My interdisciplinary dissertation, Écriture Artiste and the Idea of Painterly Writing in Nineteenth-Century France, studies the notion of écriture artiste as an ideologically charged aesthetic doctrine that provides a better understanding of the rapports between art and the socio-historical context of mid nineteenth-century France. Specifically, using a case study approach, I examined four encounters between writers and painters, including Gustave Flaubert, Gustave Moreau, the Goncourt brothers, Eugène Delacroix, Émile Zola, Édouard Manet, J.-K. Huysmans and Odilon Redon. I analyzed how these pairings, each illustrative of a different facet of écriture artiste, highlight extratextual realities of the time through aesthetic embellishments. Findings show that some of these artists refashion the existing hierarchy of academically legislated rules on style by purposefully obscuring legibility in order to valorize artistic productions as alternatives to, not copies of, nature. Moreover, they reshape cultural views by staging the coexistence of lyrical and positivist elements, thus encouraging an array of subjective interpretations. I conclude that écriture artiste provides a valid framework for analyzing a self-conscious type of art that uses symbolic power to shape public taste. In turn this provides alternatives to a monolithic model upheld by legitimate culture. The central contribution of my project is its analysis of écriture artiste as a concept that does not fit neatly specific categories of genre or literary movements. My work intervenes in extant debates on literature and the visual arts in the latter half of the nineteenth century by challenging the critical tradition that considers écriture artiste as a pedantic descriptive style. My dissertation broadens the scope of écriture artiste beyond the work of the Goncourt brothers. This expansion of the field also reveals that this type of art theory is developed with an acute consciousness about the power of art and the artist to reach a changing readership, prompted by the shifting ideological climate of the time.

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Étudier les liens entre Huysmans (1848-1907) et la médecine, c’est se pencher sur un paradoxe : celui d’un écrivain d’abord naturaliste, fortement influencé par Zola et une médecine triomphante dont la méthode est érigée en modèle pour les romanciers, qui conserve après sa conversion au catholicisme, au début des années 1890, une écriture fortement imprégnée d’images relevant de la physiologie et d’un lexique médical. Ces derniers sont caractéristiques du style de l’écrivain, le « naturalisme spiritualiste », qui entend dire l’âme sans faire abstraction du corps. Si les éléments biographiques dont nous disposons, correspondance à l’appui, témoignent de la part de Huysmans d’une expérience personnelle de la maladie et d’une fréquentation de médecins, on constate, plus encore, une appétence érudite et un goût de la documentation médicale qui ne faiblira pas, documentation insérée parfois à l’état brut au point de menacer le roman dans sa définition générique. Il s’agit donc de s’intéresser au savoir médical de l’écrivain, acquis souvent par la lecture de petites revues ou de sources de seconde main, mais aussi de s’interroger sur le devenir d’une certaine déception à l’égard de la clinique, à partir d’À Rebours et de manière plus visible encore dans Là-Bas. Comment Huysmans offre-T-Il dans son œuvre à la fois une critique de la médecine et l’idée d’une physiologie des âmes, associée à l’image d’une Église thérapeute ? Comment la médecine, de référence naturaliste, devient-Elle l’expression du mystère d’un Dieu incarné ? Le sujet entend donc se situer à un nœud entre histoire des sciences et des idées, histoire de la littérature et connaissance de Huysmans lui-Même. / Studying relations between Huysmans (1848-1907) and medicine, it is looking over a paradox; the one of a writer who first was a naturalist strongly influenced by Zola and medicine whose method was at that time a model for writers. Despite a conversion into Catholicism, at the beginning of the 1890s, Huysmans writing is impregnated with pictures issued from physiology and medical vocabulary. These last two items are specific of the author style “the spiritualist naturalism” which is meant to tell the soul without excluding the flesh. We can notice, reading the biographical elements at our disposal, particularly letters, that Huysmans had an intimate knowledge of disease and acquaintance with doctors, as well as a real taste for medical documentation; this strong and particular taste didn’t fade, Huysmans will include medical sources and documents as they were, up to point of threatening, in his works, the very name of novel. The main interest will be focused on the writer medical knowledge built upon reading medical and scientific journals and sources. This work will also lead to question the path followed by Huysmans upon a certain deception about the clinic, starting with À Rebours and more obviously in Là-Bas. How can he offer in his novels a combination of a critical review of medicine and the idea of a soul physiology, these associated with the picture of the Church as a therapist? How medicine from a naturalistic point of view can become the way to express the mystery of an embodied God?The subject of this work means to locate itself at the crossing point between sciences and ideas history, literature history and knowledge of Huysmans himself.

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