2005 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Jules Renard : Literary Work in His Later Years in vis-a-vis His Political Career
| Project/Area Number |
15520179
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
ヨーロッパ語系文学
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| Research Institution | Osaka Kyoiku University |
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Principal Investigator |
SUMITANI Hirobumi Osaka Kyoiku University, Professor, 教育学部, 教授 (00127341)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2003 – 2005
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| Keywords | Jules Renard / Chitry / Jean Jaures / villagers / Humanite / Pastoral Poetry / politics / literature |
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| Research Abstract |
Jules Renard (1864-1910), while continuing to write, was elected a member of the council of the neighboring village of his hometown Chitry-les-Mines in 1900. Then, in 1904, he became a member of village council of Chitry itself, and then the chief of this village. He was reelected as mayor in 1908 and devoted himself to the public office until his death. I wanted to analyze the two dominant desires in the autumn of Renard's life: his attempt at enlightening the backward villagers via politics, and his ardent and essential desire to write serious literature-even for a living. To date, I have written three papers on this topic.
In the first two papers, I attempted to focus on his friendship with Jean Jaures, the founder of the French Socialist Party, and recognized the profound influence of this outstanding orator on Renard. In particular, in his "Pastoral Poetry" (Bucoliques, the second edition, 1905) and in his "Mots d'Ecrits" (1908), one can see in both his victorious campaign and his aspiration as moral leader of the village to spread the spirit of the republic to the villagers. The source of both of these can be traced tojaures. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that five of nine short stories added in the second edition of "Pastoral Poetry" were originally published in "Humanite," the newspaper of the French Socialist Party, whose editor was the same Jean Jaures. The French statesman Jaures was then a key influence on Renard.
I also intended in the third paper to compare Renard with other local writers from the same region from the point of view of the conflict between the above two desires. Unfortunately, however, there was not enough time to elaborate on this. Thus, I limited myself to translating into Japanese his lecture on the most original writer and thinker Clamecy ever produced : Claude Tillier.
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