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Description
Reduced space is an important theme in the works of the Marquis de Sade including his epic novel The New Justine and his pornographic performance piece Philosophy in the Bedroom including the political/social treatise "Frenchmen, yet another effort is needed if you want to be a Republic". Through out his life Sade attempted to overcome reduction of space with writing. Tragically, his writing often prolonged the reduction of his space by sending him to or keeping him in prison. It is my theory that his violent, pornographic writing style is "une écriture de surjouissance" or "a writing of over-coming". Surjouissance is my theory for Sade's method, based on textual analysis of Sade's main works, that he combines through his syntactic structure, narrative voice, and semantic themes the orgasm of the mind represented by philosophical discourse with the orgasm of the body represented textually by orgiastic scenes and the language of orgasm to reach an ultimate state of complete freedom. In the political pamphlet "Frenchmen yet another effort..."Sade attempts to set this theory of sur-jouissance, or this transcendent state reached through the combination of physical and philosophical orgasm, as the political foundation for a new republic. Does he succeed in creating a viable political formula for a sustainable republic? My argument states absolutely not. His aristocratic elitism narrows his voice. But he does propose the combination of sexual, literary, and intellectual freedoms as a possible polemic against any form of reduced space.
ContributorsSwankie, Ryan James (Author) / Mullet, Isabelle (Thesis advisor) / Canovas, Frédéric (Committee member) / Bahtchevanova, Mariana (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Victor Hugo crafted a relationship with architecture that demonstrated his nuanced experience of the "harmony" of historical monuments, as exemplified in the novel Notre-Dame de Paris. In the first chapter, I will introduce the largest aspect of Notre-Dame de Paris' contradictory nature: its role as both historian and revolutionary. The Gothic's rise to prominence is traceable in Notre-Dame, and Hugo presented the edifice as proof of France's enduring cultural significance. Notre-Dame was just as influential in its revolutionary capacity: Hugo believed that the cathedral acted as an invigorating force to the medieval public and was a vital component of revolutions that took place in the sixteenth century. The second chapter deals with the juxtaposition between the cathedral's identity as a victim of human society and as a figure who engages in its own strategic defense. Hugo categorized several kinds of damage inflicted upon Notre-Dame, with the severity of each category depending upon its source: time, revolution, and shifting taste, which was by far the most egregious. Notre-Dame proves itself to be a formidable opponent in the novel, however, by confronting a violent mob with blows of its own; it also demonstrates the ability to psychically wound its enemies through the infernal hallucinations of Claude Frollo. The final contradiction explored in the third chapter is the nature of the cathedral's spirit. In the novel, Hugo personifies Notre-Dame, giving the structure individual relationships with human characters and the ability to nurture and influence Quasimodo in particular. The bell ringer is presented to the reader as a man reared by a cathedral, and Hugo's exploration of the particulars of their relationship composes a significant part of this chapter. Quasimodo experiences Notre-Dame as an ageless, self-perpetuating universe, and Hugo's juxtaposition of this relationship with that of Frollo emphasizes the author's reverent attitude towards the edifice and its ultimate transcendence of the culture that created it.
ContributorsHeidinger, Sedona Lee (Author) / Codell, Julie (Thesis director) / Dove-Viebahn, Aviva (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This thesis is concerned with literary representations of the passions in a selection of eighteenth-century French epistolary fiction. In close readings of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu’s 1721 Persian Letters, Francoise de Graffigny’s 1747 Letters of a Peruvian Woman and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1761 Julie, or the New Heloise, I consider how the passions serve, in the context of narrative, to ground claims about human nature and sexual difference, and to speculate on the social and political apologetics at work within each text. The importance of sensibility in the culture and literature of the eighteenth century has to some extent eclipsed the role of the passions in literary representations of human nature and sexual difference. However central sensibility became to eighteenth-century imaginations, it did not eclipse but rather complemented developing moral and natural philosophical conceptions of the passions. As each of novels explored here attest, the passions remained central to literary and philosophical claims about human nature and sexual difference in the eighteenth century, providing a common vocabulary for making claims about the state of the social and political order. Entrenched, polysemous, and changing, discourses of the passions in Early Modern Europe served multiple and divergent ends. The goal of this thesis is to contextualize their representations in the narratives of three eighteenth-century novels as interventions in moral philosophy, shaped not only by epistemological philosophy but also the imperatives of a French literary tradition of gallantry.
ContributorsLindsay, Ruth (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Barnes, Andrew (Committee member) / Wright, J K (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022