L’échec comme attaque: les romans clastiques de Gustave Flaubert et Marie NDiaye

Abstract

Bouvard et Pécuchet and Un temps de saison depict the countryside as a troubling and hostile place for urban characters, forcing them to go round in circles, just like the structure of the novel’s narratives, both unfinished, unsettled. In the Flaubertian and NDiayean countryside, the lines of time and progress dissolve themselves. This chapter shows how the authors’ monstrous representations of rural purgatory and its noxious effects on the urbane protagonists demand to be examined in the light of different kinds of ‘post-revolutionary’ France, in which the countryside, characterised by its cyclic time and knowledge destroys and (in the case of NDiaye) litterally dissolves the normative Parisian bourgeois, whose reassuring lines of progress become cracked, their linear discourses of authority melted within a hostile and haemorraging non-place

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ORCID for Aude Campmas: orcid.org/0000-0001-6662-2476

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