FR20160: You Are To Complete The Assignment Making Use Of And Reference :The Realist Novel- French Essay, UCD, Ireland

1. ‘Madame Bovary montre qu’il est impossible d’être authentique, car toujours entre soi et le réel s’interposent des images, des mythes, des lectures, des mots.’ Is this view borne out by the novel?

2. ‘[L]a parole humain est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles’ (pp. 265-6). Is this view of language confirmed by the novel as a whole? Is it contradicted by it?

3. In 1857, the critic and writer Sainte-Beuve reproached Flaubert’s novel in the following terms: ‘le bien est trop absent: pas un des personnages ne le représente. . . . Pourquoi ne pas avoir mis là un seul personnage qui soit de nature à consoler, à reposer le lecteur par un bon spectacle, ne pas lui avoir ménagé un seul ami?’ Why is this not a fair criticism?

You are to complete the assignment making use of and reference to at least 4 secondary sources on Flaubert and/or Madame Bovary. At least one of these must be a book and at least one must be in French. The bibliography of works on Flaubert/Madame Bovary is vast. I’ve put both a limited bibliography and a number of critical sources on Brightspace.

Rhetorical Irony and Literary Irony

Ancient rhetoric classifies ironia among the tropes and, as a consequence, tries to define it as verborum imputation. Irony consists, according to ancient rhetoric, in expressing something by its opposite, its contrarium. In relation to other tropes irony, however, takes on a particular character. In effect, contrary to metaphors, metonymies, synecdoches, periphrases, and so forth, ironia is not conventionalized. It seems, rather, that the “opposite expression, ” the contrarium, refers to the scale of values, to the axiologic systems of the opposed party.