Troubles with the origin: Gustave Flaubert's 'Hérodiade'

• Authors: Sniedziewski P.
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

Gustave Flaubert was critical against the nineteenth-century epistemology of history, consistently debunking the weak aspects of our thinking about the past. Of special importance in this context are the writer's doubts regarding the myth of the 'origin', as expressed in his 'Hérodiade'. In this sense, Flaubert's novella is a story on the 'origin' of Christian culture and religion. However, we can spot therein three main mechanisms, used by the French author to undermine the absolute meaning of the'origin' and to develop his own historic writing model (starting with attempted authentication of the text, through deconstructing the story, up to awareness of discontinuity and incompleteness of any narrative on the past). This makes of Flaubert a modernist historiographer in whose opinion there is an 'origin' - which is not history, but rather, a myth.

Keywords

EN

FRENCH LITERATURE; GUSTAVE FLAUBERT ('HÉRODIADE'); HISTORIOGRAPHY

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Teksty Drugie (Second Texts)
• Year: 2007
• Issue: 3(105)
• Pages: 192-205
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Sniedziewski P.

• P. Sniedziewski, Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, Instytut Filologii Polskiej, Zaklad Literatury Romantyzmu, al. Niepodleglosci 4, 61-874 Poznan, Poland

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

07PLAAAA02895912