Hokenson, Jan W.

Critical studies of the arts in Marcel Proust's La Recherche situate the text's many references to art works and artistic genius in a triadic structure of "the three arts": painting, music, and literature. Yet the theater and theatrical references reinforce many of the themes and signifying networks running throughout the text. Theater functions as an art form equivalent to Elstir's painting or Vinteuil's music, and Proust dramatizes in La Berma his crucial distinction between person and artist. In the social aspects of the actress's life, Proust constructs resonant parallels with the societal and familial conduct of his characters and their interactions, just as the brilliant theatrical performances of classical French dramatic roles onstage by La Berma essentialize the "mecanismes de la vie sociale" in the fictive world outside the theater. In short, theater functions crucially and continuously at all levels of the text, from basic components of story to meta-levels of discourse.

Although both Zola and Dickens represent the precarious situation of the lower classes of society (workers, miners, and peasants), and that representation is similarly constructed at the level of both characters and narrative, Zola's characters engage in an active endeavor to change their social conditions while those of Dickens are more resigned to their circumstances, and are rather oriented toward individual moral accomplishment. The tones of the discourse of the characters, closely reflects the implicit political posture of the narrators, in Zola's Germinal and La Terre, and in Dickens's Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend . Both writers oppose social injustice, while leaving the reader toward differential solutions, politico-economic in Zola and socio-moralistic in Dickens.

Unlike the courtesan of romantic fiction, depicted as a sentimental and pitiful victim of social mores, the courtesan of French realism is rendered through the eyes of the nineteenth-century male bourgeois as a commodity to be consumed. Her body is objectified and fetishized, just as is her milieu of pleasure designed as legitimate compensation for the social delimitation of sexuality to reproduction. Through different direct and indirect narrative modes, Balzac as well as Flaubert and Zola often dehumanize, even demonize the courtesan for her power over male senses, overtly rendering her a scapegoat for society's decaying values and an open threat to patriarchal control over financial patrimony, the family, and the church.

The art novel or roman sur les arts is a major trend of nineteenth-century novels: the Goncourts' Manette Salomon (1867) and Zola's L'oeuvre (1886) in French literature, Poe's "The Oval Portrait" (1850) and James's "The Madonna of the Future" (1875) in American literature, emphasize the figure of the artist painter and attendant aesthetic problem. The texts explore the painter's relationship to his art and to his model, unfolding along dual trajectories of plot and subplot, or creative struggles with the canvas and amorous entanglements with the model and especially her representation in painting. To disarticulate the triangular relationship between artist, model, and work of art is to show that the governing elements of this triad is the gaze. The painter's gaze at the model and her double, that is her representation on canvas, is the guiding line for his ability to create. Analysis of the relations between the female model and her aesthetic counterpart reveals how femininity and art are perceived in the art novel.

Stefan George, one of the few literary self-translators, rendered two of his original English and three of his original French poems into German. These self-translations may serve as case studies for the problem of "equivalence" in literary as well as linguistic and cultural terms. Recent translation theories (e.g. Rose, Pym, Fitch) problematize the overlap or the interliminal space between languages, cultures, literary traditions, and texts. Rather than binary-based source-target models, recent theory helps elucidate equivalence in George. Indeed only a self-translation can reveal how the many micro-adjustments made in linguistic and literary succeed in rendering the semantic content of the original and in comparison establish a perfect functional and stylistic correspondence with comparable effects in the two languages. Thus, such expressions as his "own language," or his "own culture," traditionally used by his critics to refer solely to German, are inappropriate to George's oeuvre.

In histories of European Modernism, it is almost axiomatic that the first performance of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris in 1910 was an aesthetic watershed, culminating earlier experiments by Symbolists and Cubists and forecasting later Modernists' radical syntheses of French arts and literature. Yet the role of French writers in the productions of the Ballets Russes has been neglected by literary critics and historians. Nijinski's choreography of L'Apres-midi d'un Faune stands as the theatrical culmination of Mallarme's poetic. The ballets Sheherazade and The Rite of Spring find a counterpart in the literary work of their admirer Proust, and Cocteau's achievement with the Ballets Russes in Parade serves as apprenticeship for his own later literary work while pointing the way to Surrealism and other avant-garde movements in France.