Word: flaubert
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...premise is intriguing: Scarry claims we imagine best when guided word by word, as in great literature. Whatever we imagine without this guidance is dull and unsatisfying compared to the detail and life our imaginings attain under the tutelage of Homer or Flaubert (two of Scarry's favorite examples). She claims that the "ordinary enfeeblement of images has a striking exception in the verbal arts, where images somehow do acquire the vivacity of perceptual objects, and it is the purpose of this book to trace some of the ways this comes about." Literature contains structures and formats that allow...
...world of literary criticism, as long as one can cite examples, one's ideas will have validity. Scarry quotes liberally from some authors (like Homer and Flaubert) and occasionally from other poets or novelists to support her airy-sounding ideas. But the skeptical reader's sensibilities will hesitate to accept these categories, mechanisms, formats, processes or other structures imposed upon the activity of imagination guided by words. Dreaming by the Book is a rather formulaic approach to an extremely free-flowing activity...
...Flaubert's last novel, Bouvard and Pecuchet, two middle-aged copyists come into an inheritance and move to the countryside where they try their hand successively at farming, medicine, archaeology, history, literature, spiritualism, gymnastics, education, philosophy and religion and manage to fail at each and every one of them before finally resolving, after 40 years, to return to their work as copyists...
Both characters are imbeciles. They read an entire library and get nothing out of it except the illusion of understanding. But, in the eighth chapter, in the most famous passage of the entire novel, Flaubert writes that "a lamentable faculty arose in their spirits, that of seeing stupidity and no longer being able to tolerate it. They were saddened by insignificant things: the advertisements in the newspapers, the profile of a bourgeois, a mindless remark overheard by chance...
...Richard C. Marius Prize in Expository Writing went to Haiwen Chu '02. His essay was entitled "Why Reread? Freedom, Flaubert, and a Parrot...