Word: flaubert
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...centuries of Ottoman rule had reduced the City of God to a crumbling Levantine village of no more than 15,000 inhabitants (slightly fewer than half of them Jews). "Jerusalem is mournful and dreary and lifeless," Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad. "Everything in it is rotting," said Gustave Flaubert, "the dead dogs in the streets, the religions in the churches." Today, after a turbulent sequence of British, Jordanian and Israeli conquests, after years of sporadic bombings and gunfire, this beautiful and richly diverse city is vibrant with growth and prosperity...
What we hear in Tolstoi or Flaubert or Dickens or Proust, wrote Novelist Mary McCarthy, "is the voice of a neighbor relating the latest gossip." Literature coalesces out of base gossip, from Suetonius to Boswell's Journals to Diana Trilling's new account (Mrs. Harris) of the Scarsdale Diet doctor's murder...
...that even a tabloid subject causes when drawn across a perceptive and deeply cultured intelligence. Where newspaper readers saw the case as little more than an upper-middle-class rendition of Frankie and Johnny (he done her wrong. Bang! Bang!), Trilling sees a drama worthy of the talents of Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She also teases out enough class conflict to spin a dark web of one of egalitarian America's most sensitive subjects...
...realism of a Flaubert, a Manet, a Degas thought not. This kind of realism was expository, not didactic. It did not aim to show things as they might be-the argument of political art - but as they actually were. Its model, often invoked by Flaubert, was the objective procedure of scientific thought, and its aim was to produce a perfectly limpid art in which the world would be mirrored. There is everything in common between the relentless detail in which the boredom and pointlessness of Emma Bovary's life was built up, and the minutely articulated jumble of reflections...
This change is not imaginable without the intellectual permissions and opportunities for irony given to bourgeois artists by a bourgeois society. Under such a dispensation, art claimed the same rights as the sciences that Flaubert took as a Literary model: in particular, the right not to be understood too quickly or by too many. Unpopularity and marginality - "uselessness" - gave the new work of art a chance to develop its resonances before it faced the full stress of public inspection...