Theory Vs. Practice in Bouvard and Pecuchet Research Proposal

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Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet

Gustave Flaubert's posthumously-published novel Bouvard and Pecuchet is a sustained exercise in irony: to some extent this irony can be interpreted as the distance between theory and practice. Bouvard and Pecuchet is a text about texts. The work's eponymous protagonists begin their lives as professional copyists, dutifully transcribing documents they did not author, in the style of a Xerox machine, and Flaubert's planned ending for the unfinished work would see them return to this drudgery. Between these two bookends of the plot, Bouvard and Pecuchet, as beneficiaries of an unexpected financial windfall, retire to the country -- "No more writing! No more bosses!" (Flaubert 14) -- and proceed to devour theoretical texts on a variety of subjects, and then attempt to put them into practice, with invariably ironic disastrous results. Their freedom from "writing" (which is not really writing) turns into an overabundance of reading (which is not the same as thinking).

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In his research for writing the book, Flaubert claimed to have read a phenomenal number of texts by others, which are cited in the course of the protagonists' adventures. To a certain extent, the gap between educationally-intended writing, and ineducable foolishness, is the target of Flaubert's satire here: Bouvard and Pecuchet are like Quixotes for an age of scientifically-overconfident theory. Polizzotti notes that Flaubert at one point proposed the subtitle for the novel "On the Lack of Method in the Sciences" (Flaubert xv). Flaubert's compositional process linked Bouvard and Pecuchet with another satirical project left unfinished at his death, the Dictionary of Received Ideas. This appended work gives some clue as to the overall scope of Flaubert's critical target in the longer fiction: organized as a dictionary, it contains terse entries such as "STOCK….....

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