Allan H. Pasco

University of Kansas | KU · Department of French and Italian

After the Commune and the terrible defeat in the war of 1870, J.-K. Huysmans, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, and others created a kind of art based on hedonism, beauty, a refined style, and analogical (or metaphoric) structures. Flavoured with decay and death, their decadentism was fin-de-siècle, perhaps la fin du monde. In the midst of some posturing,...

“The Dying Patriarchy” turns to Balzac’s exploitation of La Rabouilleuse’s innovative narration to unveil the dire reality of a society dominated by the bourgeoisie, where virtue is unimportant, where only money matters. The unrolling narration exposes the dire results of generations of war that left fatherless young men who lack respect for truth,...

“L’Illustre Gaudissart” uses comedy to make significant points about “Nascent Capitalism.” The beneficent changes of the Industrial Revolution required the involvement of the entire society. Gaudissart is sent to the provinces to encourage the developmentally arrested provincials to unearth their assets and provide the financial liquidity desperate...

“A Provincial Muse, La Muse du department” signals Balzac’s effective treatment of both religious apostasy and marital adultery to castigate journalism and vilify financially backward provincials. The novelist exploits numerous elements, from the title that implicitly denigrates the role of the muse, to the derogatory names of people and places, to...

“Restoration Boneyard: Le Cabinet des antiques” illustrates the graveyard of France’s nobility. Making use of the timeworn device of the “roman à clé,” Balzac focuses on the old-line aristocracy buried in the provinces that has become inconsequential. As the aristocracy’s vacuity is revealed to Emile through the windows of the d’Esgrignon house, so...

In the “Conclusion,” Balzac, the proto-sociologist, used plots and several thousand believable characters to provide warp and woof for his sociological insights that describe society in detail. As themes coalesce and produce a vision, the Restoration/July Monarchy society, ideas are turned out in the guise of images, whether of relationships, plots...

La Vieille Fille focuses on “Empty Wombs” in the creation of this superb, comic novel. It plays on the declining capacities of the upper middle class, the feckless stumbles of phantom-like aristocrats, and the crass cruelty of the commercially driven bourgeois. Balzac wanted to show the suicidal despair of youth squandered by the gerontocracy, a so...

“The ‘Divine’ Comedy” of Eugénie Grandet exploits some of the results of the decisions to strip the church of all material property, if not all of its spiritual authority. Revolutionary dechristianization had infuriated many of the faithful, though Balzac understood that the Church’s real problems came from a competing religion that was strengtheni...

“The Tangible and the Intangible” turns to Le Curé de Tours. It tells the pitiable story of a country priest, who is incapable of divining the forces moving against him and thus loses the meager but tangible joys of his self-centered life. While burlesque always serves to ridicule, Balzac’s creation also envisages the French church after the Revolu...

In Ursule Mirouët, the reader traipses “Through the Glass Darkly” into the Scenes from Provincial Life. The novel begins with the vision of Levrault-Minoret, a malevolent giant, who unsuccessfully attempts to protect his self-centered, indigenous world from the fast-moving society of his day. He represents the provinces that are different in form a...

Illusions perdues develops Balzac’s view of “Aeries and Muck” in a society controlled by money. It tells the story of the close friends David, who invents a new kind of paper, and Lucien, who has considerable talent as a poet. Just as Paris and the provinces are irredeemably separate, a disjunction that must be overcome for France to move into the...

“The Gerontocracy and Youth” opens with Pierrette’s implicit promise of a joyous tale of young love, as Balzac exploits mock heroic in a desolate account of the abuse of the nation’s young by the elderly. Youth was everywhere frustrated, for avenues to positions where they might work the changes desperately needed by society had been closed. Pierre...

Victor Hugo's desire to reform both society and art marks all of his work, as one would expect of the leader of the Romantics. Determined to create a militant, utilitarian, literary work that was also aesthetic, he reformulated the fable in his attempt to reform society. His ‘Claude Gueux’ tells a pathetic tale that reveals the inadequacies of educ...

