french lit metamorphosis: quiz 3

week 9: who is this man?

what is a summary of balzac’s sarrasine?

• At a Paris party, a narrator is asked to explain the identity of a mysterious, almost ghostlike old man in attendance, and he responds by recounting the tragic story of a young French sculptor named Sarrasine.

• Sarrasine travels to Rome to study art, where he attends the opera and becomes completely captivated by a performer named La Zambinella, whom he believes to be the perfect embodiment of feminine beauty and grace.

• Consumed by obsession, he studies her appearance and movements in detail, creates a sculpture inspired by her, and passionately declares his love, attempting to pursue her romantically despite her evasive behavior and subtle warnings that something is not as it seems.

• Sarrasine eventually discovers that women are forbidden from performing on the Roman stage, leading him to realize that Zambinella is actually a castrato, which shatters his idealized vision and fills him with a sense of betrayal and humiliation.

• Enraged by what he perceives as deception, Sarrasine confronts Zambinella and resolves to kill her, but before he can act, he is surrounded and killed by those protecting her.

• The narrator concludes the story by revealing that the strange old man at the party is in fact Zambinella, now aged, exposing the long-lasting reality behind the illusion that once consumed Sarrasine.

week 9: who is this man?

what is the “betwixt & between” in the structure of sarrasine as discussed in class?

• 1830: from Bourbon Monarchy (Restoration) to Orléans Liberal Constitutional Monarchy (July Monarchy)

• Aesthetically, the novel occupies a space between the Romantic period (mystery, Gothic atmosphere) and Realism.

• The novel’s opening emphasizes contrasts and intermediary points of view: narrator’s physical position, time, outdoor/indoor, darkness/light, death/life, ugliness/beauty, masculine/feminine, etc

  • one foot in one foot out

  • midnight

week 9: who is this man?

what is an important detail when considering zabinella’s background in sarrasine?

• zabinella is a victim, but is still very rich

  • how far do you extend this empathy? does it change the way the story should/can be viewed

  • he sacrificed his free and gender identity in the name of art

  • balzac is empathetic to the cruelty

• the way zabinella dresses is very outdated

  • men’s fashion shifted to a more neutral style, yet he’s still dressed up

week 9: who is this man?

what is the narrative structure of sarrasine?

• Sarrasine contains two narratives: a frame narrative set around 1830, and an embedded narrative whose central episode takes place in 1758.

• The narrator of the frame narrative ("I") is himself a character within the story (intradiegetic narrator). He describes the Lanty soirée from his own point of view (internal focalization)

• The narrator of the embedded narrative is the same as that of the frame narrative, but he is no longer a character within the story (extradiegetic narrator)

  • At the beginning of the embedded narrative, the narrator is omniscient; however, starting from the first encounter between Sarrasine and Zambinella, the narrator describes the action exclusively from Sarrasine’s point of view (internal focalization), while occasionally interjecting general observations.

• Making the narrator a character within the fiction encourages the reader to consider the motivations—or the intent—that drive an individual to produce a narrative.

• The narrator of Sarrasine tells a story—about the identity of the subject of a painting they see in a boudoir—to a woman with the aim of obtaining sexual favors. Both parties are fully aware of the game being playe

week 9: who is this man?

what is the danger of navigating life soley through artistic training, as seen done by sarrasine?

• ladder of love: hierarchical structure of love

  • lust/desire for bodies at the bottom → physical attraction

  • intellectual, understanding the nature of said attraction → god?

• artists are to capture the ideal beauty by using imagination

• sarrasine fails because his perception is only through his senses

  • limits of perception then translates into betraying his reality

  • naive young man who knows nothing about love

  • sees zambinella as his artistic training ideal

• sarrasine has no (negative) experience with love, so basing his entire relationship with zambinella on nothing, just superficials

  • projects his anger on Zambinella and blames him for his mistakes

week 9: who is this man?

what is sublimation?

The sexual drive places extraordinarily large quantities of energy at the disposal of cultural work; this is due to the drive’s particularly marked capacity to displace its aim without essentially losing any of its intensity. This capacity to exchange the original sexual aim for another aim—one that is no longer sexual, yet remains psychologically related to it—is termed sublimation

week 9: who is this man?

what is the main question the narrator is trying to answer? and what are some real artistic references?

“What is the connection between this story and the little old man?”

• The connection consists in a series of artistic metamorphoses:

  • 1758: Cicognara, Zambinella’s patron, acquires the statue sculpted by Sarrasine.

