From Goethe To Gide

Description

From Goethe to Gide brings together twelve essays on canonical male writers (six French and six German) commissioned from leading specialists from Britain and North America.

These essays, aimed at final year undergraduates and postgraduates, focus on Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Fontane, Zola, Kafka, Gide. The collection therefore foregrounds the major authors taught on British university BA courses in French and German. Working with the tools of feminist criticism, the authors demonstrate how feminist readings of these writings can illuminate far more than attitudes towards women.

Preface


List of Contributors


Introduction


1. Errant Strivings: Goethe, Faust and the Feminist Reader, Gail K. Hart


2. Hospitality and Sexual Difference in Rousseau's Confessions, Judith Still


3. Gender and Genre: Schiller's Drama and Aesthetics, Lesley Sharpe


4. Male Foibles, Female Critique and Narrative Capriciousness: On the Function of Gender in Conceptions of Art and Subjectivity in E.T.A., Hoffmann Ricarda Schmidt


5. Varieties of Female Agency in Stendhal, Ann Jefferson


6. Heine's 'Madchen und Frauen': Women and Emancipation in the Writings of Heinrich Heine, Robert C. Holub


7. Mundus Muliebris: Baudelaire's World of Women, Rosemary Lloyd


8. Flaubert's Cautionary Tales and the Art of the Absolute Mary Orr, Patricia Howe


9. Bodies in Crisis: Zola, Gender, and the Dilemmas of History, Jann Matlock


10. Karl Rossmann, or the Boy who Wouldn't Grow Up: The Flight from Manhood in Kafka's Der Verschollene, Elizabeth Boa


11. Andre Gide and the Making of the Perfect Child, Naomi Segal


Postscript


Notes


Bibliography of Secondary Literature


1. General Works


2. Works on Specific Authors


Index

Sujets

• European Studies
• Literary Criticism
• Fontane
• Zola
• General officer
• Friedrich Schiller
• E. T. A. Hoffmann
• Émile Zola
• Études européennes
• General
• Germany
• Heine
• Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann
• Friedrich von Schiller
• Franz Kafka
• Rousseau
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Stendhal
• Gustave Flaubert
• France
• Charles Baudelaire
• André Gide

Informations

• Publié par: University of Exeter Press
• Date de parution: 02 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780859899147
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Orr and Sharpe

Goethe Rousseau From Goethe Schiller to Gide Stendhal Feminism, Aesthetics Baude and l the a Fre i nch re and German Literary Eta Ho Can f on 1 f 770–1 m 936 ann Flaubert Heine Zola Fontane edited by Mary Orr and Lesley Sharpe Kafka Gide

From Goethe to Gide Feminism, Aesthetics and the French and German Literary Canon 1770–1936

This collection of essays provides a major reassessment of those literary figures from the later Enlightenment to the beginnings of Modernism who are most studied on French and German courses in Britain and around the world today.

By investigating the works of these canonical male French and German writers through the optic of feminist criticism, the contributors lay bare some of the fundamental aesthetic questions raised by these works: the function of art and of the artist; the limits of Realism; the relation of gender and genre. Readers new to French and German can study one author in depth or engage in comparative analysis, while specialists will find much to stimulate their critical thinking.

Editors: Mary Orris Professor of French at the University of Southampton. Lesley Sharpeis Professor of German at the University of Exeter. Both have published major monographs on canonical writers of French and German literature as well as working on women writers and feminist criticism. Mary Orr is one of the General Editors ofForum for Modern Language Studiesand Lesley Sharpe was for six years Germanic Editor of theModern Language Review.

From Goethe to Gide Feminism, Aesthetics and the French and German Literary Canon 1770–1936

edited by Mary Orr and Lesley Sharpe

First published in 2005 by University of Exeter Press Reed Hall, Streatham Drive Exeter EX4 4QR UK www.exeterpress.co.uk

© Mary Orr, Lesley Sharpe and the individual contributors 2005

The right of Mary Orr and Lesley Sharpe to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 0 85989 721 4 Paperback ISBN 0 85989 722 2

Typeset in 10½/13pt Plantin Light by Kestrel Data, Exeter, Devon

Printed in Great Britain by Athenæum Press Ltd, Gateshead

Preface List of Contributors Introduction

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Contents

Errant Strivings: Goethe,Faustand the Feminist Reader Gail K. Hart Hospitality and Sexual Difference in Rousseau’sConfessions Judith Still Gender and Genre: Schiller’s Drama and Aesthetics Lesley Sharpe Male Foibles, Female Critique and Narrative Capriciousness: On the Function of Gender in Conceptions of Art and Subjectivity in E.T.A. Hoffmann Ricarda Schmidt

Varieties of Female Agency in Stendhal Ann Jefferson Heine’s ‘Mädchen und Frauen’: Women and Emancipation in the Writings of Heinrich Heine Robert C. Holub Mundus Muliebris: Baudelaire’s World of Women Rosemary Lloyd Flaubert’s Cautionary Tales and the Art of the Absolute Mary Orr

