Dictionary of Accepted Ideas

Name: Dictionary of Accepted Ideas
Brand: Recyclivre
Author: Gustave Flaubert
ISBN: 9780811200547

Gustave Flaubert

01/02/1982
New Directions Publishing Corporation

NC (0 avis)

Couverture de Dictionary of Accepted Ideas par Gustave Flaubert

Résumé

Throughout his life Flaubert made it a game to eavesdrop for the cliché, the platitude, the borrowed and unquestioned idea with which the "right thinking" swaddle their minds. After his death his little treasury of absurdities, of half-truths and social lies, was published as a Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Because its devastating humor and irony are often dependent on the phrasing in vernacular French, the Dictionnairewas long considered untranslatable. This notion was taken as a challenge by Jacques Barzun. Determined to find the exact English equivalent for each "accepted idea" Flaubert recorded, he has succeeded in documenting our own inanities. With a satirist's wit and a scholar's precision, Barzun has produced a very contemporary self-portrait of the middle-class philistine, a species as much alive today as when Flaubert railed against him.