  • 1791: The fictional Lanty family commissions the real-life painter Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809) to use the statue as inspiration for a fictional painting of Adonis, the mortal lover of the goddess Venus (Aphrodite).

  • The real-life artist Anne-Louis Girodet (1767–1824) subsequently uses Vien’s painting as a model for an existing painting, The Sleep of Endymion, the mortal lover of the goddess Diana (Selene, Artemis)

• goes back to when the painting is brought up in the story:

  • the story is to answer the woman’s question of “who is that man?”

  • and yet she still doesn’t get it

  • the connection exists of metamorphoses

    • gives her an art history lesson—why?

    • because the painting is zambinella that she sees/is interested in

week 10: kafka’s metamorphosis in context

what is a summary of kafka’s metamorphosis?

• Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up one morning to find that he has inexplicably transformed into a giant insect, immediately worrying not about the transformation itself but about missing work and disappointing his demanding job and family.

• His family—especially his parents and sister Grete—are initially shocked and horrified, struggling to communicate with him and gradually isolating him in his room while relying on him less as a provider and more as a burden.

• As time passes, Gregor becomes increasingly alienated: he loses his ability to speak, his human habits fade, and his family’s attitude shifts from concern to resentment, with Grete eventually taking on the role of caretaker but growing frustrated and disgusted.

• The family’s financial situation worsens without Gregor’s income, forcing them all to work and take in boarders, while Gregor is neglected, injured, and confined, symbolizing his complete loss of status and identity within the household.

• After a disturbing incident in which the boarders see Gregor and react with outrage, Grete insists that the family must get rid of him, declaring that he is no longer truly her brother.

• Weak, rejected, and fully isolated, Gregor retreats to his room and dies quietly, after which his family feels relief rather than grief and begins to look forward to a more hopeful future without him.

week 10: kafka’s metamorphosis in context

what does nabokov say about the way in which audiences interpret kafka’s metamorphosis? (and some of his other notes)

“If Kafka's ‘The Metamorphosis’ strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great readers”

“You will mark Kafka's style. Its clarity, its precise and formal intonation in such striking contrast to the nightmare matter of his tale. No poetical metaphors ornament in his stark black- and-white story. The limpidity of his style stresses the dark richness of his fantasy. Contrast and unity, style and matter, manner and plot are most perfectly integrated.”

• pushed his students to think about the morals

• he doesn’t believe the metamorphosis is a symbol of religion

  • symbol of three is an aesthetic and logical significance

  • 3 lodgers, 3 parts, 3 members of the family…

  • just suggests fabrication!

week 10: kafka’s metamorphosis in context

what is “ungeheures Ungeziefer” in german and why is it significant to the story?

“The German term ungeheures Ungeziefer is famously ambiguous because it does not refer to a particular insect or animal per se but in a general way to harmful, parasitic animals, especially insects and rodents, to bugs, fleas, lice, and beetles. The etymology of Ungeziefer shows an early connection to pagan sacrificial animals (or, alternatively, to unclean animals unsuited for sacrifice) and to unclean or rotten meat, refuse, ang garbage. Note also the parallel structure of the German terms: both use the negative prefix un- and the generalizing prefix ge-, which typically shifts a word from a particular to a collective meaning. Employed literally as well as metaphorically throughout its history Ungeziefer consistently refers to what is disgusting, damaging, or unclean.”

• the intro is deliberate, an attempt to confuse the reader

• even translators struggle

week 10: kafka’s metamorphosis in context

what is the reality effect?

According to Roland Barthes, the “reality effect” in Realist works of fiction depends on the reader’s expectation that the literary work affirms the contiguity between the text and the concrete real world. Objects often appear in Realist works of fiction solely to signify “this is real”

In fairy tales, objects have “extra value,” “the unreal elements, be they allegorical names of human cockroaches, set up a kind of electric field; the most trite and prosaic detail brought into that field glows with extra meaning.

• can think of gregor’s bedroom: type of bed isn’t given, but objects listed in the room aren’t absurd—seems to be coherent?

week 10: kafka’s metamorphosis in context

what is the significance of the picture on the wall in gregor’s bedroom?

• image on his wall alludes to Venus in Fur, the term Masochism was coined from it afterwards

  • protagonist “gregor” in this book is subservient

  • both novels focus on degradation of male figure into submission/subhuman or objectified state

  • does this image suggest something about kafka’s gregor psychology?

    • likely yes, maybe representing a dream life? opposite of his now

week 10: kafka’s metamorphosis in context

what is the significance—or lack thereof the bed, table, picture, window (objects in gregor’s room)?

these objects do not have a fixed or clear symbolic meaning, they “glow with extra meaning” because they enter the “electric field” caused by the irruption of a supernatural element in a realistic setting.

