Dans la chronique Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide, Marcel Proust interprète le parricide et le suicide d'Henri van Blarenberghe comme un événement tragique et exemplaire. Chez l'écrivain, le parricide n'était pas une bête barbare, mais un homme très gentil, délicat et aimable. Cette polémique conception du crime est soutenue par la comparaison avec des oeuvres d'art comme Guerre et Paix, Roi Lear, Orestie et, principalement, OEdipe-roi. La culpabilité est une caractéristique des personnages cités par Proust, mais, ils sont encore exemplaires. La juxtaposition de Proust entre le crime et la littérature révèle une singulière vision sur le parricide et sur la nature de l'amour filiale. Qu'est-ce qu'est le parricide chez Proust ? Comment la comparaison entre Henri van Blarenberghe, une personne, et OEdipe, le personnage tragique, est possible ? Quelles sont les caractéristiques de l'OEdipe soulignés par Proust dans son interprétation ? Comment la relation entre un fils et ses parents est construite ? Donc, ce travail analyse et interprète Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide le but de découvrir la signification du parricide chez Proust, à partir de l'intertextualité du personnage OEdipe et les affinités de la chronique avec autres oeuvres de Proust. Ainsi, ce travail cherche une compréhension plus large e de la réception du crime dans les journaux français ; l'analyse du thème du parricide ; la proximité de la chronique avec le thème des mères profanées ; la conception de Proust sur le personnage OEdipe ; et la comparaison de l'OEdipe proustien avec autres interprétations du personnage. / Na crônica Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide, Marcel Proust interpreta o matricidio e o suicidio de Henri van Blarenberghe como um acontecimento trágico e exemplar. Segundo o escritor, o parricida não é uma besta atroz, mas um homem extremamente dedicado e amável. Essa polêmica concepção do crime e do assassino é sustentada pela comparação com obras literárias trágicas: Guerra e paz, Rei Lear, Ájax, Oréstia e, principalmente, Édipo-rei. Todos os personagens evocados por Proust têm o sentimento de culpa, no entanto, eles ainda são grandiosos. A justaposição de Proust entre o crime e a literatura revela uma singular visão sobre o parricida e sobre a natureza do amor filial. Qual o significado do parricidio na crônica? Como a comparação entre Henri van Blarenberghe e Édipo é possível? Quais são as características de Édipo destacadas por Proust em sua interpretação? Como é construída a relação de um filho com seus pais? Portanto, o trabalho analisa e interpreta Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide com o propósito de decifrar o significado do parricídio na crônica, a partir da intertextualidade com o personagem Édipo e as afinidades do texto com elementos selecionados da obra de Proust. Assim, o presente trabalho analisou a repercussão do crime nos jornais franceses; o tema do parricídio; a aproximação da crônica com o tema da profanação das mães; a concepção de Proust de Édipo; e o confronto do Édipo proustiano com outras versões do mesmo personagem.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, gaslight supplanted the candles and oil lamps that had brightened Europe and America for centuries, and, by 1900, electricity would attain decisive dominance over both. In their narrative figurations of lighting, however, novels of the same period often arrest this march of progress, lingering in an Arcadian past organized around the rhythms of the solar day and the agricultural year. Mining works by Frances Burney, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Marcel Proust, and others, my dissertation argues that novelists employ obsolete lighting technologies not merely to provide historical texture, but to express narrative impulses that run counter to the realist mode, to dramatize transgressive forms of ambition within the rural communities they depict, and sometimes even to voice ambivalence about the commercial constraints of the serial form. Characters in these novels who avail themselves of artificial illumination alter the rhythm of the workday in order to satisfy desires inconsistent with the interests and pursuits sanctioned by their neighbors: by the light of lamps and candles, they pursue cross-class romance, literary aspirations, or professional goals that fall outside the parameters dictated by social class and the historical moment. For Proust’s narrator, this entails a series of adjustments to his evening schedule over the course of the Recherche, first to accommodate an aristocratic social calendar, and, later, to facilitate the nocturnal composition of his own novel. In Eliot’s case, the inclination to stay awake after nightfall—whether the illicit romantic fantasies of a Hetty Sorrel or the workmanlike resolve of an Adam Bede—constitutes a meaningful challenge to the author’s narrative realism. By examining the formal innovations these technologies provoke in nineteenth-century fiction, my research unearths a pervasive counter-realist tendency in novels often famed for their fidelity to the protocols of realist representation.

