Word: flaubert
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...alive are his incantations today? In 1857, the same year Flaubert was prosecuted for the alleged obscenity of Madame Bovary, Baudelaire was fined 300 francs for "offending public morality" with Les Fleurs du Mai. The theme of Flaubert's novel-the bored-to-adultery housewife-is the stuff soap operas are made of 120 years later. Today, Baudelaire's tragically ignored poems retain their original capacity to lacerate the skin of the mind...
Enraptured Paris. The space is never real. Cornell's L 'Egypte de Mile, Cléo de Mérode, 1940, is not the Egypt seen by Flaubert, detachedly noting the gleam of his white socks at midnight on the Nile. Cornell had never been, or wished to go, to that Egypt. But in his mind the image of Cléo de Mérode, a courtesan who so enraptured Paris society in the '90s that even Proust is said to have murmured "Gloria in excelsis Cléo!" when she walked into Maxim...
Tales of George Sand's amours with Liszt, Heine, Balzac and Flaubert are also dismissed as apocryphal. With the record thus cleared, Biographer Cate dramatically details the involvements that his scholarship can verify-including affairs with Prosper Mérimeée, Alfred de Musset, Frédéric Chopin, one Italian surgeon, two French lawyers and an international assortment of young men who entered Sand's household as tutors for her two children, Maurice and Solange...
...stark misery of factory and tenement is assimilation into the elite through physical beauty and seductive charm, as the heroines of mass culture from Cinderella to Marilyn Monroe have discovered. Had De Sica treated the contradictions in Clara's self-awareness with the sardonic tone whose subtle pinpricks enabled Flaubert to deflate Madame Bovary's romantic illusions. A Brief Vacation might have been a penetrating analysis of the obstacles that inhibit working women's emancipation. Because it founders in its heroine's false consciousness instead the film is most realistic where it is least perceptive, as its unintended ironies subvert...
...saying anything like that. That's too presumptuous and naive to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else...I equate that with propaganda. I think that's a lower rank of purpose and value in your work. I believe in staying out, the way Flaubert does in his writing...