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7

22

34

49

65

80

97

113

9

10

11

12

Manly Men and Womanly Women: Aesthetics and Gender in Fontane’sEffi BriestandDer Stechlin Patricia Howe Bodies in Crisis: Zola, Gender, and the Dilemmas of History Jann Matlock Karl Rossmann, or the Boy who Wouldn’t Grow Up: The Flight from Manhood in Kafka’sDer Verschollene Elizabeth Boa André Gide and the Making of the Perfect Child Naomi Segal

Postscript Notes

Bibliography of Secondary Literature 1. General Works 2. Works on Specific Authors Index

129

145

168

184

199 205

236 240 256

Preface

The twelve essays in this volume are designed to stimulate debate on what we the editors consider a vital issue in contemporary criticism: the extent and value of the contribution of feminist criticism to scholarly analysis of canonical male writers and the potential of such criticism to enrich and diversify scholarly debates in the future. The project was born of our sense of the need to take stock of the impact of an enormously varied and sometimes incompatible set of feminist critical approaches that had often been only sporadically applied to major canonical writers in the French and German traditions. These approaches and their interpretative possibilities had, moreover, often been marginalized in mainstream critical debate. In harnessing the rich critical tools of feminist criticism and by foregrounding its usefulness, our aim was also to demonstrate the increasing sophistication of those approaches and hence their potential to probe not only received interpretations of canonical texts but also the aesthetic assumptions underpinning them and their reception. Our hope is that the essays in this volume will encourage further dialogue within feminist criticism and, by demonstrating that criticism’s flexibility and productiveness, help in questioning assumptions about the formation of literary values and traditions. All the contributors to the volume are experts in their fields. They present original work and an immense background of accumulated scholarly expertise in a manner accessible to the undergraduate and yet challenging to the specialist. All would have liked more space for notes in order to indicate where further material on their subject could be

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From Goethe to Gide

found. Our solution to the problem of length was to restrict full bibliographical references in the notes to each chapter to the secondary literature whose arguments were specifically alluded to, and to refer readers by author to additional titles listed in full in the bibliography at the end of the volume. In this way the notes to each chapter provide a compact source of references for those, particularly students, who want to read further on specific texts, while the main bibliography has become an extensive, and we hope useful, research tool for those engaged in longerterm scholarly work in these fields. Those interested in applying feminist critical methods to other canons will also find useful pointers in the bibliography. We are immensely grateful to our contributors for their participation in this project, which involved not only producing the essays in this volume but also taking part in a twoday conference in November 2003 that gave us a very necessary opportunity to exchange ideas and approaches. We should like to acknowledge the generous support of the British Academy, which gave us a British Conference Grant of £2,000 towards the cost of bringing our US contributors to the UK for this event. We should also like to thank the Institute of Romance Studies and the Institute of Germanic Studies (at that time still separate institutes in the University of London’s School of Advanced Studies) for providing two excellent venues for the conference and for their administrative support. Julie Crocker of the School of Modern Languages at the University of Exeter lent her computing skills to the task of formatting the chapters and bibliography, and the School also provided for the services of an indexer. Finally, we are grateful to the University of Exeter Press for the confidence they have shown in the project and the practical advice and professional support they have given us throughout.

Mary Orr Lesley Sharpe Exeter, December 2004

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Contributors

Elizabeth Boais Emeritus Professor of German, University of Nottingham. Her publications includeThe Sexual Circus: Wedekind’s Theatre of Subversion(Blackwell, 1987),Kafka: Gender, Class, Race in the Letters and Fictions(OUP, 1996), ‘Die Geschichte der O oder die (Ohn)Macht der Frauen.Die Wahlverwandtschaftenim Kontext des Geschlechterdiskurses um 1800’,GoetheJahrbuch118 (2001).

Gail K. Hartis Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine, where she also directs the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program. She has published books on Gottfried Keller’s fiction and on German bourgeois tragedy and articles on German and comparative literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Her new book,Friedrich Schiller: Crime, Aesthetics, and the Poetics of Punishment, appeared in 2005.

Robert C. Holubteaches in the German Department at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written numerous books and essays in the area of eighteenth to twentiethcentury literary, cultural, and intellectual history. His current research deals with Friedrich Nietzsche, situating his writings in the context of nineteenthcentury scientific, social and political discourses.

Patricia Howeis Senior Lecturer in German at Queen Mary College, University of London. Her research interests are narrative fiction and travel writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has written on Fontane, Saar, Storm, Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, and on women writers.

Ann Jeffersonis Fellow and Tutor in French at New College, Oxford. Her publications includeReading Realism in Stendhal(CUP, 1988). She is currently working on a project entitled ‘Writing Lives and Making Literature in France: 1750 to the present’.

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