This dissertation examines how Marcel Proust presents and uses different speech styles in A la recherche du temps perdu. The narrator of the novel analyzes how almost everyone he encounters speaks and consistently bases his decisions about how to interact with others on his evaluation of their speech mannerisms. I argue that, through the narrator’s observations, Proust emphasizes the role of the socioindexicality of speech, or how the way a person speaks communicates their social identity, in mediating social relations. I begin by presenting the narrator’s comments on how social status is interpreted through the way that people speak. Then I turn in the second chapter to how the narrator’s understanding of what factors determine a person’s speech mannerisms changes over the course of his life. The third chapter argues that the narrator has a sustained interest in how people use speech to perform different identities and shows how his investigation into the reasons these performances succeed or fail informs Proust’s own technique of using different speech styles to create fictional characters in his novel. The last chapter discusses how Proust’s Jewish and gay characters adapt how they speak to avoid or overcome discrimination. In each of these chapters, I show how, in A la recherche, the way social identity is interpreted and performed through speech causes individuals to take on different identities. I argue that, through the narrator’s comments on this phenomenon, Proust demonstrates how it affects the structure of society while also studying the way it can be used to create fictional characters in a novel.

This thesis explores the role of Nihilism in Oscar Wilde's thought and writing, beginning with the depiction of Russian Political Nihilism in Wilde's first play; Vera, or the Nihilists and tracing the engagement with philosophical Nihilism in his fiction, drama and essays, up to and including De Profundis. It is argued that Russian Political Nihilism derives from the same sources and expresses the same concerns as the philosophical Nihilism discussed by Nietzsche in The Will to Power, and that Nietzsche and Wilde, working independently, came to a strikingly similar understanding of Nihilism. Philosophical Nihilism is defined in two ways; as the complete absence of values (Absolute Nihilism) and as a sense that, while absolute values may exist, they are unattainable, unknowable or inexpressible (Relative Nihilism). Wilde uses his writing to express Nihilism while simultaneously seeking aesthetic and ethical counterforces to it, eventually coming to see Art and the life of the Artist as the ultimate forms of resistance to Nihilism. Wilde's philosophical views are examined in the context of his time, and in the light of his exceptionally wide reading. He is compared and contrasted with Nietzsche, the philosopher who has done most to shape our view of what Nihilism means, in his ethical and aesthetic response to Nihilism. The conclusion also considers the reception of Wilde's expression of Nihilism and his employment of Art as the only superior counterforce in the first half of the twentieth century, with particular reference to the works of Gide and Proust. Their engagement with Nihilism is explored both in historical context and as a way of addressing a problem which has become uniquely pervasive and pressing in the modern era.

This Master's thesis consists of two separate parts: Le vent dans les voiles, a travel fiction, is followed by a short essay, Le voyage comme archeologie de la memoire. / Le vent dans les voiles is both a travel fiction and a short apprenticeship novel. Julien Legare, an idealistic young man, is fond of Jim Morrison and Zarathoustra . As he is travelling in Europe, his dreams of intellectual and emotional liberation are breaking down to pieces. Disillusion eventually leads him to a new vision, beyond childhood nostalgia. / The essay is a mythocritical analysis of three Twentieth Century novels by Le Clezio, Proust and Gabrielle Roy: Le chercheur d'or, A la recherche du temps perdu and La Route d'Altamont . These books have in common the themes of travel, memory and creation. The three protagonists all long for the lost paradise of their childhood, thus they search for their origins. Travelling in space and time, on the outside and inside themselves, they become archaeologists of their own memory, digging for forgotten treasures. Is remembrance a topos of travel literature?

