Research Catalog

Michel Tournier, Le coq de bruyère

Title: Michel Tournier, Le coq de bruyère / Walter Redfern.
Author: Redfern, W. D.
Publication: Madison [N.J.] : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; London ; Cranbury, NJ : Associated University Presses, [1996], ©1996.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	PQ2680.O83 C637 1996	Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

138 pages; 24 cm

Summary

This book is a study of Michel Tournier's collection of short stories, Le Coq de bruyere, but it is also much more. Author Walter Redfern sees the stories as a microcosm of the whole fictional universe of Tournier, widely regarded as France's premier living writer.
Each story is analyzed in detail for its meaning, residual ambiguities, artistic qualities and flaws, and its place in the total collection. As Tournier thinks big, even in a short text, Redfern finds many links between the longer fiction of Tournier's novels and these stories.
Indeed, Tournier considers himself primarily as a teller of tales - or a re-teller - since several of these stories recycle, divert, and update such well-known narratives as Genesis, Cain and Abel, Tom Thumb, ogres, dwarfs, Robinson Crusoe, Tristan and Isolde, and St. Veronica. Tournier's obsessive themes of the androgyne, self-assertion, the multiple forms of creativity, and the overlapping of fixed categories give the collection its pointed and powerful resonance.
. Redfern's conclusion seeks a precariously balanced equation of Tournier's genius and his chicanery. It stresses the appropriateness of mixed responses to so profoundly ambiguous a writer. Tournier offers to readers a mixed bag: sights for sore eyes, cloying or nausea of the palate, refreshment of jaded minds. Though centered on Tournier's short stories, this study offers a way in, enlarging and not reductive, to his work in general.

Subject

Tournier, Michel > Coq de bruyère

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-132) and index.

Contents

1. The Founding Myth: "La Famille Adam" -- 2. Closure of the Myth: "La Fin de Robinson Crusoe" -- 3. Creation of Legend: "La Mere Noel" -- 4. The Good Initiation: "Amandine ou les deux jardins" -- 5. Child Father to Man: "La Fugue du petit Poucet" -- 6. Sex and Confusion: "Tupik" -- 7. The Optative Mode: "Que ma joie demeure" -- 8. Purifying Laughter: "Le Nain rouge" -- 9. Radio Daze and Imperishable Myth: "Tristan Vox" -- 10. Photographic Fetishism: "Les Suaires de Veronique" -- 11. Something about Nothing: "La Jeune Fille et la mort" -- 12. The Fetish of Not Seeing: "Le Coq de bruyere" -- 13. Cain and Abel Revisited: "L'Aire du Muguet" -- 14. The Virtues of Perversion: "Le Fetichiste" -- 15. The Play of Words.

ISBN

0838636276 (alk. paper)

LCCN

95032323

OCLC

ocm32778588

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries