Tuesday, April 25, 20174:30 PM
236 Royce Hall
For half a century, literary theory has borrowed from a dark and damp room on the ground floor of a Flaubert story, a barometer Roland Barthes nicknamed l’effet de réel. For Roland Barthes, its pure presence, incongruity and superfluity in the text reeked of bourgeois fetishism and realism’s descriptive excess. 10 years later, in Camera lucida, he renamed punctum this pure presence without a function or a meaning, and entrusted it to embody the poignant trace of l’avoir-été-là. Recent critical interventions (Compagnon, Rancière, Milner, Fludernik, Jameson) on Barthes, realism or the paradoxes of pictural, literary and philosophical detail have not questioned the automatic identification of the original barometer with insignificance. It might be time to do so. What does Flaubert’s barometer actually measure?
Anne Garreta is a French novelist and a member of the experimental literary group Oulipo. She also teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies.
Cost : Free and open to the public. RSVP not required for admission.
Related Document:
Apr25---Anne-Garreta-lecture-ym-0tn.pdfSponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, French and Francophone Studies