| FEL-258056-18 | Research Programs: Fellowships | Clementine Faure-Bellaiche | André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernism | 7/1/2018 - 6/30/2019 | $50,400.00 | Clementine | | Faure-Bellaiche | | | | Brandeis University | Waltham | MA | 02453-2728 | USA | 2017 | French Literature | Fellowships | Research Programs | 50400 | 0 | 50400 | 0 | Completion
of a book-length study on the influence of Protestantism on French literary
modernism, particularly in the writings of André Gide (1869-1951), Jean-Paul
Sartre (1905-80), and Roland Barthes (1915-80).
This project is about three intellectual giants of the twentieth century, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Roland Barthes--three major voices of French literary modernity and three thinkers of international stature and prodigious influence. My project is centered upon an heretofore unexamined aspect of their trajectory--their Protestant difference, in a France deeply marked by Catholicism. However established those three intellectual figures appear today, their self-fashioning as writers and their theorization of literature were originally closely intertwined with their religious marginality. The project retraces how Gide, giving esthetic and ethical significance to his Protestant difference, elaborated a posture, an ethos of protestation, that Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes, also marked by Protestantism, reinvested. We still owe to this overlooked filiation the figure of the French intellectual as a protester, and the conception of modern literature as a counter-authority. |