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PRICE, Martin, Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983, 374 p.
J'avoue n'avoir lu de cet ouvrage que l'introduction et le troisième chapitre, intitulé “The Other Self : Problems of character”. J'ai l'impression que l'auteur butine : il parle du personnage dans une perspective auctoriale, lectorale, sociale, examine la caractérisation du personnage en général et s'attarde à plusieurs structures romanesques sans qu'on ne sache trop quel est l'objet principal de sa démonstration. Il s'appuie principalement sur Wittgenstein, voilà pourquoi je l'ai classé du côté de l'approche philosophique. Je donne ici quelques définitions tirées de l'introduction et son sujet divisé.
Forms of life : expression tirée de la philosophie de Wittgenstein. Forms of life are those shared activities wich give us our language. We are made conscious of these forms of life by doubts and conflicts, threats and defense. We find ourselves runnings against the limit of language and become aware of the depth of its sources and the toughness of its structure. That movement downward from the surface of experience to the encounter with these forms of life gives the novel his sense of depth, and the movement from the surface of the self to a deeper self which participates in these forms is the most characteristic structure of the novel. What I mean by the term is the dept and adequacy of the novelist's conception of experience : the degree to which he recognizes the complexities of decision or action or inaction and the effort or release involved in solving or ignoring or evading problems.
1. Fictional contract (auteur/lecteur)
2. The problem of the structure and the relevant that we perceive, or half-perceive, has we read.
3. The nature of literary character, how they differs of reals persons and yet must refer to them and draw their force from what we know their experience to be like.
4-8. Études de romans qui give society central importance, in which individuals are defined by adherence or opposition to social norms (Austen, Stendhal, Dickens, Eliot, Tolstoï).
9-14. Novels in which moral world is largely internalized. Characters live in society and act upon it, but the novelist is particulary concerned with the confusions, terrors and heroism that lie with consciousness. (James, Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Forsters)
15. Le dernier chapitre s'occupe du portrait d'artiste chez Joyce, Woolf, Mann.