Aestheticism as counterattack: study on the failures of Emma Bovary and Jean des Esseintes

Author(s)

Maria Elisa Perez Pagan

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
• Defense date: 2019-02-04

Examining board members

Fábio Akcelrud Durão; Patricia Trujillo Montón; Marcos Siscar

• Advisor: Fábio Akcelrud Durão

Abstract

This work consists of a comparative study between two fundamental works of nineteenth-century French literature: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary [1857] and Joris-Karl Huysmans's À Rebours [1884]. Its main focus is aestheticism - especially what we will call contemplative aestheticism from Walter Pater's reading of The Renaissance [1873] - and the way it points to a kind of defense against a disenchanted life in bourgeois society. For us, aestheticism can be seen, however, as the result of values ??that arise from this same society, configuring a modern response to questions posed by modernity itself. In the investigation of the contradictions inherent in the problem we pose, we will use above all Karl Marx, Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno and Moishe Postone to understand issues concerning alienation, logic of consumption, ideology, commodity form and labor in bourgeois society, among other concepts that, as we will show, may have a close relationship with what we call contemplative aestheticism. Our ambition is, from the exhaustive analysis of both books, anchored in readings of texts of literary criticism and sociology (with emphasis on Critical Theory), to contrast the way each of the works presents its own way of conceptualizing aestheticism (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 16/11619-0 - Aestheticism as counterattack: a study on the failures of Emma Bovary and Jean des Esseintes
• Grantee: Maria Elisa Perez Pagan
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master