The Model and the Masterpiece (Balzac and his followers)
Journal Title: Studia Litterarum - Year 2018, Vol 3, Issue 1
Abstract
Balzac’s short story “The Unknown Masterpiece” (“Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu”) is one of his most commented works. This essay offers a new reading of the story by correlating the narrative structures of the text with the deforming effect these structures produce on the visual artifact (the painting) featured in “The Unknown Masterpiece.” The analysis takes into consideration the dynamic history of Balzac’s “waving” text undergoing changes with every new authorial revision that obscured the important circumstances of the plot and made the central visual image ambiguous. The latter is stratified as it acquires width instead of depth while the figure it represents protrudes from the smooth surface of the canvas. The close reading of Balzac’s text is followed by the survey of French literary works and films that elaborate, after Balzac, on “the masterpiece and the model” plot. The latter include the works by Théophile Gautier, Goncourt brothers, Émile Zola, and Jacques Rivette.
Authors and Affiliations
Sergey N. Zenkin
REPRESENTATION OF THE PAST AS THE MAJOR FACTOR OF SELF-IDENTITY IN POST-SOVIET LITERATURE
The essay examines the problem of identity in its implicit relation to the memory of the past on the material of post-Soviet literature. The question of identity or “how to think identity” is and has always been releva...
CHEKHOV’S ETHICAL HERITAGE IN THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN MEDICAL HUMANITIES
The paper discusses Chekhovian ethical discourse in American fiction and non-fiction that forms part of an emerging literary canon of medical humanities in the USA. Besides Chekhov’s “medical” stories, special attentio...
NATIONAL SPECIFICITY AND ARTISTIC VALUE: AT THE CROSSROADS OF ETHNOCULTURAL DISCOURSE AND AXIOLOGICAL CRITIQUE
The article discusses correlation of ethnic, cultural, and axiological approaches as a methodologically relevant problem in literary studies. The weakening interest in the structural and semantic complexity of the lite...
The Lower Depths in Italy: the 1926 Performance Directed by Tatyana Pavlova
Russian actress and stage director Tatyana Pavlova successfully staged two of Maxim Gorky’s plays in Italy from 1926 through 1928. Those were The Lower Depths, the most famous play by Gorky, and Counterfeit Coin, a pla...
Zolotarev А.А. Campo Santo of my Memory: Memoir. Fiction. Poems. Essays. Philosophical Works. Opinions of Contemporaries. Edited by D.S. Moskovskaya and V.E. Halizev. St. Petersburg: ROSTOK Publ., 2016. Review
No Abstract