Text as proxy: Identity and the aesthetics of control in Andre Gide's works (France)

This dissertation focuses on the importance of difference for identity and the proxy link between text and self-construction in La tentative amoureuse, L'Immoraliste, Paludes and Les faux-monnayeurs . This leads me to two central concerns: (1) to overturn the predominant view, as in Lucien Dallenbach's work, which limits the specular mise en abyme technique to mere repetition of the same and (2) to argue that, when writing engages the differential structure of the self, it generates a tension between authorial interventions---which I term "the aesthetics of control"---intended either to open up interpretive possibilities or close them off.; Chapter 1 offers a new reading of the 1893 diary entry, in which I show that the dominant reading of the Gidean mise en abyme as repetition of the same is based in large part on the erroneous definition that Dallenbach made of it. I argue that the original Gidean mise en abyme relies upon difference in creating the play between sameness and difference it that effects. The second subsection of this chapter uses this insight to provide a new reading of La tentative amoureuse which illustrates themes concerning both aesthetics and identity. Chapter 2 uses the reflection on the fundamental tensions that the first chapter uncovers to analyze first the key hinge text in Gide's work, Paludes , then the ways in which the "anxiety of reception" found in it generates complex moves both to control and release control in L'Immoraliste and Les faux-monnayeurs. In this last work, I analyze the ways in which the fundamental tension between control and potential space functions.; Having devoted the first two chapters primarily to questions of aesthetics and narratology, Chapter 3 deals more in depth with some of the central elements of Gide's approach to identity. This chapter begins with an examination of the implications to the readerly self of the theories of Judith Butler, Paul Ricoeur and the ethical criticism of Wayne Booth. In the final section I return to L'Immoraliste in order to insist upon the tension between essentialist and non-essentialist identity theory that one finds in it.