Reading Realism in Stendhal

Cambridge Studies in French

by Ann Jefferson

This book poses the what happens when reading enters the realist process? and answers it by way of a critical study of Stendhal's writing. Ann Jefferson argues that a recognition of the role of reading in representation is particularly crucial to an understanding of Stendhal's realism, and her account includes substantial discussions of De l'Amour, Le Rouge et le Noir, the Vie de Henry Brulard and La Chartreuse de Parme. Her study also draws a number of illuminating parallels between Stendhal and aspects of modern critical theory, and uses them in order to reveal the high degree of sophistication and self-consciousness in Stendhal's writing, qualities which are attributed here to the intensity of his preoccupation with his readers. By focusing on the issue of reading in Stendhal this book not only proposes a reassessment of Stendhal's own work, but also opens up lines of enquiry on the critical problem that is realism.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published March 25, 1988

About the author

A.M. Jefferson is Emeritus Professor of French at New College, Oxford. She has written extensively on French literature, edited works by Stendhal and Nathalie Sarraute, and translated books by Pierre Michon and Éric Vuillard.

Reviews

[Peter Mathews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stendhal is the author of my favorite novel, The Red and the Black, and in the late 1990s I began work on a PhD dissertation examining the interconnection between nineteenth-century realism and postmodern theory. In some ways, Ann Jefferson's Reading Realism in Stendhal changed not only my critical perspective, but my whole life. You see, to that point, I had read Stendhal through the conventional eyes of the novel's translator (at the time, the older version by Margaret Shaw) in a way that painted him as a dull, tiresome realist.

Reading Realism in Stendhal taught me to be skeptical of such conventions in order to see the more radical and experimental aspects of what Stendhal was doing in his supposedly "flat" texts. Jefferson masterfully deploys the theories of Roland Barthes, in particular, to show the different codes at work in Stendhal's major works, in much the same way that Barthes himself does with Stendhal's contemporary, Honoré de Balzac.

I realize that it doesn't help that Jefferson's book has a plain and unpromisingly literal title, that its horrible orange cover makes it seem like a dull academic tome, that it focuses on a writer who is sorely underappreciated in the English-speaking world, and that its rarity and price can put it out of reach of all but the most enterprising reader (although a reissue of the book by Cambridge University Press in 2008 has helped). Nonetheless, reading Stendhal's remarkable works and having them illuminated by Jefferson's dexterous analysis has been one of the most important and pleasures intellectual adventures of my life.