The Simplest of Signs: Victor Hugo and the Language of Images in France, 1850-1950

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University of Delaware Press, 2004 - Literary Criticism - 217 pages
Must we learn how to read pictures? Or are pictures viewed, and texts read? If both pictures and texts are read, what theory accounts both for this reading and the manifest differences that exist between the two sign systems? In response to such questions, Timothy Raser traces the evolution of simple signs from the Romantic moment to the recent past, showing how a desire for direct signification informs both canonical Romantic texts and the art-critical texts of subsequent generations. Employing semiotic analyses, he isolates the devices used by poetry, plays, novels, and art criticism to produce effects of immediacy. So doing, he describes the rhetoric of art criticism as it evolved over the nineteenth century in France. The tropes of this genre are particular to it - resurrection is a favored metaphor - and these tropes, when deconstructed, explain arguments, evaluations, and choices that saturate the field. Timothy Raser is a Professor of French at the University of Georgia.
 

Contents

Introduction
13
Simple Signs in Hugo Dates Words Names and Facts
21
Limits of Performative Language in Hugos Theater
29
People Places and Apostrophe in Tristesse dOlympio
40
Revolution and AEsthetics
49
Hugos Textual Systems Antithesis Inscription Ekphrasis
61
Le Dernier Jour dun condamne
74
Reading and Refereince in NotreDame de Paris
87
Art Criticisms Narratives
123
The End of Citation in Baudelaires Art Criticism
134
Fromentin and Claudel
150
This Side of Words
163
Epilogue
188
Notes
192
Works Cited
208
Index

Literary Accounts of the Visual Arts Narrative Citation and Attribution
105
Reading and Denotation
107

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