2007 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
The Theme of the "Memory" and the Representation of the "Crowd" in Nineteenth century French Literature
| Project/Area Number |
16520167
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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 | Aoyama Gakuin University |
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Principal Investigator |
TSUYUZAKI Toshikazu Aoyama Gakuin University, College of Literature, Professor (50180055)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2004 – 2007
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| Keywords | identity / city / modernisation / crowd / memory / autobiography / community |
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| Research Abstract |
Since the late eighteenth century, Western society see the modernization accelerate through political centralization, generalization of the market economy, and cultural standardization. In France, these phenomena are unanimously observed in Paris. Its most striking aspect would be perceived, in a urban "crowd", as a transformation of the traditional human relationships and, especially, as a demolition of the ethos of traditional communities. What activate the "Romanticism" as a rich and strong ideolgical reaction is this consciousness of loss, specific to modern social experience. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideal community (in Nouvelle Heloise) as a utopian counterpart to the modern urban crowd, Chateaubriand's and Sainte-Beuve's self-isolation-authetification amid the crowd, Baudelaire's imaginative union with the multitude, each should be textual practices to relocate the Self in a modern society. But the crowd, when its image is given in such a topos as "desert d'hommes" (desert of human beings), must give a sense of the overwhelming reality, massive but unsubstantial. Another issue of the modernisation is, thus, the crisis of self-consciousness in front of the phantomized reality. Autobiographical texts of Rousseau and Chateaubriand show a way, by means of the mythical power of memory, to reestablish a self-narrative and to resolve this identity crisis. With Sainte-Beuve and Baudelaire, however, the identity remains problematic, and the memory unable to reunite the Self. Their poems (Joseph Delorme and Le Fleurs du mal) so remain foundementally the "critical" representation of modernity.
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