Gide

Summary

Dominique Pagani mainly treats Gide as the figure of neoclassicism in the twentieth-century novel and in prose12. He presents this return to classical form as a sign of exhaustion3. He quotes several times Gide's formula that "classicism is a tamed romanticism"4. He also describes him as an anti-romantic whom surrealism later knocked off his pedestal. In La Symphonie pastorale, he points to the passage where the young blind girl asks whether the meadow is as beautiful as Beethoven's "Scene by the Brook"5. He uses it to approach the question of nature and landscape. He mentions Gide's Thésée as evidence that Greek myth still survives in the twentieth century6. Finally, he links him to other figures through a few details: Gide attended Mallarmé's Tuesdays, and he read Bossuet's funeral orations while travelling up the Congo River by canoe.

1. 1#3.3 From Ulysses to Daedalus1 Aug 2017 · 25:25
2. 2#3 Harnessed to confinitude4 Apr 2020 · 23:38
3. 3The music of history26 Apr 2015 · 1:48:04
4. 4Hegel on the Beach 1/51 Feb 2016 · 2:16:36
5. 5#5.4 Introduction: nature or landscape?25 Jan 2019 · 37:56
6. 6#7 The Greeks, myth and music17 Dec 2020 · 15:58

Summary produced automatically from 11 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.