Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Comparative Literature

Advisor

André Aciman

Committee Members

Bettina Lerner

Giancarlo Lombardi

Subject Categories

Aesthetics | Comparative Literature | French and Francophone Literature | Reading and Language | Theory and Criticism

Keywords

Flaubert, Style, Modernism, Balzac, 1848, Novel

Abstract

This dissertation examines Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education as a key work in the emergence of literary Modernism from the tradition of Realism. I begin by exploring the intellectual background of Realism in the works of Honoré de Balzac and the ties between this aesthetic theory and the theory of representative government: here I discuss the work of François Guizot, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, J.W. Goethe, and Walter Scott as well as later thinkers like György Lukács, Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Rancière. From this, I demonstrate a commonly held theory of the social as a discreet totality, which makes its subtending objects legible to the knowing subject as types. Through close reading, I show how Flaubert anticipates and undermines the outlook of the knowing reader. With the absence of the authorial voice and through the use of free indirect discourse, Flaubert’s novel depends upon the readers’ typical vision of society and, at the same time, ironizes such a vision. Rather than the representational authority offered by Balzacian Realism–the claim that the novel is a reflection of the hidden moteur social–what Flaubert offers is a way of seeing commensurate with literary style, which inheres its historicity while overcoming it. In his depiction of the events of 1848, Flaubert shows the limits and corruptability of representational logic in the Second Republic. Finally, I argue that Flaubert’s way of seeing, style, can be seen as an ideal form of labor for its own sake, so that, rather than simply dismissing politics, Flaubert’s concept of style corresponds to struggles of a working class that, in 1848, began to speak in its own name.

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