Sandy Petrey - Böcker

Sandy Petrey here looks at the emergence of nineteenth-century French realism in the light of the concept of speech acts as defined by J. L. Austin and as exemplified by the history of the French Revolution. Through analysis of the techniques of representation in works by Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola, Petrey suggests that the expression of a truth depends on the same collective forces necessary to change a regime.According to Petrey, political legitimacy in the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration was established by means of a series of demonstrations that what words say cannot be interpreted without reference to the community to which they speak. Petrey first discusses the creation of France's National Assembly in 1789 as a foundational example of how speech acts can bring about historical transformation. He then challenges the most powerful twentieth-century assault on realist aesthetics, Roland Barthes's S/Z, and also considers the views of such contemporary critics as Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, and Stanley Fish. During the Revolution, Petrey says, statements of truth were not descriptions of what was, but rather exhortations to produce what was not. Nineteenth-century French fiction represents in literary form a similar collectively authorized linguistic performance; the "real" in realism comes from representing facts not as they are in themselves but as they are produced and rejected in society. In the course of illuminating readings of three central realist works—Balzac's Pere Goriot, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, and Zola's Germinal—Petrey takes the position that the dilemmas of representation, far from being one of realism's blind spots, figure among its major narrative subjects.

The period 1830–1832 witnessed a remarkable series of cultural and political milestones in France. In 1830, a revolution overturned one monarchy, only to replace it with another. In 1831, Charles Philippon's caricature of Louis-Philippe, the new monarch, as a pear achieved extraordinary popularity. Drawn on walls from one end of France to another, the pear caricature became a national obsession. In that same year, George Sand moved from the provinces to Paris and challenged gender stereotypes by adopting men's clothes and writing fiction in a man's voice. During 1830–1832, Stendhal and Balzac developed the techniques of the realist novel that still dominate much of the world's fiction. Sandy Petrey explores the factors accounting for such consequential innovations in so short a time, so restricted a space. In Petrey's view, these disparate events betoken a common recognition of society's capacity to make and unmake what it recognizes as real.Petrey's first two chapters explore the popularity of the pear caricature. The remaining chapters focus on Balzac, Stendhal, and Sand, addressing these writers' concern with society's power to define and transform the identity of its members. For Petrey their work continually recalls the hybrid character of Philippon's pear, both totally unlike the king and the king's spitting image. While the French government declared the July Revolution a nonevent and the July Monarchy an incontrovertible fact, French fiction concentrated on society's power to declare an individual a nonperson or to make presence out of absence, plenitude out of emptiness.

This book, first published in 1990, combines an introduction to speech-act theory as developed by J. L. Austin with a survey of critical essays that have adapted Austin's thought for literary analysis. Speech-act theory emphasizes the social reality created when speakers agree that their language is performative - Austin's term for utterances like: "we hereby declare" or "I promise" that produce rather than describe what they name. In contrast to formal linguistics, speech-act theory insists on language's active prominence in the organization of collective life. The first section of the text concentrates on Austin's determination to situate language in society by demonstrating the social conventions manifest in language. The second and third parts of the book discuss literary critics' responses to speech-act theory's socialisation of language, which have both opened new understandings of textuality in general and stimulated new interpretations of individual works. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics and literary theory.