Discourse/counter-discourse

Richard Terdiman sits where cultural history meets literary study, drawing on Marxism and semiotics to ask how texts actually function within a culture. His focus is France in a period of striking cultural, social and political change. He looks at the dominant bourgeois discourse carried by novels, newspapers and other mass media, alongside the attempts of intellectuals to build counter-discourses that push back against it. Flaubert, Balzac, Daumier, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Marx are read not as isolated figures but as central participants in the everyday life of the century.

Terdiman argues that stability and destabilization worked in a continuous, tangled interplay, and that this interplay drove historical and cultural change. To account for it, he widens the notion of the sign so that it covers social difference as well as linguistic meaning. Family structure, gender roles, educational systems and political organization, he contends, are all shaped by and contested within the signs that make up every text. He engages Bakhtin, Gramsci, Bourdieu, Foucault and Derrida along the way, and examines conflict between literature and the visual arts, between the novel and political philosophy, and between elite literature and popular culture.

The book is aimed at students and scholars of French literature, as well as literary theorists, cultural and intellectual historians, and Marxist scholars across several disciplines.