Documents found
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By focussing on a study of the writer Sandoz in the novel L'Oeuvre by Émile Zola, this article interrogates the role that writing plays in the construction of one's self-image. It is concerned with understanding the significations and reasoning that govern fiction when it is put at the service of self-knowledge and self-promotion. We show that the writer Sandoz in Zola's fiction is there to depict Émile Zola: a performative image that shapes the social definition and image of its author.
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This article explores representations of Zola and of naturalism in the early 20th century French press particularly in general-interest weeklies of the interwar period and in magazines of the 1950s. The hypothesis defended here is that of Zola's extensive media presence and of what might be called a “naturalist culture” in middlebrow periodicals. During that same era, and prior to a major rehabilitation of the 1950s, mainstream press and specialized magazines generally regarded Zola as a great man but a mediocre novelist. In contrast, weeklies and then magazines at the turn of the century appropriated Zola's fiction as a way of reading current events and saw it as the matrix of a major contemporary neo-naturalist movement, a movement that has been largely forgotten today.
Keywords: Zola, naturalisme, néonaturalisme, réalisme, culture médiatique, culture moyenne, presse et littérature, Zola, naturalism, neo-naturalism, realism, media culture, middlebrow culture, press and literature
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The relatively unknown tribute to Zola by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pronounced in Medan in 1933, allows us to question the validity of a tribute to one writer by another. Can the celebrant not talk about the celebrated? Does he try to diminish the distance that separates him from the one he's celebrating, maintain it, or even exacerbate this difference. If yes, then to what end?
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Thanks to an early career in journalism, Émile Zola knew how to use his critic's pen to passionately defend his literary conceptions. When he became a librettist and was collaborating with the musician Alfred Bruneau, newspapers were still considered a showcase for disseminating his naturalistic views on music and opera, especially given that Bruneau was himself a music critic. A careful reading of both men's critical writings provides information on the discursive strategies they deployed to position themselves in the aesthetic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Despite differences in tone and a few specifics, the two artists successfully combined their efforts to promote their lyrical theatre.
Keywords: Alfred Bruneau, Critique musicale, Idées esthétiques, Naturalisme musical, Opéra, Presse et littérature, Émile Zola, Alfred Bruneau, Music criticism, Aesthetic ideas, Musical naturalism, Opera, Press and literature, Émile Zola
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As a continuation of the works of Jacques Noiray, Michel Butor and Michel Serres, the present article intends to question the nature and expansion of the machine's theme in the last phase of Émile Zola's work, in order to show the porosity of the boundaries that separate the “machine” from the “media”. Therefore, the author will develop the hypothesis that, in spite of the low representation of the traditional media in the cycle <em>Les Trois Villes</em> (1893-1898), it is nevertheless possible to find a very rich media imaginary, if we focus on the effects of the machines and technical objects that inhabit it. The analysis will focus on two novels that open and close this ensemble, Lourdes and Paris. Will be studied and compared the railway (train and wagon) and cyclist's (bicycle) devices.
Keywords: Émile Zola, Train, Bicyclette, Hypermedialité, Modernité, Cinéma, Émile Zola, Train, Bicycle, Hypermediacy, Modernity, Cinema
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Zola is no stranger to the art of the portrait: as a journalist, he penned many biographical texts describing his contemporaries. His correspondence, which allows for self-reflection through dialogue with the other, is also host to numerous portraits and self-portraits. In our article we seek to show, by poring over different examples of self-portraits found in the novelist's correspondence, how Zola presents himself to his readers. The identity assumed by the novelist in his letters is often fluid, changing, dependant upon his relations with the literary world. This is especially true concerning his epistolary exchanges with other actors of the literary field, writers, critics, and journalists.
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First, this article will look at some of the ways in which the crowd is analyzed in the novels of Émile Zola, before attempting to examine the possible repercussions of the crowd on the ethical level. The Zolian crowd, often “monstrous,” and the different aesthetic strategies of its staging, have indeed repercussions on the level of the characters' “savoir-vivre.” Through the analysis of the exemplary case of Zola's La Débâcle, this paper focuses on the ethics of the main character, Jean Macquart, in opposition to the collective character of the crowd.
Keywords: foule, siècle, Émile Zola, éthique, esthétique, collectivité, soldats, violence, savoir-vivre, crowd, 19th century, Émile Zola, ethics, aesthetics, community, soldiers, violence, good manners
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If, in the natural order, to create life does not necessarily entail beauty, beauty “a contrario” cannot exist without life. Zola forever denounced the hopeless nature of the quest for an ideal beauty. How did Zola approach the redefining of an aesthethic ideal? What is the beauty that he portrays in his works? What is it in its character that by definition finds itself on the fringe, since it manifests itself as the shadow carried by the living. In what way does Zola search for the “new formula that would unveil the particular beauty of its society?” The study of some of Zola's female characters should enable us to answer these questions.
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L'“Hommage à Zola,” by Céline (1933) is an odd text; more than a recognition of Zola's genius, it is what separates the two writers that is brought into focus. Zola who (according to Céline) succeeded in showing the horrors of his time, could only fail today because the reality has become indescribable. The lesson learnt in reading this perplexing text in which a writer from the 20th century is especially sensitive to that which underlies the naturalistic initiative — faith in truth, that is to say in language. Céline writes precisely from the loss of this faith.
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