| The following study seeks to fill two lacunae, one in the theory of literature, the other in scholarship on Flaubert. Stylisticians and literary theoreticians have inadequately examined the relationship between free indirect discourse and irony, and there exists no intensive study of the ironic potentialities of free indirect discourse in Flaubert's fiction. Criticism purporting to shed light on the subject generally suffers from a failure to define its terms in relation to existing theories of irony and point of view. Accordingly, this study evaluates the pertinent arguments in the fields of ironology and narratology, and brings the fruits of that analysis to bear on a model text, Madame Bovary. The result is an enhanced understanding of Flaubert's literary craft as well as a greater flexibility and accuracy in the theoretical constructs themselves.;Chapter Two situates free indirect discourse within a general poetics of irony, point of view, and narrative voice. It also anticipates typologically ambivalent cases of free indirect discourse by introducing a univocal permutation of the properly bivocal technique.;Chapter Three explores comprehensively the semantic range of Flaubert's free indirect mode--any technique whose grammatical features and proximate verbal context suggest free indirect discourse. This mode often equivocates between free indirect discourse and the narration of inarticulate mental activity. Sample passages are referred to stylistic, structural, and thematic contexts for an irony which underscores the arbitrariness of connotative and referential naturalizations in the romantic code and, by implication, in language at large.;Corrective irony in Madame Bovary enters directly into Romantic Irony, leading the reader from a story about the gap between discourse and the world to the experience of that gap in Flaubert's text itself. Chapter Four locates the cognitive shift from polemical irony to Romantic Irony, and from Romantic Irony to the final disarticulation of the sign, within Flaubert's metaphysical esthetic of immanence and transcendence, mimesis and designification.;A rhetoric of Verbal Irony, Chapter One distinguishes Verbal and Situational Irony, defines the peculiar nature of irony's pragmatic and semantic components, and examines the often elusive signals of irony. |
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