Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France

by Deborah Jenson

Overview

Mimesis has been addressed frequently in terms of literary or visual representation, in which the work of art mirrors, or fails to mirror, life. Most often, mimesis has been critiqued as a simple attempt to bridge the distance between reality and its representations. In Trauma and Its Representations: The Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France, Deborah Jenson argues instead that mimesis not only denotes the representation of reality but is also a crucial concept for understanding the production of social meaning within specific historical contexts. Examining the idea of mimesis in the French Revolution and post-Revolutionary Romanticism, Jenson builds on recent work in trauma studies to develop her own notion of traumatic mimesis. Through innovative readings of museum catalogs, the writings of Benjamin Constant, the novels of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, and other works, Jenson demonstrates how mimesis functions as a form of symbolic wounding in French Romanticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801876172
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Deborah Jenson is an assistant professor of French at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Table of Contents

Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Chapter 1: ICONOCLASM: Setting Wounds in Stone at the Musée des Monuments Français, 1795-1816
Chapter 2: TRANSPOSITIONALITY: The Political Gets Personal in Constant's Cécile
Chapter 3: PLAGIARISM: Duras, Desbordes-Valmore, and the Scandalous Potency of the Woman Author
Chapter 4: "HARMONY" : Lamartine's Social Pain
Chapter 5: ANALOGY: Slavery to Duplicity in Sand's Indiana
Chapter 6: FETISHISM: Thinking with Things in Flaubert's "Un Coeur simple"

EPILOGUE: French Romanticism: Posttraumatic Utopia/ Post-Utopian Trauma
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This is an absolutely brilliant and original study of post-revolutionary France.
—Barbara Johnson, Harvard University

In this elegantly written and beautifully conceived work, Deborah Jenson reclaims the notion of mimesis to demonstrate how it informs nineteenth-century poetry and prose, epistemology and politics. This work is a dazzlingly ambitious and original attempt to reconceive nineteenth-century French literature as a working-out of the trauma inflicted on the national psyche by the Revolution and its legacies. It is by far the most pleasurable book about pain I have ever read.
—Naomi Schor, Yale University

Editorial Reviews

In this profound, engaging book, Deborah Jenson develops a comprehensive, highly original analysis of French romanticism . . . This exemplary study should greatly influence nineteenth-century French studies and the theory of social mimesis.
—Laurence M. Porter, Nineteenth-Century French Studies

Read this book if you are interested in the legacy of the French Revolution . . . it will not disappoint.
—Annabelle M. Rea, French Review

From the Publisher