Hugues Rebell, a Zarathustran disciple, a Zarathustran writer
Item
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Title
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Hugues Rebell, a Zarathustran disciple, a Zarathustran writer
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:a32cb17edc4c:10526
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identifier
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10629
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Creator
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Schlehlein, Melinda,
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Contributor
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Royal S. Brown
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Romance literature | Philosophy | 19th Century | French novel | French politics | Hugues Rebell | Nietzsche | perspectivism
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Abstract
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This dissertation seeks to give Hugues Rebell, born Georges Grassal (1867-1905), the attention he deserves but has not yet received from the Anglophone world as a fin-de-siecle essayist and novelist whose writings are as distinct within the French literature of the period as they are distinctive as some of the first to be inspired by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. A descendent of aristocrats and grands bourgeois in Nantes, Rebell took up in writing the rebellion that his penname signified, a rebellion against the socio-political systems that his family dreaded and that the Third Republic represented, or, those that originated in the French Revolution: egalitarianism, and its expression in democracy, socialism, and Christianity.;I establish early that given Rebell's privileged reception of Nietzsche over his French contemporaries, he was able to form an original understanding and interpretation of Nietzschean thought. In so doing, Rebell, as I contend, does not borrow Nietzsche's ideas wholesale but rather uses them to authenticate his own aesthetic in two main areas: in politics and in fiction, each of which is the focus of Parts I and II, respectively.;Part I shows how Rebell's political thinking both develops and deviates from Nietzsche's elitism, and also distinguishes itself from that of his extreme-Right French cohorts. Part II shifts the focus from Rebell's nonfictional political writing to one of his most neglected novels, La Femme qui a connu L'Empereur that I argue should be recognized in a special place within the history of the French novel and as an example of great Nietzschean fiction, as it can be seen to exhibit amazing synchronicity with the theory of perspective considered at the levels of character development, narrative structure, and French History rewritten as a story. In both Parts, I strive to make salient my contention that, like Nietzsche's writings, Rebell's pose irresolvable inconsistencies that render any attempt reduce the author to a one-sided position---whether political or other--- impossible. I connect Part II to Part I primarily by suggesting that there are at least two Rebells: the perspectival novelist whose multi-voiced narrative opposes the fascist political thinker.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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French
