An Obscure Man by Marguerite Yourcenar is the novelist's heritage to posterity. By Yourcenar's own admission, it constitutes her spiritual and literary testament. In this novel, her poetics of self-effacement reaches its culminating point, where Nathanael is portrayed as a protagonist free of any constraints because he exhibits no desire or ambition. The author paints a character who incarnates a constant passive state. But by doing so, one could argue that it is the work of fiction itself that is put into question, as Nathanael's triviality and insignificance --- hence his exemplary conduct --- represents a great threat to the novel as an ontological entity with its own set of rules. And so we ask: for a writer whose aesthetics are closely tied to ethics, particularly to those higher values of lucidity and humility peculiar to Yourcenar's philosophy, does the novel still have a claim to existence? In other words, if there is no illusion, what is left of the novel?
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.116007 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Allnutt, Vanessa. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Département de langue et littérature françaises.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 003134605, proquestno: AAIMR66942, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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