Unwrapping Balzac : : A Reading of La Peau de Chagrin / / Samuel Weber.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Archive 1933-1999
• VerfasserIn: Weber, Samuel,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2019]; ©1979
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Heritage
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (192 p.)

This radically new reading of La peau de charin presents a case for Balzac as a modern rather than a traditional, realist writer. Using the principles and languages of Marx, Derrida, Freud, Barthea, and others who have contributed to a redefinition of modern criticism, Samuel Weber presents a detailed and intricate explication of the text that challenges all standard interpretations of the novel. Traditional readings of La peau de chagrin, and of Balzac in general, have pursued a message in the novel, a reality beneath the allegory. Weber demonstrates that Balzac's text can be grasped both as a mise en scène and as a play of representations that reflects no original truth, reality, or meaning beneath the text to which the representation can be referred and by which they can be authenticated. To unwrap Balzac in this manner is to discover that there is no thing inside, that there is only the 'wrapping.' Weber's conclusions are not only startingly original, but they also solve problems which have puzzled traditional readers of the novel since the earliest commentators of 1831. Unwrapping Balzac is a brilliant tour de force that will create controversy among Balzac scholars for years to come.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- 1. Introduction -- 2. 'La tres spirituelle epigraphe du livre... ' -- 3. Work and Play -- 4. The Entry -- 5. Postponement -- 6. The Store -- 7. The Truce of a Text -- 8. The Canard -- 9. A Burst of Laughter -- 10. Patrimony -- 11. The Broken Net -- 12. The Matrix -- 13. 'Ces riens qui ont tant de prix ... ' -- 14. Speculation -- 15. Going (for) Broke -- 16. The 'Dissipational System' -- 17. The Signature and the Voice -- 18. Antiphrasis -- 19. A Remark on Reading -- 20. Origen, or the Automat -- 21. Revue 1: The Perils of Pauline Raphael's -- 22. Revue 2: Diagnosis -- 23. Homecoming -- 24. Finale: Projection -- 25. Epilogue -- Postface: Et que devint S/Z? -- Notes -- Index of Proper Names