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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:37
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Ok, heres the rules.
Make the case for the superiority of either.
Preferably, list authors on your side first, before discussing merits. Hopefully we should get a pretty full list of major French and British authors of the period.
To count as British, they have to live under the crown, and write in English - so Scots, Canadians, Aussie, yes, but no Americans. French can be from anywhere, as long as they write in French.
Major works by any author cited (and any individual work cited) must be written between 1800 and 1899, inclusive.
Works can include novels and other fiction, poems and plays. Essays if known mainly for their literary value. Works of science, social science, etc are excluded.
Have at it, gentlemen.
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nostromo
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Montréal, Québec
Mar 2002
time: 00:37
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Balzac
quote:
Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 – August 18, 1850) was a French novelist. He is considered the founding-father of realism in European fiction. His large output of novels and stories, collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, is a broad panorama of French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy 1815-1848.
After his death he became recognised as one of the fathers of Realism in literature, and distinct in his approach from the "pure" Romantics like Stendhal and Hugo. La Comédie humaine spanned more than 90 novels and short stories in an attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in contemporary bourgeois France. In the 20th Century his vision of a society in flux, where class, money and personal ambition were the major players, achieved the distinction of being endorsed equally by critics of Left-wing and Right-wing political tendencies.
He guided European fiction away from the overriding influence of Walter Scott and the Gothic school, by showing that modern life could be recounted as vividly as Scott recounted his historical tales, and that mystery and intrigue did not need ghosts and crumbling castles for props. Maupassant, Flaubert and Zola were writers of the next generation who were directly influenced by him, and Marcel Proust (that other weaver of a great tapestry) acknowledged his influence.
In one of his last tales, Les comédiens sans le savoir (The Unwitting Actors, 1847) a provincial is rescued from a ruinous speculation by a boulevardier who asks him "Will you not now concede, my friend, that Paris is bigger than you are?". What Balzac had brought to fiction was the social context, a factor unrecognized by the Romantics, for whom the inner world of the individual was all that counted.
In the 1960s, the counter-culture unearthed two strange and mystical novels from Balzac's early years: the quasi-autobiographical Louis Lambert (1832) and Séraphîta (1834), in which an angel guides the gender-bending hero/heroine around the solar-system. Some academics have claimed that alchemy, animal-magnetism and other esoteric theories underlie Balzac's interpretation of society, and that his credentials as a Realist should be questioned. But the critical literature on his work is very large, and one can find almost any shade of opinion if one looks for it.
It is Balzac the observer of society, morals and human psychology who continues to appeal to readers today. His novels have always remained in print. His vivid realism and his encyclopedic gifts as a recorder of his age outweigh the sketchiness and inconsistent quality of some of his works. Enough of them are recognized as masterpieces, to rank him as the Charles Dickens of France. |
I'm reading Lost Illusions and its amazing!
Last edited by nostromo on 24-08-2005 at 23:07
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nostromo
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Montréal, Québec
Mar 2002
time: 00:37
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quote:
Originally posted by lord of the mark
Hit! A very palpable hit!
who are bouvard and pechuchet? |
A book by Flaubert. Its basically a book about human stupidity.
quote:
Bouvard et Pécuchet details the adventures of two Parisian copy-clerks, François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard and Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet, of the same age and nearly identical temperment. They meet one hot summer day by the canal Saint-Martin and form an instant, symbiotic friendship, exchanging the commonest and the most banal platitudes. When Bouvard inherits a sizable fortune, the two decide to move to the countryside to the town of Chavignolles in the Norman countryside, 100 miles west of Rouen, to live in quiet contemplation. What ensues is their search to find intellectual preoccupation fitting for their narrow minds as they rapidly cycle through almost every intellectual discpline known to man.
In the course of their odyssey, Flaubert skewers his contemporaries by exposing the weaknesses and frailty of everything Bouvard and Pécuchet set their minds on.
Some scholars assert that Flaubert intended that Bouvard and Pécuchet gain transcendent insight into the nature of human knowledge, and set about writing the also unpublished Dictionary of Received Ideas to mock their contemporaries. As the work is unfinished, this will never be anything more than an assertion). |
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lord of the mark
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FUKCOV - Former United Kingdom Colony of Virginia
Dec 2000
time: 00:37
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quote:
Originally posted by BeBro
Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (pronounced ['gø tə]) (August 28, 1749 – March 22, 1832) was a German writer, humanist, scientist, philosopher, and he conducted his civic services as a cabinet minister of Weimar. Considered a brilliant writer, Goethe was one of the paramount figures of German literature and European Neo-classicism and Romanticism in the late 18th and early 19th century. Goethe was the author of Faust and Theory of Colours and inspired Darwin with his independent discovery of the human premaxilla jaw bones and focus on evolution. His influence spread across Europe, and for the next century his works were a primary source of inspiration in music, drama and poetry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe
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Er. em, (cough).
Bebro, when two gangs rumble, they DONT want another gang butting in. Feel free to mention French or British authors, though.
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24-08-2005 22:43
before me.
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