Zola et le roman viril

Zola and the Manly Novel is a survey of how stereotypes and sexual representations come to the heart of the discourse that the novel formulates on itself. The resurgence of a normative and agreed diction of the feminine is even more fascinating when it comes to nestle in the heart of an officially progressive speech: it is precisely because the Zolian novel is a text of the great difference that it seems to us of such a remarkable actuality. If Zola defends the widow of a miner and the orphan of the Parisian pavement, the language, this capricious instrument, lets us filter with obstinacy a refrain of assignments and prohibitions that he sometimes shares with the most reactionary of his adversaries. For the men and women of our century, confronted with the overlapping of egalitarian principles and the trivialization of everyday misogyny, his novels are formidable prolegomena to critical deconstruction. It is a manual of vigilance that is proposed here; he relies on one of the richest texts, the most fascinating by his very paradoxes, of French literature to develop a methodology for mistrustful reading.--Honoré Champion.