Word: flaubert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...recognize in ourselves the temptation that Paz meant--the liberating flash of decision, the mad, giddy flight. The spectacle of such love is bracing, even when scandalous and self-destructive--or perhaps because of that. In Emma Bovary's case, Flaubert pursued the story past the giddy dash to a sadder place down the road (dead end, suicide...
With his voluminous poetry reckoned in, Hugo's effect on French literature exceeded anything short of the Bible itself. Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier all stood in his shadow, along with foreigners like Dostoyevsky and Conrad. In the words of English scholar Graham Robb, whose brilliant new biography, Victor Hugo (Norton; 682 pages; $39.95), does for this sublime windbag what George Painter did for Proust 30 years ago, Hugo was "a one-man education system through which every writer had to pass...The story of Hugo's influence after death is the story of a river after it reaches...