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On Stendhal: "The study of human nature, 'the observation of the human heart and its passions, ' was his constant preoccupation. But where could he study the passions better than in himself? Though he lived exuberantly, submitting himself to experience... he went on incessantly writing down everything that happened to him just as it happened. he even led to perform some remarkable experiments upon himself.He laid claim to having been a soldier, a man of fortune, a great lover, a society wit, a diplomat, a traveler, and even, sometimes, a revolutionary conspirator. "Fifty years after his death he becomes one of the demigods of the world's letters, taking his place in the ranks of the great social writers who appeared toward the end of the last century. his manner of life itself has fascinated whole regiments of literary scholars in France, Italy and Germany in the last forty years." -Matthew Josephson, From the Introduction (1946) "Like Josephson's Victor Hugo, it is the best and most comprehensive English study of its subject, a careful collection of material, skillfully assembled and organized...When Freud read Stendhal's memoirs of his childhood and adolescence he called them 'a manifestation of psychological genius.' Stendhal, he saw, had been a Freudian some 70 years before Freud himself."-TIME Magazine (1946)
During a period when the field of literary studies turned away from texts to "theory," Novel Configurations: A Study of French Fiction has become an underground classic. Although it proposes a theory, that theory is inductive and solidly based in real works of fiction. While looking again at significant masterpieces that range from the early nineteenth-to the late twentieth-centuries, from the creations of traditional french writers to that of an Argentine who spent most of his productive life in France. Allan H. Pasco has perceptively indicted new but valid close readings that have revolutionized our view of these works. He suggests that La Chartreuse de Parme is rigorously organized, that Balzac was a narrational minimalists, that Huysmans developed novelistic strategies that would be played out in the Nouvea Roman, that Proust intended good readers to come away from A la recherche du temps perdu with very different but complementary interpretations, that Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie turns on a plot that seems strange only because it takes place in the mind of the narrator. From these philololgically sophisticated interpretations, Pasco lucidly, elegantly, and wittily points to categories that include all fiction. Concentrating on patterns and description, on the one hand, and external and internal organization, on the other, Novel configurations proposes a new classification that can be easily taught to novices though it will help even professional readers understand the most complex fictional innovations.
"Stendhal's most independent heroines are usually disliked or marginalized by critics. However, when gender-neutral criteria are applied, Mina de Vanghel, Vanina Vanini, Mathilde de La Mole, and Lamiel can all be shown to enact extraordinary experiments in freedom. These experiments are all the more remarkable in view of the gender of their agents, the historical situation of the author (1783-1842), and the conventions of the literary movement that his fiction helped to found: realism. Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 study of Stendhal's heroines gives preference to the reserved females over his Amazons. But existentialism, as a philosophy of freedom, also enables a reading of the self-determining heroines that acknowledges the superiority of their choices: their resistance and counter-plots, their paradoxical authenticity, their rejection of seriousness, and their assumption of responsibility for the routes they plot."
An engaging, highly accessible and informative introduction to French literature from the Middle Ages to the present.
A Major New Translation The Red and the Black, Stendhal’s masterpiece, is the story of Julien Sorel, a young dreamer from the provinces, fueled by Napoleonic ideals, whose desire to make his fortune sets in motion events both mesmerizing and tragic. Sorel’s quest to find himself, and the doomed love he encounters along the way, are delineated with an unprecedented psychological depth and realism. At the same time, Stendhal weaves together the social life and fraught political intrigues of post–Napoleonic France, bringing that world to unforgettable, full-color life. His portrait of Julien and early-nineteenth-century France remains an unsurpassed creation, one that brilliantly anticipates modern literature. Neglected during its time, The Red and the Black has assumed its rightful place as one of the world’s great books, and Burton Raffel’s extraordinary new translation, coupled with an enlightening Introduction by Diane Johnson, helps it shine more brightly than ever before.
"The author explores this tradition in depth and defines it with a breadth of vision, a dynamic vigor and freedom rarely paralleled today....His method, flexible, generous, humane in the best sense of the word, eschews pedantry, dogma, useless theorizing and scholastic argumentation."--The New York Times Book Review. "I wish to make it clear that The Gates of Horn represents an outstanding critical accomplishment."--Saturday Review. In the Odyssey, Homer describes two gates of the imagination: one of ivory through which fictitious dreams pass, and the other of horn, through which nothing but the truth may pass. Realism is the type of literature that passes through the horn, and in this significant study of the genre Levin examines a major form of Realism--the French novel--and focuses on five of its masters--Stendahl, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust. Now available in paperback, Levin's study is a veritable reconstruction of the artistic and intellectual life of a nation.
Traces the life of the nineteenth century French novelist, attempts to portray his complex personality, and analyzes his major works.
Neither art nor philosophy was kind to beauty during the twentieth century. Much modern art disdains beauty, and many philosophers deeply suspect that beauty merely paints over or distracts us from horrors. Intellectuals consigned the passions of beauty to the margins, replacing them with the anemic and rarefied alternative, "aesthetic pleasure." In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas reclaims beauty from its critics. He seeks to restore its place in art, to reestablish the connections among art, beauty, and desire, and to show that the values of art, independently of their moral worth, are equally crucial to the rest of life. Nehamas makes his case with characteristic grace, sensitivity, and philosophical depth, supporting his arguments with searching studies of art and literature, high and low, from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Manet's Olympia to television. Throughout, the discussion of artworks is generously illustrated. Beauty, Nehamas concludes, may depend on appearance, but this does not make it superficial. The perception of beauty manifests a hope that life would be better if the object of beauty were part of it. This hope can shape and direct our lives for better or worse. We may discover misery in pursuit of beauty, or find that beauty offers no more than a tantalizing promise of happiness. But if beauty is always dangerous, it is also a pressing human concern that we must seek to understand, and not suppress.