| Summary: | Despite its apparent irrelevancy to Flaubert's time, La Tentation de Saint Antoine is linked to a net of knowledge, historical research, questions that characterize a period and define an epistemological configuration. These types of knowledge are at play on two levels: in the organization of the poetics of the work and in its representations. Flaubert uses historical, anthropological and psychiatric knowledge which legitimates the organization of the text while at the same time he deconstructs this body of knowledge. Flaubert invents a new form of grotesque – the grotesque of ideas – and, in a mise-en-abyme from the first Tentation to the 1874 version, he questions these fields of knowledge.
|
|---|