Projet originel, projet créateur

: reading Flaubert's authorship in its contexts after Sartre and Bourdieu

Abstract

This thesis sets out to re-evaluate the contributions made to our understanding of the novels of Gustave Flaubert and the contexts of their production by philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, in L’Idiot de la famille (1971-1972) and sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, in Les Règles de l’art (1992). The former is a biography of Flaubert, which charts the origins and development of his projet originel, or his search for freedom through art, between the years 1821 and 1857. Bourdieu’s text, written partly in response to Sartre, comprises a sociological analysis of the development of Flaubert’s literary ambitions, or projet créateur, and his position as a novelist within the nineteenth-century literary field. Centring its analysis on four novels by Flaubert, Madame Bovary, the two versions of L’Éducation sentimentale, and Bouvard et Pécuchet, this thesis will explore the ways in which Sartre and Bourdieu can allow for renewed insight into the personal and socio-historical contexts of the writing of each text. Moreover, the critical engagement with each novel will demonstrate the fecundity in employing Sartrean and Bourdieusian theory as a framework for literary analysis. In doing so, this thesis will identify and fill a significant gap on critical discussions of Sartre’s and Bourdieu’s readings of Flaubert, wherein the presence of the author and his literary output has become largely absent. By positioning itself at the nexus of philosophical and sociological approaches to literature and history, this thesis shall thus endeavour to turn the critical focus of Sartre’s and Bourdieu’s Flaubert texts back onto the novelist and his works. Whilst the disparate approaches of biography and sociological field analysis suggest a critical tension between Sartre and Bourdieu on Flaubert, the analysis carried out in each chapter will identify key points of reconciliation between the two by employing a dual Sartre-Bourdieusian perspective to seek correspondences between the personal, socio-historical, and cultural contexts of Flaubert’s novels and their style, structuring and characterisation. This in turn will provide renewed insight into the evolution of Flaubert’s literary aesthetic, with the cross-reading of Sartre and Bourdieu allowing for a theoretical interrogation of the dispositions, attitudes, and behaviours of Flaubert’s protagonists within the historically and socially determinate positions they occupy in the context of France’s nineteenth century.

Date of Award	Jul 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium
Supervisor	Dominique Jeannerod (Supervisor) & Steven Wilson (Supervisor)