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in France were fraught with turmoil, and the populace was riven with insecurity, anguish, and fear. Writers repeatedly mention “the instability of everything!” as they seek a generative, foundational idea to explain both the causes of the contemporary topsy-turvy world and the future toward which t...

Melding the fields of literature, sociology, and history, this book develops analyses of the ten novels in Balzac's Scènes de la vie de province. Following the order of the novels projected in La Comédie humaine, Allan H. Pasco investigates how Balzac used art as a tool of social inquiry to obtain startlingly accurate insights into the relationship...

The extraordinary complication of Camus's La Chute creates what might be called an allusive complex, including numerous allusions creating various parallels and oppositions. If an allusion is “the metaphorical relationship created when an alluding text evokes and uses another” (Pasco), what makes it especially interesting in Camus's monologue is th...

: Revolutionary violence contrasted with preceding enlightenment thought. The characters in Balzac's Les Chouans (1829) were enveloped in frustration, aggression, and violence and personalize the author's lesson: Revolutions are destructive and inhuman. The novelist uses the love affair between Marie de Verneuil and Montauran to establish an antith...

Balzac was a master of allusion. He usually embedded his allusive patterns so seamlessly that, although they may work on the reader’s subconscious, they only call attention to themselves with great subtlety. While in most cases, as for example when he alludes to the female novelists Mme Girardin, Mme Guizot, and others in La muse du département, he...

Among the stories Barbey d'Aurevilly included in Les Diaboliques (1874), the most impenetrable has been 'Le Dessous de cartes d'une partie de whist'. Though the story follows the pattern of the others, the tale requires a fi rm grasp of Barbey's culture, whether the rules of the popular game of whist, his attitudes toward primogeniture, or, perhaps...

There are several things besides the pleasure of experiencing a masterpiece that should be noted on reading Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Most obviously, there is the asyndeton or absence of connectives, which is so pronounced that it takes considerable good will to believe that the work actually tells a story, despite the reappearance of...

It is easy to assume that the history of fiction begins in the earliest days of civilization. Human beings tell stories, after all. That is how we reiterate our meaning, how we understand reality, and how we amuse ourselves, though I admit that I am guessing that fiction has a long history. We really do not know, since so few stories remain from th...

In the past, novelists regularly exploited formats and techniques borrowed from other genres—whether from collected correspondence, memoirs, diaries, or other generic traditions. Eventually, in every instance, novelists’ pilfering came to seem hackneyed and was discarded. Of course, even today, writers continue to feel justified in taking devices a...

To say that the popular and critical reception of Flaubert’s La tentation de saint Antoine (1874) was mixed, as its appreciation continues to be, is to be generous. One has to wonder about the real stature of Flaubert, if, as many have believed, this novel resulting from a lifetime of work by a great writer is a failure, “a nineteenth-century liter...

The novel genre is appropriately named. Novelty rejuvenates it. As Grossvogel pointed out, however, “[T]he need for renewal is … constant.”1 When a technique has been exploited so often that readers expect whatever it is and does, it loses its lively novelty. It is true that worn-out devices can be effectively exploited because they are no longer a...

Pasco analyzes innovative nineteenth- and twentieth-century French works to suggest a definition of the novel, in all of its variations and difficulties: a relatively long, artistically designed, prose fiction. He permits literary aficionados to reevaluate novels through comparisons with other genres and both recent and former traditions.

Most graduate students in the humanities have the intelligence and insight required to publish outstanding studies, though, of course, they may lack the knowledge and persistence required of successful professionals. Whether or not they should publish remains an open question, with a number of issues that must be evaluated. Publication should be en...

Depuis la parution d’ À rebours , le roman décadent de J.-K. Huysmans, on critique sa« confusion, » ce qui attire l’attention sur son intrigue fautive. Si on lit cependant le romanavec Valéry selon la signification traditionnelle des symboles et avec Condillac d’après sathéorie bien connue des sensations, un cadre analogique paraît qui fait voir la...

