Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Park, John

Area of Concentration

French Language and Literature

Abstract

In this thesis, I claim that Georg Lukács, who was a Hungarian Marxist theorist, saw in the novel Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac, a form of social critique. He saw in Lost Illusions how a society came to be reified historically, and he identifies this as a blind and totalizing cohesion between the human subject and their social realities, a cohesion so total there cannot be any critical distance between the individual and the social forces which act upon them. Reification is taking social relations for solidified, immutable things, like institutions, such as universities or class relations, which put on an appearance as natural or inherent structures. In his famous essay on reification, Lukacs asks how can there be critique and social change when human consciousness has been so mechanized, to the point where it holds no critical distance from the machinery of social forces. What this thesis highlights is that Lukacs saw in Balzac a way to critique such a totalizing social force.

Rights

The author has granted New College of Florida the nonexclusive right to archive, make accessible, and distribute for educational purposes this work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The copyright of this work remains with the author.

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