ÉTAT PRÉSENT: Victor Hugo ('French Studies' 63: 1 [2009]: 66-74) (original) (raw)
Los dibujos arquitectónicos de Víctor Hugo: Entre la realidad y la ensoñación
EGA, 2014
Víctor Hugo no era ni pintor ni arquitecto, por lo que la búsqueda desarrollada en sus dibujos no fue tanto formal como conceptual. Sus dibujos buscan profundizar en el alma creadora del artista a través de la experimentación y del azar; incursiones en el mundo interior que subyace tras el mito creador. Son reflejo del mundo en el que se desarrolla su obra literaria, no de una forma literal, sino simbólica. Víctor Hugo no dibuja arquitectura, dibuja el caos, la exaltación, lo sublime. Hugo explora a través del dibujo el universo espacial en el que se ubican sus ficciones literarias: la Arquitectura como metáfora del hombre empequeñecido por la inmensidad, casi metafísica, de la Naturaleza y el Cosmos
"Victor Hugo and the Melancholy Novel: Reading the Haitian Revolution in Bug-Jargal" (2018)
French Studies
In the two decades following the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804, a wide array of French writers from across the political spectrum returned, with obsessive frequency , to the subject of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in an attempt to grapple with the effects of 'traumatic' loss through discursive revisitings of the forever lost imperial object. Reflecting on the (largely disavowed) centrality of Haiti to an understanding of Romantic-era French cultural production, this article situates Victor Hugo's 1826 novel about the Haitian Revolution, Bug-Jargal, as the culminating expression of those melan-cholic narratives lamenting the loss of France's precious 'pearl of the Antilles'. It does so, specifically, by discussing the plagiaristic relation of key passages in Hugo's novel to a hitherto unidentified source, Philippe-Albert de Lattre's Campagnes des Français a ` Saint-Domingue (1805). The youthful Hugo's word-for-word reliance on this earlier account of the Haitian Revolution can, to be sure, simply be written off as yet another piece of evidence for the artistic 'immaturity' of Bug-Jargal. A very different argument will be mounted here, however: this mimetic reliance of Hugo's novel on a text that mourns the loss of Saint-Domingue, denies the legitimacy of Haitian independence, and consolidates the hierarchies of racial science, needs to be read as exemplifying — in its purest, most 'mature' form — a collective practice of retelling colonial stories that is characteristic of what Paul Gilroy has dubbed 'postimperial melancholia', and that is arguably one of the constitutive features of the literary habitus in Restoration France.
Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three (Quatrevingt-treize)
2015
Quatrevingt-treize (Ninety-Three in its English translation) was Victor Hugo's last novel, published in 1874, twelve years after Les Misérables.[1] Though he had originally conceived the idea for the novel several years before the Paris Commune of 1871, he undoubtedly had the Commune in mind as he wrote it, above all that terrible week in May 1871 when many thousands of insurgents were killed on the streets of Paris. Yet Hugo's subject was not the present but the past: the greatest-and most terrible-period of the French Revolution-the year 1793. Hugo had seen the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 at first hand; he believed passionately that the revolutionary cause was a just one, and that ultimately it would triumph. He had shown that commitment in his account of the life-and-death struggle on the barricade that forms the climax to Les Misérables (though people whose knowledge of Hugo's politics begins and ends with the musical version of "Les Mis" may not be aware that he saw the slaughter on the barricade as a pointless loss of life).[2] In Quatrevingt-treize he returned to confront this theme and to tackle the first French Revolution. His task might have been pleasanter had he set his novel in 1789, the time of heady optimism when, to invoke the phrase so often used since, France gave the world "liberty, equality, fraternity-and the rights of man." But that was not Victor Hugo's way. He did not shy away from the time four years later when political violence, betrayal and terror overtook the early idealism. He took as his subject
2016
The great French writer Victor Hugo said at the funeral of his friend on 20 August 1850, “Balzac was one of that powerful generation of writers of the XIX century who came after Napoleon...” Victor Hugo was also one of that powerful generation of writers of the XIX-century French literature who came after Napoleon. In a speech to mark the centenary of Voltaire’s death in 1878, Victor Hugo said: “He was not just a person. He was a century.” The same words can be attributed to Victor Hugo as well. Asgar ZEYNALOV
As the patriarch of French Romanticism, Victor Hugo is often associated with the primacy of the imagination, exhibiting a poetic creativity that seems to share little in common with the rigors of philosophical logic. However, in 'Victor Hugo, le philosophe' (1900), Charles Renouvier argued that Hugo was perhaps the French philosopher of the nineteenth century precisely because he brought the romantic and the rational to bear upon one another. Suspicious of how philosophy had become institutionalized in academic circles, Renouvier was the most prolific philosophical writer of his generation in France, whose work influenced both William James and Julien Benda. He praised Hugo as a thinker of contrast who had refused to fix his ideas within a single conceptualizing framework. As a man of his times, Hugo identified and tapped into the major pulses of nineteenth-century thinking, including positivism and pessimism. But his inventive vision as a poet helped him look beyond such philosophical strictures, giving him both breadth of understanding and depth of insight as the poet-philosopher. This article highlights that both men indeed conceive of poetry and philosophy as necessarily in dialogue rather than mutually exclusive. Their focus is on an interdisciplinary practice rather than an institutional one, challenging the closed outlooks of both ‘l’art pour l’art’ and strictly practical reason to empower a much wider perspective. Crucially, I highlight how both thinkers emphasize contestation, not resolution. They keep in play the dynamic of poetic intuition and philosophical sense that they see as pivotal to man’s thinking about his world. In so doing, I foreground their relevance to current debates on the identity of the French thinker in a ‘post-theory’ world that is reclaiming philosophy as a creative rather than solely critical discourse.
Medieval Elements in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Anastasis: Research in Medieval Culture and Art, 2018
Published in 1831, the classic historical Gothic romance The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is representative for narratology, since the plot is majestically set in medieval Paris and Victor Hugo manages to create a specific Middle-Ages atmosphere without having studied in a formal manner about the specificity of medieval times, therefore he is a medievalist avant-la-lettre. Moreover, it is important to underline Hugo's attention to details, the realism of description and the manner of giving shape to vivid characters, the predilection for creating memorable, powerful epic moments with a deep religious-ethical component. Furthermore, our purpose is to analyze medieval and modern elements in the novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, also insisting on the symbols present in the novel, its impact on the readers and also the narrative techniques used by Victor Hugo.