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Western Ontario, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-115).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Western Ontario, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-101).

viii, 189 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / The question of the present study concerns the relationship between language and nature as it has been taken up in the history of Western philosophy. The goal of this study is to show how language and nature are held together by thinking the transition between them, through the figure of silence. I will show this by drawing primarily on the work of Merleau-Ponty, who, as a phenomenologist expressly concerned with the senses, the body, and language, attempted to describe and understand the passage between language and nature in a manner that could maintain their ontological continuity. Silence was the hinge of this passage, in which language, in its emergence from the silence of nature, turns back to disclose nature as already expression. Merleau-Ponty's late interrogation into how philosophical language might both emerge from and return to silence turned on the example of Proust's literary language. This study will also draw on Proust's meta-novelistic awakening to his literary calling, as it is recounted near the end of Le Temps Retrouvé, which discusses explicitly how Proust's language makes a turn through silence in order to emerge as literature. This provides an example of the emergence which Merleau-Ponty describes. I will then make the case that Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy can be read as the thinking of being as nature, and that it begins to think how language roots human beings in nature as it blossoms out of nature's soil. I will show how Merleau-Ponty repeats a structure of thought traversed by Schelling in his essay on freedom, which will further show how philosophical attention to language discloses nature as a radical excess. Finally, I will discuss how the negotiation between language, nature, and silence, as it is practiced by Merleau-Ponty, Proust, and Schelling, is another turn in a long story of the human place in language and in nature, a story which is at least as old as the mythical thought of ancient Greece. / Committee in charge: Peter Warnek, Chairperson, Philosophy; Naomi Zack, Member, Philosophy; Ted Toadvine, Member, Philosophy; Jeffrey Librett, Outside Member, German and Scandinavian

Dans la chronique Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide, Marcel Proust interprète le parricide et le suicide d'Henri van Blarenberghe comme un événement tragique et exemplaire. Chez l'écrivain, le parricide n'était pas une bête barbare, mais un homme très gentil, délicat et aimable. Cette polémique conception du crime est soutenue par la comparaison avec des oeuvres d'art comme Guerre et Paix, Roi Lear, Orestie et, principalement, OEdipe-roi. La culpabilité est une caractéristique des personnages cités par Proust, mais, ils sont encore exemplaires. La juxtaposition de Proust entre le crime et la littérature révèle une singulière vision sur le parricide et sur la nature de l'amour filiale. Qu'est-ce qu'est le parricide chez Proust ? Comment la comparaison entre Henri van Blarenberghe, une personne, et OEdipe, le personnage tragique, est possible ? Quelles sont les caractéristiques de l'OEdipe soulignés par Proust dans son interprétation ? Comment la relation entre un fils et ses parents est construite ? Donc, ce travail analyse et interprète Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide le but de découvrir la signification du parricide chez Proust, à partir de l'intertextualité du personnage OEdipe et les affinités de la chronique avec autres oeuvres de Proust. Ainsi, ce travail cherche une compréhension plus large e de la réception du crime dans les journaux français ; l'analyse du thème du parricide ; la proximité de la chronique avec le thème des mères profanées ; la conception de Proust sur le personnage OEdipe ; et la comparaison de l'OEdipe proustien avec autres interprétations du personnage. / Na crônica Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide, Marcel Proust interpreta o matricidio e o suicidio de Henri van Blarenberghe como um acontecimento trágico e exemplar. Segundo o escritor, o parricida não é uma besta atroz, mas um homem extremamente dedicado e amável. Essa polêmica concepção do crime e do assassino é sustentada pela comparação com obras literárias trágicas: Guerra e paz, Rei Lear, Ájax, Oréstia e, principalmente, Édipo-rei. Todos os personagens evocados por Proust têm o sentimento de culpa, no entanto, eles ainda são grandiosos. A justaposição de Proust entre o crime e a literatura revela uma singular visão sobre o parricida e sobre a natureza do amor filial. Qual o significado do parricidio na crônica? Como a comparação entre Henri van Blarenberghe e Édipo é possível? Quais são as características de Édipo destacadas por Proust em sua interpretação? Como é construída a relação de um filho com seus pais? Portanto, o trabalho analisa e interpreta Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide com o propósito de decifrar o significado do parricídio na crônica, a partir da intertextualidade com o personagem Édipo e as afinidades do texto com elementos selecionados da obra de Proust. Assim, o presente trabalho analisou a repercussão do crime nos jornais franceses; o tema do parricídio; a aproximação da crônica com o tema da profanação das mães; a concepção de Proust de Édipo; e o confronto do Édipo proustiano com outras versões do mesmo personagem.

