To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and ZolaIn a unique demonstration of the critical possibilities of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and Zola analyzes the intertextual conflicts between four monuments of nineteenth-century fiction: Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, Charles Dicken's Bleak House, and Emile Zola's Le Ventre de Paris and Germinal. The book's fundamental hypothesis is that Dickens and Zola exemplify Hugo's conception of the novel - and of literary history - as a "graft" of one work upon another, producing hybrid mixtures of genres and styles of representation. For Hugo, a new work always "kills" its predecessor while at the same time preserving its memory. Thus writing becomes inlaid with writing; the text, a palimpsest. |
From inside the book
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Page 14
... nature of specific literary works . Thus , for example , in Notre - Dame , the trace of classical works is to be found in the novel's partially epic form . In Le Ventre de Paris , Hugo's romantic trace , or one might say his signature ...
... nature of specific literary works . Thus , for example , in Notre - Dame , the trace of classical works is to be found in the novel's partially epic form . In Le Ventre de Paris , Hugo's romantic trace , or one might say his signature ...
Page 16
... nature of human consciousness and the romantic philosophical concern with relations between the self and the other . Both thematically and stylistically , these novels are obsessed with " otherness . " Their theme revolves around ...
... nature of human consciousness and the romantic philosophical concern with relations between the self and the other . Both thematically and stylistically , these novels are obsessed with " otherness . " Their theme revolves around ...
Page 20
... nature of discourse and of human existence . Briefly put , Bakhtin defines the novel as an " artistic genre " that does not have a place in ( formalist ) Aristotelian poetics ( 269 ) , a genre " multiform in style and variform in speech ...
... nature of discourse and of human existence . Briefly put , Bakhtin defines the novel as an " artistic genre " that does not have a place in ( formalist ) Aristotelian poetics ( 269 ) , a genre " multiform in style and variform in speech ...
Page 21
... nature , reflects the most stable , " eternal " tendencies in literature's development . Always preserved in a genre are undying elements of the archaic . True , these archaic elements are pre- served in it only thanks to their constant ...
... nature , reflects the most stable , " eternal " tendencies in literature's development . Always preserved in a genre are undying elements of the archaic . True , these archaic elements are pre- served in it only thanks to their constant ...
Page 23
... nature of these novels is deter- mined by intertextual relations between them , any discussion of formal hybridity raises questions that also pertain to literary history . Hence formal analysis and historical perspective are inseparable ...
... nature of these novels is deter- mined by intertextual relations between them , any discussion of formal hybridity raises questions that also pertain to literary history . Hence formal analysis and historical perspective are inseparable ...
Contents
13 | |
33 | |
NotreDame de Paris The Hybrid Novel | 47 |
Formal Incongruity in Dickenss Bleak House | 85 |
Fiction Fair or Fiction Foul? Bleak House and NotreDame de Paris | 138 |
Ceci tuera cela The Cathedral in the Marketplace | 176 |
Pregnant Death Germinal and the Triumph of the Hybrid Novel | 192 |
Notes | 224 |
Works Cited | 245 |
Index | 253 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Ainsworth ambiguous architecture artistic authorial discourse becomes belly Bleak House bourgeois carnival Caryl Emerson Catherine Chancery chapter characters Charles Dickens Chesney Wold church Claude Frollo Claude's coexistence concept critics Dickens's dramatic Emile Zola epic Esmeralda Esther Etienne Etienne's Florent free indirect speech genre Germinal Gothic graft Gringoire's grotesque realism Halles heteroglossia Hillis Miller Hugo's Notre-Dame Ibid interpretation intertextual italics added Jarndyce Lady Dedlock language literary history literature meaning metaphor Michael Holquist Mikhail Bakhtin miners mirror Morson and Emerson narrative Notre-Dame de Paris novelistic original parody past Pierre Gringoire plot poetics Préface de Cromwell pregnant death present Quasimodo Rabelais reading relation relationship represented rewriting rhetoric romantic romantic realism Saint-Eustache scene Scott Seebacher speech story structure style stylistic symbol theme theory tion Tower of Babel trace tradition tuera Tulkinghorn Ventre de Paris Victor Hugo voice writing Zola Zola's
Popular passages
Page 108 - Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.
Page 21 - Genre is reborn and renewed at every new stage in the development of literature and in every individual work of a given genre. This constitutes the life of the genre. [...] A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning. Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development.
Page 20 - Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression of the centripetal forces of language. A unitary language is not something given [dan] but is always in essence posited [zadan] — and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia.
Page 102 - What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyardstep ? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together ! Jo sweeps his crossing all day long, unconscious of the link, if any...
Page 53 - Apres le roman pittoresque mais prosaique de Walter Scott il restera un autre roman a creer, plus beau et plus complet encore selon nous. Cest le roman, a la fois drame et epopee, pittoresque mais poetique, reel mais ideal, vrai mais grand, qui enchassera Walter Scott dans Homere.—Victor Hugo on Quentin Durward.
Page 174 - ... and admit no light of day into the place ; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect, and by the drawl languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it, and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fogbank...
Page 17 - ... an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another, the carving-out of a living image of another language.
Page 193 - Moreover, the old hags are laughing. This is a typical and very strongly expressed grotesque. It is ambivalent. It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed.
Page 96 - It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you find still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places, with lattice windows and green growth pressing through them. Mine, which we entered first, was of this kind, with an up-and-down roof, that had more corners in it than I ever...
Page 129 - For, I saw very well that I could not have been intended to die, or I should never have lived: not to say should never have been reserved for such a happy life. I saw very well how many things had worked together, for my welfare; and that if the sins of the fathers were sometimes visited upon the children, the phrase did not mean what I had in the morning feared it meant. I knew I was as innocent of my birth, as a queen of hers; and that before my Heavenly Father I should not be punished for birth,...