Margaret Elizabeth Colvin
This indepth study of the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar's fiction contends that the author's texts exhibit, in unexpected ways, numerous characteristics of the neobaroque, the subversive, postmodern aesthetic that privileges extravagant artistic play, flux, and heterogeneity.
In demonstrating the affinity of Yourcenar's texts with the neobaroque, the author of this study casts doubt on their presumed transparency and stability, qualities associated with the French neoclassical tradition of the past century, where the Yourcenarian oeuvre is most often placed.
Yourcenar's election to the prestigious, traditionbound French Academy inas its first female "immortal" cemented her already wellestablished niche in the twentiethcentury French literary pantheon.
A selftaught classicist, historian, and modernday French moralist, Yourcenar has been praised for her polished, "classical"
style and analyzed for her use of myth and universal themes.
While those factors at first seem to justify amply the neoclassical label by which Yourcenar is most widely recognized, this study's close reading of four of her fictions reveals instead the texts' opacity and subversive resistance to closure, their rejection of stable interpretations, and their deconstruction of postmodern Grand Narratives.
Theirs is a neobaroque "logic," which stresses the absence of theoretical assurances and the limitations of reason,
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
I, A Frontispiece
II. Introduction Marguerite Yourcenar and the Writing of Fiction: An Aesthetic Imperative
III, ChapterAnna,Soror : Neobaroque Sacralizes the Abject
IV, ChapterDenier du rêve : Baroque Discourses, Fascist Practices
V, ChapterNeobaroque Humanism: “Sounding the Abyss ” in 'L Œuvre au Noir'
VI, ChapterNeobaroque Confessions: Un homme obscur and the Oppressive Superficiality of Words
VII, Conclusion An Author for the New Millennium
VIII, Selected Works Cited and Consulted
IX, Index of Proper Names
This study will be of interest to students of twentiethcentury French fiction and comparative literature, especially that of the latter half of the twentieth century.
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ovde samo par citata kao mogući ključ u "food for thought" stilu za razumevanje ukupnog književnog napora Margerit Jursenar,
"Yourcenar practices absolute relativity, an expression that captures an essential paradox of her writing, She cultivates a third way, one which makes ample space for our firmly rooted Western heritage but thereafter proceeds to dismantle its seductive image of order and rationalism.
In short, Marguerite Yourcenar is more paradoxical and enigmatic than generally assumed, "
"When Marguerite Yourcenar employs an excessively limpid or severe classical style in a novel or novella, she frequently has a particular purpose or is tactically engaged in a mannerist exercise in order to elude or divert.
Politically speaking, history for Yourcenar is a concatenation of chance events, endemic violence, and human blindness history makes no sense, in spite of our efforts to invest it with clarity and the order of cause and effect it is always an abyss.
Aesthetically, history provides the framework for Yourcenars “catastrophic” and liberating vision of a world without boundaries, whose ambiguity finds concrete expression in her works “poetic,” analogical style, their intricate syntax, and their transgressive personae.
Thus, Marguerite Yourcenar uses the neoclassical domain of politics and history especially ancient classical and Renaissance politics and history to frame her fundamentally formalist aesthetic project.
This singular mélange captures the ambivalence and inherent paradox of her work: they comprise a subversive entredeux that the author cultivated and occupied for most of her career.
"
"Yourcenar considered 'Un homme obscur' to be the third panel of a “triptych” that includes 'Mémoires dHadrien' and 'LŒuvre au Noir'.
Un homme obscur, Marguerite Yourcenars last fictional work her literary “testament” constitutes the final step in a process that has progressively liberated Yourcenars texts from the burden of having to justify themselves using “meaning” as a general standard.
In privileging silence, represented in 'Un homme obscur' by the protagonist Nathanaël, the Buddhistic trope works at crossed purposes with the authors project of writing.
The inevitable aporia can only be resolved by recognizing in the obvious devaluation of words the authors ultimate artifice, one by which she will vindicate her aesthetic design: in this novella, the author suggests that words cannot be measured against their ability to produce meaning in the general sensea futile endeavor at bestbut rather against their capacity to produce beauty, and beauty alone.
"
This indepth study of the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar's fiction contends that the author's texts exhibit, in unexpected ways, numerous characteristics of the neobaroque, the subversive, postmodern aesthetic that privileges extravagant artistic play, flux, and heterogeneity.
In demonstrating the affinity of Yourcenar's texts with the neobaroque, the author of this study casts doubt on their presumed transparency and stability, qualities associated with the French neoclassical tradition of the past century, where the Yourcenarian oeuvre is most often placed.
Yourcenar's election to the prestigious, traditionbound French Academy inas its first female "immortal" cemented her already wellestablished niche in the twentiethcentury French literary pantheon.
A selftaught classicist, historian, and modernday French moralist, Yourcenar has been praised for her polished, "classical"
style and analyzed for her use of myth and universal themes.
While those factors at first seem to justify amply the neoclassical label by which Yourcenar is most widely recognized, this study's close reading of four of her fictions reveals instead the texts' opacity and subversive resistance to closure, their rejection of stable interpretations, and their deconstruction of postmodern Grand Narratives.
Theirs is a neobaroque "logic," which stresses the absence of theoretical assurances and the limitations of reason,
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
I, A Frontispiece
II. Introduction Marguerite Yourcenar and the Writing of Fiction: An Aesthetic Imperative
III, ChapterAnna,Soror : Neobaroque Sacralizes the Abject
IV, ChapterDenier du rêve : Baroque Discourses, Fascist Practices
V, ChapterNeobaroque Humanism: “Sounding the Abyss ” in 'L Œuvre au Noir'
VI, ChapterNeobaroque Confessions: Un homme obscur and the Oppressive Superficiality of Words
VII, Conclusion An Author for the New Millennium
VIII, Selected Works Cited and Consulted
IX, Index of Proper Names
This study will be of interest to students of twentiethcentury French fiction and comparative literature, especially that of the latter half of the twentieth century.
.