Dans la chronique Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide, Marcel Proust interprète le parricide et le suicide d'Henri van Blarenberghe comme un événement tragique et exemplaire. Chez l'écrivain, le parricide n'était pas une bête barbare, mais un homme très gentil, délicat et aimable. Cette polémique conception du crime est soutenue par la comparaison avec des oeuvres d'art comme Guerre et Paix, Roi Lear, Orestie et, principalement, OEdipe-roi. La culpabilité est une caractéristique des personnages cités par Proust, mais, ils sont encore exemplaires. La juxtaposition de Proust entre le crime et la littérature révèle une singulière vision sur le parricide et sur la nature de l'amour filiale. Qu'est-ce qu'est le parricide chez Proust ? Comment la comparaison entre Henri van Blarenberghe, une personne, et OEdipe, le personnage tragique, est possible ? Quelles sont les caractéristiques de l'OEdipe soulignés par Proust dans son interprétation ? Comment la relation entre un fils et ses parents est construite ? Donc, ce travail analyse et interprète Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide le but de découvrir la signification du parricide chez Proust, à partir de l'intertextualité du personnage OEdipe et les affinités de la chronique avec autres oeuvres de Proust. Ainsi, ce travail cherche une compréhension plus large e de la réception du crime dans les journaux français ; l'analyse du thème du parricide ; la proximité de la chronique avec le thème des mères profanées ; la conception de Proust sur le personnage OEdipe ; et la comparaison de l'OEdipe proustien avec autres interprétations du personnage. / Na crônica Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide, Marcel Proust interpreta o matricidio e o suicidio de Henri van Blarenberghe como um acontecimento trágico e exemplar. Segundo o escritor, o parricida não é uma besta atroz, mas um homem extremamente dedicado e amável. Essa polêmica concepção do crime e do assassino é sustentada pela comparação com obras literárias trágicas: Guerra e paz, Rei Lear, Ájax, Oréstia e, principalmente, Édipo-rei. Todos os personagens evocados por Proust têm o sentimento de culpa, no entanto, eles ainda são grandiosos. A justaposição de Proust entre o crime e a literatura revela uma singular visão sobre o parricida e sobre a natureza do amor filial. Qual o significado do parricidio na crônica? Como a comparação entre Henri van Blarenberghe e Édipo é possível? Quais são as características de Édipo destacadas por Proust em sua interpretação? Como é construída a relação de um filho com seus pais? Portanto, o trabalho analisa e interpreta Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide com o propósito de decifrar o significado do parricídio na crônica, a partir da intertextualidade com o personagem Édipo e as afinidades do texto com elementos selecionados da obra de Proust. Assim, o presente trabalho analisou a repercussão do crime nos jornais franceses; o tema do parricídio; a aproximação da crônica com o tema da profanação das mães; a concepção de Proust de Édipo; e o confronto do Édipo proustiano com outras versões do mesmo personagem.