Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Harvey, Robert | Petrey, Sandy | Munich, Adrienne | Spacks, Patricia.
Date
2015-08-01
Keywords
Comparative literature | Boredom, George Gissing, Gustave Flaubert, Literacy, Novel, Théophile Gautier | Boredom, George Gissing, Gustave Flaubert, Literacy, Novel, Théophile Gautier
Department
Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77208
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
Théophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and George Gissing deploy tropes of bored readers and writers and dilatory narrative structures in order to register their ambivalence toward the shift from sponsorship of the arts to a literary marketplace. In contrast to popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the mood as sign of bad character, intellectual deficiency, or elitism, my chosen novelists posit boredom as a site from which to assess and critique their roles in culture. I begin with the problem of boredom's possibility in a literary text: boredom must be dispelled a priori for writing and reading to take place, making it the writer's duty to solicit his reader and the reader's duty to be solicitous. Gautier's epistolary Mademoiselle de Maupin neglects both duties, however: the writer, d'Albert, writes only his boredom, while the reader who would alleviate it, the titular Mademoiselle, breaks the bonds of her own boredom and exits the novel in search of a livelier story. Her departure topples the anticipatory structure erected by d'Albert's letters, and recapitulates the move in French romanticism from an emphasis on mood to the popular romantic mode adopted by a growing number of non-traditional commercial writers, of whom Mademoiselle is emblematic. My second chapter discusses Flaubert's writing practice in relation to boredom's movements of withdrawal, stasis, and eventual reengagement. Madame Bovary's experiment with language as dead, malleable object reflects Flaubert's belief that boredom had made of him " a phantom that thinks." I then trace Flaubert's reemergence from phantomhood throughout Bouvard et Pécuchet, a work that parrots contemporary discourse. My final chapter asserts George Gissing's indelible place in British realism, as his work recreates the tones and textures of middle-class experience, particularly the experience of boredom as fostered by mass culture. New Grub Street's and In the Year of Jubilee's characters' boredom marks them as sympathetic, as crucially sensitive to and critical of their environment. Gissing's psychological portraiture distinguishes him as cultural critic, of both his day and days to come. | Théophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert, and George Gissing deploy tropes of bored readers and writers and dilatory narrative structures in order to register their ambivalence toward the shift from sponsorship of the arts to a literary marketplace. In contrast to popular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the mood as sign of bad character, intellectual deficiency, or elitism, my chosen novelists posit boredom as a site from which to assess and critique their roles in culture. I begin with the problem of boredom's possibility in a literary text: boredom must be dispelled a priori for writing and reading to take place, making it the writer's duty to solicit his reader and the reader's duty to be solicitous. Gautier's epistolary Mademoiselle de Maupin neglects both duties, however: the writer, d'Albert, writes only his boredom, while the reader who would alleviate it, the titular Mademoiselle, breaks the bonds of her own boredom and exits the novel in search of a livelier story. Her departure topples the anticipatory structure erected by d'Albert's letters, and recapitulates the move in French romanticism from an emphasis on mood to the popular romantic mode adopted by a growing number of non-traditional commercial writers, of whom Mademoiselle is emblematic. My second chapter discusses Flaubert's writing practice in relation to boredom's movements of withdrawal, stasis, and eventual reengagement. Madame Bovary's experiment with language as dead, malleable object reflects Flaubert's belief that boredom had made of him " a phantom that thinks." I then trace Flaubert's reemergence from phantomhood throughout Bouvard et Pécuchet, a work that parrots contemporary discourse. My final chapter asserts George Gissing's indelible place in British realism, as his work recreates the tones and textures of middle-class experience, particularly the experience of boredom as fostered by mass culture. New Grub Street's and In the Year of Jubilee's characters' boredom marks them as sympathetic, as crucially sensitive to and critical of their environment. Gissing's psychological portraiture distinguishes him as cultural critic, of both his day and days to come. | 282 pages
Recommended Citation
Foley, Ashar Elizabeth, "The Text at an Impasse: Authorial, Representational, and Structural Boredoms in Selected Works by Gautier, Flaubert, and Gissing" (2015). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3039.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3039