Kenneth Lee

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Van Tuyl, Jocelyn

Keywords

Gide, The Counterfeiters, Stendhal, The Red & the Black, Mise en Abyme

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

Gide alludes to many other novels in his highly intertextual 1925 novel The Counterfeiters andovertly refers to Balzac's Old Man Goriot and Stendhal's The Red and the Black. In this thesis, I juxtapose Stendhal's and Balzac's novels with Gide's to illuminate three prominent figures in The Counterfeiters: the Bildungsromanprotagonist Bernard, the novelist character Edouard, and the narrator. My first chapter contrasts Bernard with two other Bildungsromanprotagonists: Stendhal's Julien and Balzac's Rastignac. This contrast reveals how Bernard appears to conform to the traditional Bildungsroman, yet ultimately breaks the mold of the genre. My second chapter discusses Edouard's failure as novelist, contrasting his writing methods with those of Stendhal and Balzac, and discusses Gide's recuperation of Edouard's writings for his own novel. My last chapter characterizes The Counterfeiters' narrator through contrast with the narrators of Stendhal's and Balzac's novels. Using Roland Barthes's concept of readerly and writerly texts, I argue that Gide's narrator places the reader and author on the same level of authority, while Stendhal's and Balzac's narrators place their reader on a level below the author. Through my intertextual examination of Gide's experimental novel, I reveal The Counterfeiters to be a novel about how novels function.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida Libraries, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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