A Revolution in Fiction: the Navigation of Feeling En ligne
jeudi 9 juillet 2009A Revolution in Fiction is designed as a collaborative weblog to encourage exchanges among literature, history, art history, and the human sciences across the ages, and more particulary during the French Revolution.
Revolution Now: We hope to explore and publicize new findings about French revolutionary art, literature, and culture, and to inspire more research on the little-known, transitional period between the ancien régime and modernity (1780-1830).
Ce weblog a été constitué par Julia Douthwaite, Professeure au French Department of Romance Languages & Literatures, University of Notre Dame, IN (USA) (http://romancelanguages.nd.edu/people/douthwaite-julia/): elle étudie en particulier le thème de « La Pitié et ses adversaires : La politique de l’émotion dans les écrits révolutionnaires» et écrit à ce à propos:
"The lecture builds upon my research on the pamphlets, fictions, and correspondence on the King’s demise following his ill-fated attempt to flee the country in 1791, and considers these materials in the light of the history of “emotives” outlined in William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge UP, 2001) and “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38 (June 1977).
The fall of Louis XVI is an excellent case to test Reddy’s claims that 1) sincerity is culturally managed; and that 2) “emotional control is the real site of the exercise of power” (NF, 111; “AC,” 335). My study explores how authors described and criticized who could be a rightful recipient of pity at three key moments in the political history of the French Revolution: 1791, 1800-01, and 1803. Not only was the king’s sincerity and legitimacy radically challenged after he was arrested in June 1791 at Varennes, he also lost the right to people’s pity. Most intriguing from a literary perpective is the contrast between Regnault-Warin’s novel, Le Cimetière de la Madeleine, and the king’s correspondence (1803, ed. Helen-Maria Williams). Whereas the former presents an explicitly sympathetic reaction to the king’s fate, mirroring through a number of mise en abyme techniques the desired reader’s response, the latter repeatedly challenges the king’s claims of sincerity and efforts to elicit pity with an ironic series of editorial ”commentaries.” "