Most graduate students in the humanities have the intelligence and insight required to publish outstanding studies, though, of course, they may lack the knowledge and persistence required of successful professionals. Whether or not they should publish remains an open question, with a number of issues that must be evaluated. Publication should be en...

After the end of the eighteenth century, Classicism would never again enjoy significant authority as a focused movement, though the values of clarity, precision, order and unity continued to be valued among the most outstanding Romantics, Realists, Parnassians and Symbolists, whether they admitted it or not. Though the terms ‘classic’ and ‘classica...

Felix Gaudissart, the main character and the prince of commis voyageurs, is the butt of a practical joke in this novel by Balzac, yet the true comedy mocks provincials who cannot move into the world of the aborning Industrial Revolution and are thus condemned to remain immured in their limited and stultifying way of life in a French province.

Balzac's La Rabouilleuse (1842) exploits an innovative plot structure to insist on the changes taking place in France, especially the way the middle class was crushing the outstanding young people that France so desperately needed. Plot centered novels usually follow the actions of a central character or group. In La Rabouilleuse everyone and every...

Balzac's La Rabouilleuse (1842) exploits an innovative plot structure to insist on the changes taking place in France, especially the way the middle class was crushing the outstanding young people that France so desperately needed. Plot centered novels usually follow the actions of a central character or group. In La Rabouilleuse everyone and every...

While it is always desirable to develop new archives, it is especially important for late eighteenth century France. A number of cultural historians have suggested that our sense of historical reality would be augmented if it were infused by the information provided by art and literature. The last half of the eighteenth century gives reason to beli...

Flaubert talked repeatedly of 'un nouveau plan' he was creating for the last version of La Tentation de saint Antoine (1874). This design remains puzzling despite the work of superb critics. It may be possible, however, to gain further understanding by paying particular attention to the many references to the Christian Triune God and to Athanasius,...

During a time in which academics experience increasing pressure to publish, it is all the more important that a potential author understand the nature of academic publishing. An experienced author-editor summarizes thefundamental questions involved in the search for a publisher and explores the important rules - written and unwritten - that govern...

French Forum 26.3 (2001) 27-42 Despite its popularity, if one can consider successive paperback editions an indication of popularity, Balzac's Pierrette (1840) has had remarkably little attention from critics and scholars, no more than passing references and a very small handful of introductions and studies. These professional readers have frequent...

This work brings together seventeen papers originally presented at the nineteenth annual Colloquium in Nineteenth-Century French Studies held at the University of Kansas in 1993. Contributors include well-known critics as well as younger scholars working in the field.

Illustrations, viii Acknowledgments, ix Conventions, xi Introduction, xii 1 Moving, 1 2 The Unrocked Cradle, 31 3 Doddering Paternities, 54 4 The Unheroic Mode, 84 5 Incest in the Mirror, 109 6 Death Wish, 134 7 An Ending: Julien among the Cannibals, 157 Notes, 179 Bibliography of Primary Sources, 217 Bibliography of Secondary Sources, 225 Index, 2...

Balzac's monumental work, La Comedie humaine, consists of a wide range of novels, stories, and other writings which, he maintained, were to be read and understood as a whole. In this illuminating study Allen H. Pasco explores the work's unifying elements which lend weight to Balzac's claim. Pasco articulates the principles against which he measures...

During a time in which academics experience increasing pressure to publish, it is all the more important that a potential author understand the nature of academic publishing. An experienced author-editor summarizes the fundamental questions involved in the search for a publisher and explores the important rules - written and unwritten - that govern...

A study of Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Le Rideau cramoisi" and Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir provides insights into the functioning of allusion as an artistic device. Barbey, with his use of Stendhal's masterpiece, was probably appealing to a group of ardent stendhaliens forming as early as the 1850's. Where a feeling for the rather equivocal reactions...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1968. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 274-278). Photocopy.