To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and ZolaUniversity of Delaware Press, 1995 - 260 pages In a unique demonstration of the critical possibilities of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and Zola analyzes the intertextual conflicts between four monuments of nineteenth-century fiction: Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, Charles Dicken's Bleak House, and Emile Zola's Le Ventre de Paris and Germinal. The book's fundamental hypothesis is that Dickens and Zola exemplify Hugo's conception of the novel - and of literary history - as a "graft" of one work upon another, producing hybrid mixtures of genres and styles of representation. For Hugo, a new work always "kills" its predecessor while at the same time preserving its memory. Thus writing becomes inlaid with writing; the text, a palimpsest. |
Contents
| 13 | |
Bakhtins Dialogue with Hugo | 33 |
NotreDame de Paris The Hybrid Novel | 47 |
Formal Incongruity in Dickenss Bleak House | 85 |
Fiction Fair or Fiction Foul? Bleak House and NotreDame de Paris | 138 |
Ceci tuera cela The Cathedral in the Marketplace | 176 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Ainsworth ambiguous architecture artistic authorial discourse becomes belly Bleak House bourgeois carnival Caryl Emerson Catherine Chancery chapter characters Charles Dickens Chesney Wold church Claude Frollo Claude's coexistence concept critics Dickens's dramatic Emile Zola epic Esmeralda Esther Etienne Etienne's Florent free indirect speech genre Germinal Gothic graft Gringoire's grotesque realism Halles heteroglossia Hillis Miller Hugo's Notre-Dame Ibid interpretation intertextual italics added Jarndyce Lady Dedlock language literary history literature meaning metaphor Michael Holquist Mikhail Bakhtin miners mirror Morson and Emerson narrative Notre-Dame de Paris novelistic original parody past Pierre Gringoire plot poetics Préface de Cromwell pregnant death present Quasimodo Rabelais reading relation relationship represented rewriting rhetoric romantic romantic realism Saint-Eustache scene Scott Seebacher speech story structure style stylistic symbol theme theory tion Tower of Babel trace tradition tuera Tulkinghorn Ventre de Paris Victor Hugo voice writing Zola Zola's
Popular passages
Page 21 - Genre is reborn and renewed at every new stage in the development of literature and in every individual work of a given genre. This constitutes the life of the genre. [...] A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning. Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development.
Page 20 - Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression of the centripetal forces of language. A unitary language is not something given [dan] but is always in essence posited [zadan] — and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia.
Page 17 - ... an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another, the carving-out of a living image of another language.