• window is place next to his “ideal image”

  • his reality is bleak: it’s a rainy day!

  • ironic contrast/juxtaposition

week 10: kafka’s metamorphosis in context

how do all the doors in the samsa house allude to the family’s complexities?

• the family exists in a space that’s divided

• door can be an opening—or an obstacle

  • not a symbol, but an instrument conveying the complexity

—

• when gregor was in the military service, he has visible respect

  • but as a traveling salesman, his service is invisible

  • the image of him in uniform represents another submission to the system

• when his mom and sister clear out his room, he wants to save the picture

  • charged with weird energy

  • literally clinging onto his dream

week 10: kafka’s metamorphosis in context

what are driscoll’s four main points and main argument in his analysis?

1. Distinction between voice (human) and phone (sound, animal): Acteon loses his voice

2. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is full of voices, some of them clear, others muffled; it is when Gregor stops to be intelligible that he loses his humanity

3. For the metaphor to function, the metamorphosis must remain indeterminate (193)

4. The end of the story suggests that the family members exist also in an undetermined zone between humanity (logos) and animality (phone)

main argument:

“the language of The Metamorphosis reveals the categories of human and animal to be arbitrary and inherently unstable (this, more than anything, is what links Kafka’s text to the tradition of the literary metamorphosis).”

week 10: kafka’s metamorphosis in context

how does straus approach kafka’s metamorphosis?

• Straus proposes a feminist gender analysis of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, a text she considers multivalent and inexhaustible

• She focuses on Grete’s metamorphosis from a sister shaped by conventional gender stereotypes to a future bride with power and agency.

• Grete’s transformation is inversely proportional to Gregor’s (zero-sum game): the more power and agency she acquires, the less power and agency Gregor keeps.

• “we must distinguish between masculine writers and writers who are male; we should acknowledge Kafka's discomfort with the male role and with a language symbolically "owned" by a male literary establishment. As a prophet of the complexities engendered by "the woman question," Kafka's text, fortunately, no longer delivers a message only to (alienated) men”

week 11: ionesco’s rhinoceros in context

what is a summary of ionesco’s rhinoceros?

• In a quiet provincial town, ordinary citizens begin noticing bizarre events when a rhinoceros suddenly runs through the streets, initially dismissed as a rare accident but soon followed by more sightings that unsettle the community.

• The protagonist, Bérenger, an apathetic and somewhat disoriented man, watches as his more rational and confident friend Jean insists on logical explanations, only for Jean himself to gradually transform into a rhinoceros, signaling the first clear breakdown of human identity.

• As the phenomenon spreads, more townspeople—including colleagues, intellectuals, and neighbors—succumb to “rhinoceritis,” transforming physically and psychologically while beginning to justify or embrace the change as natural or even superior.

• Bérenger becomes increasingly isolated as he refuses to conform, witnessing society’s collapse into herd mentality, where human individuality is replaced by aggressive, mindless collective behavior symbolized by the rhinoceroses roaming the town.

• By the end, nearly everyone has transformed, and despite his fear and self-doubt, Bérenger ultimately resolves to resist the transformation and remain human, standing alone against the unstoppable tide of conformity.

week 11: ionesco’s rhinoceros in context

what is a syllogism?

an instance of a form of reasoning in which a conclusion is drawn (whether validly or not) from two given or assumed propositions (premises), each of which shares a term with the conclusion, and shares a common or middle term not present in the conclusion (e.g., all dogs are animals; all animals have four legs; therefore all dogs have four legs.)

week 11: ionesco’s rhinoceros in context

what is theater of the absurd?

Dramatic works of certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early ’60s who agreed with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus’s assessment, in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of purpose.

The term is also loosely applied to those dramatists and the production of those works. Though no formal Absurdist movement existed as such, dramatists as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter, and a few others shared a pessimistic vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose and to control its fate. Humankind in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and anxious.

Language in an Absurdist play is often dislocated, full of cliches, puns, repetitions, and non sequiturs. The characters in Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950) sit and talk, repeating the obvious until it sounds like nonsense, thus revealing the inadequacies of verbal communication. The ridiculous, purposeless behaviour and talk give the plays a sometimes dazzling comic surface, but there is an underlying serious message of metaphysical distress

week 11: ionesco’s rhinoceros in context

what is bennett’s argument in his analysis?

