Off-campus UNL users: To download campus access dissertations, please use the following link to log into our proxy server with your NU ID and password. When you are done browsing please remember to return to this page and log out.
Non-UNL users: Please talk to your librarian about requesting this dissertation through interlibrary loan.
Representation in Flaubert's "Salammbo": Subjectivity actualized
Abstract
Flaubert has often been viewed as a Realist whose oeuvre underscores the tenuous nature of the mimetic enterprise. This study attempts to show how $\underline{\rm Salammb\ o}$'s fictionality is achieved through the internal referential workings of the narrative. The extent to which the text reveals its autonomous status simultaneously discloses the author's attitude toward perceived reality and its expression. In the Carthaginian novel, distribution of descriptive elements, seemingly posing as exotic faits de civilisation, is based on their potential to generate fictional closed-circuits, anticipating and reflecting on the action. The artistic manipulation of Moloch's pictorial depiction facilitates the representation of a violent world, and engenders, via the recurrence of motifs that are metonymically related to the idol and his setting, a sacrificial reading of the text (Part I). Integration of Phoenician legend in the narrative, establishing the mystico-sexual context underlying male-female attraction, reveals the significant contribution of myth for the rendition of psychology (Part II). The notion that reality originates within a specific mode of vision is demonstrated in and through the narrative. On the thematic level, the events mirror the imagined dimension of the characters' subjective perspective; on a textual level, form mirrors content via the writer's progressive blurring of factual and figurative discourse. Part I demonstrates how the characters' distorted point of view constitutes the fictional foundation of the developing action. Part II posits Salammbo's involvement in the plot by Schahabarim as the eunuch's mythologization of the action. In the novel, the representation of the Mercenaries thematizes the unreliable nature of language (Part III). Spendius's successful instigation of the revolt, based on his rhetorical ability and on his infiltration of an existing structure, emerges as the duplication of the Barbarians' exploitation by Carthage. The transition between initial and actualized exploitation is marked by the slave's adaptation of language--in order to influence meaning--to the pictorial sign system with which the Barbarians are familiar.
Subject Area
Romance literature
Recommended Citation
Kropp, Sonja Dams, "Representation in Flaubert's "Salammbo": Subjectivity actualized" (1994). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9513718.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9513718