Two Treatments of a Subject: Proust's “La Regarder Dormir” and Valéry's La Dormeuse

PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 900-909
Author(s):  
Henry A. Grubbs

A critical cliché often heard today is that Proust was fundamentally a poet rather than a novelist. The historians of literature and the critics do not put it quite as crudely as that, but their remarks frequently permit such an assumption on the part of the reader. Thus the Castex and Surer manual, in its twentieth-century volume, finds in “toute l'œuvre [de Proust] un climat d'intense Poesie” (p. 82). And Georges Cattaui, in his recent survey of the present status of Proust, though he does not in so many words call Proust a poet or his novel a poem, does say that Proust is above all the heir “de Nerval, de Baudelaire, de Mallarmé,—de ces poètes qui lui ont enseigné l'art de transfigurer les choses, l'art de délivrer la beauté prisonnière … ” Now all this is true if it is merely taken as a vivifying figure of speech, if it merely means that Proust was not a realistic novelist, and that he shows the influence of the great French poets of the late nineteenth century, or that, to use a convenient term, he was a symbolist, like his contemporaries, Claudel, Gide, and Valéry. But it has so often been said in our time that the twentieth century has seen the breaking down of the distinctions between the novel and poetry, that it seems to me useful to demonstrate, by studying two treatments of the same subject, one that of a novelist, Proust, the other that of a poet, Valéry, that there remains a fundamental and profound difference between the intent and the method of prose fiction and of poetry, at least the type that is today called “pure” poetry.

Author(s):  
Leah Price

This chapter suggests that two phenomena that usually get explained in terms of the rise of electronic media in the late twentieth century—the dematerialization of the text and the disembodiment of the reader—have more to do with two much earlier developments. One is legal: the 1861 repeal of the taxes previously imposed on all paper except that used for printing bibles. The other is technological: the rise first of wood-pulp paper in the late nineteenth century and then of plastics in the twentieth. The chapter then looks at Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861–62), the loose, baggy ethnography of the urban underclass that swelled out of a messy series of media. Mayhew's “cyclopaedia of the industry, the want, and the vice of the great Metropolis” so encyclopedically catalogs the uses to which used paper can be turned.


2018 ◽  
pp. 94-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kama Maclean

This chapter discusses the racist environment in late nineteenth-century Australia which resulted in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 designed to prohibit entry of non-white immigrants from the Commonwealth. The chapter discusses the evolution of various collective terms like ‘alien’, ‘coolie’ or ‘Hindoo’ to identify Indians as the ‘other’ of the national community. From biographical details and photographs in the Certificates Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDTs), which monitored the movement and identities of non-white residents, the chapter reveals how many Indians had undergone a change of name during immigration, an important marker of individual identity. The chapter argues that the most commonly ascribed name ‘Charlie’, was a means of ‘infantilizing and subordinating’ Indian migrants. The CEDT images of migrants in Indian clothes and identified with their new names are seen as locating Indian settlers in early twentieth-century Australia in a position of subordination within the colonial social hierarchy.


ILR Review ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Eichengreen

This paper presents an analysis of data on male workers taken from an 1894 survey of the Iowa labor market. Consistent with the results of earlier research by Paul Douglas, the author finds evidence of a statistically significant and economically important union earnings premium. The analysis also shows that late nineteenth-century unionism, like unionism in the twentieth century, tended to reduce wage dispersion. On the other hand, the author finds no evidence that late nineteenth-century unions reduced the length of the workday for union members compared to nonunion workers.


AJS Review ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 171-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Mintz

A shared phenomenon in the prose fiction of Western literatures in the late nineteenth century is the exploration of individual consciousness dissociated from collective existence. Although individual consciousness had been at the center of the fictional enterprise from the beginning, forming a first condition for the rise of the novel as genre, in the novel of sentiment and in the realistic novel the inner life of individual characters was largely produced dialectically from within the medium of social relations and social ideas. The description of an interior space deserving of attention for its own sake, a space generated by rules of its own which evince no clear or necessary connection to the larger social system, constitutes one of the points at which literature can be said to have become “modernist.” Thereafter, one of the central thematic preoccupations of fiction remains the representation of consciousness itself: memory, reflection, and the manifold operations of the imagination, especially the act of writing.


Author(s):  
Meredith L. Goldsmith

Chapter 8 responds to two prevailing arguments about the fiction of Jessie Fauset—the one labeling her work retrograde, the other regarding it as subtly subversive—by viewing the writer’s work as part of a history of long nineteenth-century representation. Countering the dominant perception of the Harlem Renaissance as a break from the past—a view that has shunted Fauset’s work to the sidelines—the essay argues that Fauset’s work explores the legacy of late-nineteenth-century US culture in the emergent modernity of the early twentieth century. Excavating the literary, cultural, and scientific tropes of feminine representation that burst from the pages of Fauset’s fiction, the essay identifies a recent literary past that informs Fauset’s constructions of her modern urban heroines.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. 221-264
Author(s):  
Jajang A Rohmana

Nawawī of Banten (1813–1897) and Haji Hasan Mustapa (1852–1930) are two important figures of Malay-Indonesian Muslim scholars (‘ulamā’) who have been widely studied. However, personal proximity of these two ‘ulamā’ seems to escape from scholarly discussion. Seen from the light of scholarly commenting (sharh) tradition, this study on the other hand attempts to show their personal proximity between the senior teacher and young student when they lived in Mecca in the late nineteenth century. The sharh tradition of these two ‘ulamā’ particularly through appear in Nawawī’s al-’Iqd al-Thamīn that aims to comment on Mustapa’s work, Al-Fath al-Mubīn, and Mustapa’s al-Lum’a al-Nūrāniyya, a response to Nawawī’s al-Shadra al-Jummāniyya. These two Arabic books (s. kitab; p. kutub) were published in Cairo, Egypt. This article further argues that the sharh tradition situates authority and reputation as the epicenter of scholarly discussion between the two ‘ulamā’ who were influential among the Jawah community. It also argues that these two Sundanese scholars contributed significantly in the transmission of Islamic learning in the early twentieth century Middle East. Their works show a scholarly reputation which delivers insights on exceptionality of Islamic and Malay archipelagic issues and serve as a global contribution of Malay-Indonesian ‘ulamā’ to the triumph of Islamic learning traditions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Uphaus

The burgeoning subfield of literary oceanic studies has largely neglected modernist literature, maintaining that the end of the age of sail in the late nineteenth century also marks an end to maritime literature's substantive cultural role. This essay outlines a way of reading the maritime in modernism through an analysis of the engagement with history and temporality in Joseph Conrad's sea novel The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). The novel depicts the sea as variously an anachronistic sphere left behind by history, an integral foundation to history, an element that eclipses history, and an archive of history's repressed violence. This article traces the interactions of these various views of the sea's relationship to history, highlighting how they are shaped and inflected by the novel's treatment of race. Based on this analysis, it proposes an approach to the sea in modernist literature that focuses on its historiographical rather than social import.


2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.


Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.


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