The Politics and Poetics of Ekphrasis in Nineteenth-Century French Art Novels
of a dissertation at the University of Miami. Dissertation supervised by Professor David Ellison. No. of pages in text. (227) This dissertation explores how literary descriptions of visual artworks affect the narrative and descriptive fabric of a text. The novels I examine operate on three textual levels: the painter's creative struggles, his amorous entanglements with his model and/or the painted women of his canvas, and his aesthetic claims to revolutionize painting. My project argues that ekphrasis is a translational mode that takes two forms: the traditional, "contained" description of a visual artwork; and a mode of writing that pervades the entire text and emulates the characteristics of painting. For example, Balzac's "Le Chef d'œuvre inconnu" and the Goncourts' Manette Salomon successfully adopt the ekphrastic mode of writing, transforming the narrative into a canvas where the boundaries between the media are blurred. On the other hand, Zola's L'Œuvre exploits ekphrasis in order to advance the superiority of literature over painting. At the heart of these Realist and Naturalist texts, the fundamental adherence to the mimetic principle of art is confronted with the nonfigurative experiments of their fictional painters. The female body, as the embodiment of Art and the manifestation of the artist's desire, becomes the symptom of his incursion into abstract painting and the site of the resistance to ekphrasis. Acknowledgment I owe many thanks to my committee members, family, and friends, without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. I would like first and foremost to thank my dissertation director, Dr. David Ellison, for having been a dedicated mentor and advisor throughout my years at the University of Miami. His careful readings, timely feedback, and his intellectual guidance have been invaluable to the completion of this work. I would like to thank Dr. Ralph Heyndels for his continued support. From classes taken with him to informal and formal discussions about this work, Dr. Heyndels’ ability to ask the right questions, point to the gist of the matter, and see beyond the words on the page have been an inspiration. My most sincere thanks go to Dr. Barbara Woshinsky, a careful, attentive, and enthusiastic reader of this dissertation, who helped me edit and refine my arguments. I am also most grateful to Dr. Rebecca Brienen for agreeing to work with me on this project. Her intellectual rigor was challenging and she raised important questions that pushed me to think outside my box. All the faculty and staff at the University of Miami have been kind and generous, helping with administrative and intellectual matters; in particular Directors of Graduate Studies Dr. Gema Perez-Sanchez and Dr. Elena Grau-Lleveria, as well as Keyla Medina. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Jan Hokenson, my mentor and advisor at Florida Atlantic University. Her support and encouragement during my M.A. years gave me the confidence I needed as a student and her love for literature and literary analysis inspire me to this day.
Anamorphic Realism: Veridictory Plots in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Henry James
ESSAY IDENTIFIES AND EXPLORES a prominent plot pattern in realist fiction, a "structure of knowing" that I propose to call anamorphic by analogy with the practice of anamorphosis in visual art. In what follows, I demonstrate how this pattern functions as an immanent critique of some of the basic presuppositions underlying the narrative-ideological shape of the realist novel. I also situate this formal figure within the wider field of novelistic conceptions of socialization, distinguishing the anamorphic plot from the plots of desiring ambition, dialogic perspectivalism, and ascent to maturity in order to show how it exposes the sinister obverse of these "enlightened" narratological principles. First, however, a few words are in order about the nature and extent of the anal-
NUMBER OF TRIANGULATIONS OF A MÖBIUS STRIP
Consider a Möbius strip with n chosen points on its edge. A triangulation is a maximal collection of arcs among these points and cuts the strip into triangles. In this paper, we proved the number of all triangulations that one can obtain from a Möbius strip with n chosen points on its edge is given by 4n−1 + (2n−2 n−1 ) , then we made the connection with the number of clusters in the quasi-cluster algebra arising from the Möbius strip.