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Neophilologus (2014) 98:2340
DOI 10.1007/s11061-013-9347-3
Michael G. Kelly
Published online: 9 March 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
Abstract This article explores certain implications of the intertextual connections between two canonical French novels, Mme de Lafayettes La Princesse de Clves (1678) and Raymond Radiguets Le Bal du comte dOrgel (1924), with particular emphasis on the question of literary individuation as it applies to the later work and its author. The functional importance of exemplary model works in respect of the modern French literary eld is examined in the context of challenges to notions of literary tradition and transmission in the inter-war years. Radiguets literary individuation is seen as both practically enabled and theoretically problematised by the connection to the earlier text. The individuation process, complicated additionally in this instance by Radiguets literary and personal association with Jean Cocteau, is argued to unfold with respect to a classical imaginary that is facilitated by but independent of the actual classical intertext.
Keywords Literary individuation Intertextuality Classical imaginary
French inter-war novel La Princesse de Clves Raymond Radiguet Jean Cocteau
UN JEUNE HOMME NE DOIT PAS ACHETER DE VALEURS SURES
(Cocteau, Le Coq et lArlequin (1918))
The evolving discussion of intertextuality within literary studies (Bassnett 2007) informs a diversity of contemporary critical reading practices. This article focuses on a particular kind of legitimising relationship to an archetypal intertext from within the historical canon of a national literary culture. In this respect, its main interest is not on the actual functioning of one or other primary text in that
M. G. Kelly (&)
School of Languages, Literature, Culture and Communication, University of Limerick, Plassey, County Limerick, Irelande-mail: [email protected]
Model Behaviour: Cocteau, Radiguet and La Princesse de Clves
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intertextual relationship, but on the broader question of literary individuation as it arises in respect of the later work, as both enabled and problematised by its connection to the earlier one.
1. Dialectics of literary exemplarity
Literary individuation coheres around the gure of the individual author, a gure (along with its philosophical and ideological underpinnings) with which modern literary practice is engaged in an ambivalent relationship. As developed by Pierre Bourdieu (1992), the theoretical model of the literary eld exists as an account of individuation within which the...