The festival of degeneration: Body, carnivalesque and naturalism in Zola and Dostoevsky

My doctoral dissertation "The Festival of Degeneration: Body, Carnivalesque and Naturalism in Zola and Dostoevsky", is a comparative study of works by Zola and Dostoevsky that considers the themes of carnival of passion, murder, parricide and national identity. I ask how the rules of the carnivalesque, set up in these works, transform and interfere with their system of naturalism and vice versa. My point is that sometimes the additional discourses that constitute the opposition to the main aesthetic system of the novel, as is the case with naturalism and carnivalesque, are used by the writers to resolve some important problems within the major economy of their work. In my first chapter, I consider the position of the body in The Idiot and Nana and the impact of the sublime on the movement of carnival. In my second chapter, I study the body put to the experiment of murder in Crime and Punishment, La Bete Humaine and Therese Raquin. In my third chapter, I argue that the problem of parricide in the system of Dostoevsky and Zola is resolved in two opposite ways despite the fact that both of them use simultaneously the categories of carnival and naturalism in their novels The Brothers Karamazov and La Terre. In my fifth chapter I compare Dostoevsky's approach to the concepts of nation and nationalism with Zola's arguments about degeneration in La Debacle.;My first argument is that the co-presence of different discourses in these novels shows a specific nature of representational sign in the art of this period supporting the theory of mimesis proposed by Joel Black. The representation at the end of the XIXth century becomes an entre-representation characterized by variability of representational sign whose integrity is visible through constant repetition of its different facets. Naturalistic discourse and carnivalesque can be viewed as these different interacting disguises of one representational sign.;My second argument involves a discussion with Bahktinian theory of non-violent polyphonic author whose ideological position, according to Bahktin, can not be articulated in this type of novel. My point is that the close reading of works by Zola and Dostoevsky gives us the possibility to develop this theory and to consider a hero's body as a final non-articulated sign in the new semiotic system of polyphonic novel through which one can decipher the author's point of view.;My third argument concerns the nature of violence in carnival. The comparative analyses of these novels not only allows to include the concept of violence rejected by Bakhtin into the carnivalesque, but it also shows the specific role of violence inside it. Violence becomes the essential force that assures circular movement of carnival in which violence is first imposed on the hero pushed to the crime and in which a physical torture of his body afterwards eliminates a temporary end to the development of carnivalesque.