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This book is a study of Michel Tournier's collection of short stories, Le Coq de bruyere, but it is also much more. Author Walter Redfern sees the stories as a microcosm of the whole fictional universe of Tournier, widely regarded as France's premier living writer.
Michel Tournier is a writer who explores complex philosophical questions in the guise of concrete, imagistic narratives. This comprehensive study privileges the notion of literary reference, by which the world of text is understood or experienced in metaphorical relation to the world outside of it. Metaphor, in the context of Tournier’s fiction, shows how the fantastic merges with the real to provide new perspectives on many diverse aspects of the modern world: the Crusoe myth, Nazism, the value to society of art and religion, and the nature of education. This book elucidates an aesthetic of Tournier’s fiction that encompasses the writer’s stated ambition to ‘go beyond literature’.
This study of the fictional themes and techniques of Michel Tournier reveals his profound radicalism as a social critic and novelist despite the seeming conventionality of his works. Guided by Tournier's essays and interviews, Petit examines his fiction in light of plot sources, philosophical and anthropological training, and his belief that fiction should change the world. Close study of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique, Le Roi des aulnes, Les Meteores, Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, and La Goutte d'or, as well as the short fiction in Le Coq de bruyere and Le Medianoche amoureux, shows Tournier's revolutionary conception of plot structuring as he develops key themes, whether religion, sensuality, or prejudice, in more than twenty years spent reconceiving the nature of fiction.
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This first full-length study of the popular French novelist shows that his fiction cannot be understood simply as a literary transposition of philosophical ideas, and that, despite his opposition to the New Novel, he shares its assumptions about the subversive role of literature. Davis combines analysis of the major novels with discussions of Tournier's theory of reading, his attitudes toward language, and his preoccupation with the reconciliation of opposites.
Michel Tournier defines the supreme mission of a writer to be the creation of a mythology which allows for interaction with his readers, who seem to be losing their critical faculties in our contemporary, postmodern world dominated by consumption and dizzying technological advances. Our contemporary society has changed due to the end of the modern era with its reigning ideologies. Collapsing after the atrocities of the Second World War, Modernity and the artistic and literary reactions referred to as modernism, have likewise been transformed. Myth continues to represent the collectivity of human existence, yet, in the short stories and novels of Michel Tournier, myth represents the collapse ...
A collection of fourteen eerie tales that highlight mankind's secret yearnings and sense of destiny.
Unlock the more straightforward side of Friday with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Friday by Michel Tournier, a retelling of Daniel Defoe’s classic novel Robinson Crusoe. Like Defoe’s 1719 novel, Friday recounts the adventures of Robinson Crusoe after he is shipwrecked on a desert island, where he eventually comes into contact with a young native whom he dubs “Friday”, after the day they met. Although Robinson initially considers Friday an inferior, like in Defoe’s novel, he eventually develops a deep respect and friendship for him, and casts off the trappings of civilisation to live in harmony with nature. Michel Tou...
Best known in America for his 1970 novel, The Ogre (Le Roi des aulnes), Michel Tournier is arguably France's most important living popular author. Since 1980, however, Tournier has focused on making his fiction accessible to children, who now constitute his primary audience. Dr. Anderson focuses on the evolution of Tournier's writing style in terms of myth, initiation, and intertextual reference. He breaks new ground by demonstrating that Tournier's later works introduce young readers to initiatic structures and a ludic approach to reading, a key to the understanding of Tournier's adult works. It shows, too, the crucial role that initiation and intertextual reference play in unifying all of Tournier's fiction.