Flaubert, Zola, and the Incorporation of Disciplinary Knowledge

by L. Duffy

Overview

This book is about how France's two major documentary authors of the nineteenth century – Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola – incorporate medical knowledge about the body into their works, and in so doing exploit its metaphorical potential of the body to engage in critical reflection about the accumulation and reconfiguration of knowledge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349452125
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	12/03/2014
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature
Edition description:	1st ed. 2015
Pages:	261
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Larry Duffy has taught French language, culture and literature in universities in Ireland, Australia and the UK, where he is currently Lecturer in French at the University of Kent. He is the author of numerous journal articles about the nineteenth-century encounter between literature, science and medicine.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Knowledge, Incorporated PART I : FLAUBERT AND PROFESSIONAL INCORPORATIONS 1. Madame Bovary and the Incorporation of Pharmacy 2. Medical and Literary Discourses of Disciplinary Struggle and Regulation PART II: FLAUBERT, LE CORPS REDRESSÉ 3. Diagnosing the Aveugle, Correcting the Body: Ophthalmia and Orthopaedics 4. Correcting the Aveugle: Monstrosity, Aliénisme and the Haunting of the Social Body PART III: ZOLA: PROFESSIONAL, PATHOLOGICAL AND THEARAPEUTIC INCORPORATIONS 5. La Bête humaine and the Incorporation of Psychiatry: du monstre lombrosien à l'anormal zolien, de la mécanique à la thermodynamique 6. Textual Healing: Le Docteur Pascal's Incorporation of Hypodermic Therapy Conclusion: Taxonomy, Taxidermy and l'esthétique naturaliste Bibliography Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

'Duffy breaks new ground in this major study by offering a rich analysis of the incorporation of an impressive range of contemporary extraliterary discourses into the writings of Flaubert and Zola, two of the nineteenth century's most influential writers. Moving beyond understandings of incorporation that focus on sexuality, he attentively probes, through a series of close readings and intertextual and theoretical engagements, the ways in which disciplinary knowledge is represented in the powerful metaphor of the physiological body in need of treatment and correction. The book makes a high-quality, imaginative contribution, not merely to the discipline of French studies but, in-keeping with its desire to break down discursive boundaries, to scholarship on the interfaces between literary, medical and scientific discourses, the documentary culture of nineteenth-century France, and the dynamics of archive and documentary fiction.' - Dr Steven Wilson, School of Modern Languages, Queen's University Belfast

Editorial Reviews

It provides invaluable insights into the debates and power struggles that occupy the scientific and medical world in nineteenth-century France. Furthermore, it helps us reconsider how we conceive of the connection, central to all realisms, between the physiological body and the many texts, fictional or not, that discuss it.” (Martine Gantrel, Modern Language Review, Vol. 111 (3), July, 2016)

From the Publisher