Jacques Chessex : : Calvinism and the Text / / David Bond.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Archive 1933-1999
• VerfasserIn: Bond, David,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©1994
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: University of Toronto Romance Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (212 p.)

Despite an impressive body of poems, novels, short stories, and literary criticism; high praise for his writing by French and Swiss critics; and a collection of honours that includes the prestigious Prix Goncourt, awarded for his novel L’Ogre in 1973, Jacques Chessex is relatively unknown outside France and Switzerland. With this book, David J. Bond provides the first comprehensive study of his work in any language—a study that reveals Chessex’s deep ambivalence towards his Calvinist heritage and his efforts to resolve this dilemma through his texts.Born in 1934 in Payerne, in the region of French-speaking Switzerland known as the Vaud, Chessex grew up amid the pervasive influence of the Calvinist church. His writing, which tells of Vaud society and the hypocrisy of many of its leading members, reveals his preoccupation with a rigid morality, sin, remorse, and death. Bond shows that while Chessex uses his texts to escape this heritage and affirm alternative values, particularly sexual pleasure and enjoyment of life, his writing reveals a deep nostalgia for the stability and security of a strict religious system in a world that he finds unstable and even absurd without it. Chessex looks to the text as a univocal organizing principle that might impose order and sense. Bond sees in Chessex’s writing an attempt to find unity in opposing values, to establish contact with others, and to overcome an obsession with death and the passing of time.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: Some Preliminary Considerations -- 2. The Calvinist Heritage -- 3. The Nature of Calvinism -- 4. The Ambiguities of a Calvinist -- 5. The Valley of the Shadow -- 6. Les Justes -- 7. The Affirmation of Life -- 8. The Flight from Calvinism -- 9. Division and Unity -- 10 The Text as Unity -- 11. The Text, the World, and Others -- 12. Death, Memory, and the Text -- 13. Conclusion: Religion and the Text -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index