Clothes In The Awakening

Les Lumières were the first actors to play a fundamental role in my interest in the novel’s core value as a social testimony of the human world. In fact, studying the French Enlightenment throughout my education was respectively a true turning point and an inspiration for my approach to the novel as being both a major prop for the philosophical search of the self, and a potent political tool that contributes in shattering the status quo. In the light of this perception of literature, pursuing an English M.A. after completing a French B.A. will allow me to broaden my cultural and literary perspectives, and to study how British and American nineteenth and twentieth century first-person narratives, whether they be autobiographical or autofictional,
The author-narrator of the novel steps back from his own self to strip down his narrative to an emotional and psychological bareness, which provides the reader with the possibility of either judging the narrator, empathizing with him, or even identifying with his confessions and neuroses. Concurring with the subjective scope, this past semester’s “Littérature et Société” (“Literature and Society) course has introduced L’Espoir by André Malraux. Although a third-person narrative, L’Espoir sparked my interest because it addresses the malleable author/narrator dichotomy that generated Malraux’s testimony of the Spanish Civil War. Attending the “Journée Malraux” colloquium around Jean-Claude Larrat’s new publication Sans Oublier Malraux has encouraged me to start researching the question of the self in literary works. However, the text lacked a political dimension, and reading Dr. Gisèle Sapiro’s “Politicizing the Literary Field During the Inter-War Period” chapter in Signés Malraux linked my sociopolitical interest with the art of literature by addressing how the Dreyfus affair between 1894 and 1906 was a pivotal event for the literary world of the early twentieth century. Professor Sapiro describes how French authors turned back to their spiritual
What is the core position of the author within her society when she writes her novels and how does this intertwining transpire from her relatively fictional works? Since the author voices her own experience of the world, and given that the readership is entangled in a Backhtinian “chain of speech communication” that allows them into an identification process, how does this process lead the readers to be in concert with the author’s hidden intentions, and ultimately bring them toward an uprising? My initial corpus would be constituted of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and its postcolonial re-writing Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. Nonetheless, I am expecting these avenues to develop under the advisorship of Villanova’s esteemed English