From Diderot to Kundera. The aesthetics of variation in Milan Kundera’s writings Cover Image
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De Diderot à Kundera. L’esthétique de la variation chez Milan Kundera
From Diderot to Kundera. The aesthetics of variation in Milan Kundera’s writings

Author(s): Adnana Giroud (Popescu)
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Comparative Study of Literature, French Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti
Keywords: Denis Diderot; Milan Kundera; variation; polyphony; Diderot’s heritage; rewriting; modal transposition;

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to rediscover the importance of a new textual strategy developed in the XXth century and theorized by the great Czech author Milan Kundera, the variation.Two centuries after the publication of Diderot’s novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître, Milan Kundera chose to create his play Jacques et son maître as a response to this revolutionary moment of the European literature’s history in order to legitimate his own way of writing. The variation is a textual strategy which consists in modifying a theme in order to present it differently, with a new form that can still be recognized. The analysis of a semantic center allows us to rediscover the complexity of existence in the modern world. Our study proposes an analysis of the different types of variation and its particularities in Kundera’s play Jacques et son maître. This study imagines Kundera as a real model reader of Jacques le fataliste et son maître who, by activating his own cultural Encyclopedia, makes the cultural dialogue possible in order to renew the vision of a modern reader.

  • Issue Year: 2013
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 73-80
  • Page Count: 8
  • Language: French