“I argue that Esslin based his understanding of the plays he characterized as absurd on two significant misreadings:

1. Esslin mistranslates and miscontextualizes a quote by Eugene Ionesco, which

Esslin uses to define the absurd,

2. Esslin misread Albert Camus as an existentialist. As such, Esslin posits that the Theatre of the Absurd contemplates the ‘metaphysical anguish of the absurdity of the human condition’.

I will suggest, instead, that these texts, rather, revolt against existentialism and are ethical parables that force the audience to make life meaningful. Ultimately, I arguethat the limiting thematic label of Theatre of the Absurd can be replaced with an alternative, more structural term, ‘parabolic drama’”

week 11: ionesco’s rhinoceros in context

how does bennett understand ionesco?

“For Camus and Ionesco, the absurd was a situation, but not a life sentence of destined meaninglessness or a comment on the world. True, life might not have any inherent meaning, but this stems not from the world, but from the contradiction between our desires and what the world offers us. However, even given the absurdity of this situation, it is up to us, through our defiance, revolt, and contemplation, to make our lives meaningful.”

week 11: ionesco’s rhinoceros in context

what is a parabolic drama?

1. Parabolic drama is created through metaphor

2. Parabolic drama is also performative in that it has an agenda of Transformation… For example... We question whether or not we would be able to take on the onslaught of rhinoceritis.

3. Gestural and lingual metonymic paradoxes are used frequently

4. There is a move toward disorder that results in a hanging dilemma that needs to be interpreted by an audience. One has just to think of rhinoceritis

5. the plot first orients the audience and then disorients

week 11: ionesco’s rhinoceros in context

how does lane describe the characters in the play?

• Bérenger : “a derisory antihero; a well-meaning but inept weakling with a drinking problem” (122) Ionesco: “He must be as comic as he is moving, as distressing as he is ridiculous… One has to be able to regard [him] with a lucidity that is not malevolent but ironical” (cit. in Lane 123)

• Jean: “a fastidious, overbearing pedant” (111), ”zealous conformist… bully... racist” (112)

• Daisy: “a young blond typist” (Ionesco, p. 6)

• Dudard: “ambitious, well-educated and self-possessed young man who is Bérenger’s rival for Daisy’s affections” (111)

• Botard: “an ideologue, a left-wing activist who sees conspiracies everywhere and claims to know the secret behind the sudden appearance of the rhinoceroses” 113

week 11: ionesco’s rhinoceros in context

how does daisy think differently than the rest of the characters?

• her job is a typist: job is to write what she hears and not to think!

  • so she falls for the propaganda

• all the other characters overthink, and at the same time—audience is supposed to / forced to ponder an ending

• berenger is an interesting hero, as he represents out thought process—inner workings of inner conflict

week 11: ionesco’s rhinoceros in context

what is humanism vs post humanism?

humanism: an outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems.

post humanism: Posthumanism is a philosophical perspective of how change is enacted in the world. As a conceptualization and historicization of both agency and the “human,” it is different from those conceived through humanism. Whereas a humanist perspective frequently assumes the human is autonomous, conscious, intentional, and exceptional in acts of change, a posthumanist perspective assumes agency is distributed through dynamic forces of which the human participants but does not completely intend or control.

week 11: ionesco’s rhinoceros in context

how does morizot coin posthumanism?

“This ubiquitous theme in twentieth-century literature and philosophy, which foregrounds the cosmic solitude of human beings, a solitude elevated to grandeur by existentialism, is intriguingly violent. Under cover of the heroism of Camus’s absurdity, under cover of having the courage to face the truth, this violence is a form of blindness that refuses to learn how to see the forms of existence of others, negating their status as cohabitants, postulating that in fact they have no communication skills, no ‘native senses,’ no creative point of view, no aptitudes for finding a modus vivendi, no political prompting”

week 11: ionesco’s rhinoceros in context

how does the metamorphosis act as a catalyst?

catalyst: a person or thing that provokes or speeds significant change or action

• in this story, each metamorphosis pushes the story forward, and each represents something different

• nature is viewed as a baseline? catch all word for an agenda

  • nature vs morality don’t have to be in opposition, this is created by Jean

  • “boys will be boys” , “survival of the fittest”

  • used as a way to justify something unjust

  • humans think in an individual sense: humans seperate from animals, humans separate from nature

• jean is a victim of his own ego

  • satisfying to watch his metamorphosis as a punishment

  • feeds into the herd mentality

• berenger believes in going back to “humanism”

  • at the end, berenger realizes he doesn’t speak the same language as the rhinos

  • we must conform, but how much?

  • split and divide to understand own groups only