| dc.description | When an author chooses to write a description, he or she introduces to a text not only a constructed referential object, but also the traditional features and conventional meanings which attach to descriptive discourse. The central question of this study is the following: if the descriptive form is in itself a signifier, what is that which is signified? In contrast to contemporary theories of description which take particular note of systemic lexical features of description, this study looks at description from a number of complementary perspectives. Description appearing in novels of French expression of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is studied from stylistic, discursive, pragmatic, semantic and poetic perspectives. This work suggests that description be considered as a macrostructural figure situated in the context of a rhetorical praxis. It is shown that the idea of description includes two opposing tendencies: the leaning towards semantic convergence seen in scientific discourse, and the leaning towards semantic divergence common to literary texts. After considering the nature of these differences, this study turns to the specific examination of novelistic description. Put forward here is the thesis that description may be usefully seen as a figure which performs the important function of introducing isotopies of alterity to the novel. It is seen as essential to orient the theory of literary description towards those semantic elements which are conventionally unrelated to the referential object being described, elements which are unrelated to the subject or topic of the description. Passages drawn from eight novels written by authors who describe with enthusiasm and imagination are then analyzed. Description, often neglected or disliked, is shown to offer to literary criticism a revealing point of entry for the analysis of the novelistic text. | en_US |
| dc.title | Semiolinguistique de la figure de la description: Gautier, Rachilde, Goncourt, Flaubert, J. S. Alexis, E. Glissant, Cl. Simon, Cl. Ollier. | en_US |
