoretical assurances and the limitations of reason. Not only do these qualities demand that we reassess the cultural biases restricting Yourcenar's oeuvre to the neoclassical pantheon they also strongly suggest that her fictions model certain characteristics of what in the latter half of the twentieth century was identified as the neobaroque: an aesthetic which favors artistic play, instability, opacity, and infinite multiplicity. ![]() The classical balance between form and substance is frequently upset in her fictions, aesthetic virtuosity serving as a substitute for the inefficacy and limitations of human knowledge and western epistemologies in general. While these factors viewed as a whole have justifiably earned Yourcenar the neoclassical label by which she is most recognized, I argue in a close reading of four fictional works that they fail to account for her writings' opacity and subversive resistance to closure, rejection of stable interpretations, and her deconstruction of what postmodernists call grand Narratives. A self-taught classicist and historian with a polished, "classical" style and a penchant for using myth and universal themes such as death, sacrifice, time, and human suffering, which in the tradition of ancient and modern classical moralists seem to transcend the limitations of time and place and speak to the ages, Yourcenar often situates her fictions, including her two most internationally acclaimed works Mémoires d'Hadrien and L'oeuvre au Noir, in distant historical settings, re-creating the past with uncanny insight and precision. Marguerite Yourcenar's election to the prestigious, tradition-bound French Academy in 1981 as its first female "immortal" cemented her already well-established niche as a neoclassical author of the modern French canon.
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