Madame oreilley maupassant biography
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4. The Tools of Brevity
1The short story is almost always praised for its “economy of means”. In the classic short story, this restraint is not to be found in the narrative elements that, to the contrary, we have seen to be built on extremes. Nevertheless the short story clearly proceeds towards its goal with a particular speed and effectiveness: within only a few pages, the reader is introduced to a full universe and knows what is at stake in the narrative. The aim of this chapter is to understand how the classic short story achieves this acceleration of comprehension in the reader — its means being drastically different from those of the novel or what I propose to call the “modern” short story. The antithetical structure, as we saw in the previous chapter, is part of the expedition of the readers’ understanding. However, there are two other particularly important techniques that we will examine in detail in this chapter: the use of preconstructed material, and the device of
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I read this short story by Guy de Maupassant because I have plans to watch the film with a friend of mine who’s also learning French.
The film appears to have an interesting little history. According to Wikipedia:
Partie de campagne is a 1936 French featurette written and directed by Jean Renoir. It was released as A Day in the Country in the United States. The film is based on the short story “Une partie de campagne” (1881) by Guy de Maupassant, who was a friend of Renoir’s father, the renowned painter Auguste Renoir. It chronicles a love affair over a single summer afternoon in 1860 along the banks of the Seine.
Renoir never finished filming due to weather problems, but producer Pierre Braunberger turned the material into a release in 1946, ten years after it was shot. Joseph Burstyn released the film in the U.S. in 1950.
The short story ‘A Day in the Country’ is in my freebie edition, Original Short Stories Vol 12 by Guy de Maupassa
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How many of your read French literature to broaden your French?
I am usually reading one French novel -- partly to keep up my French or broaden it, I guess, but mainly because inom like reading and French literature. inom prefer to read certain French authors in French, rather than in translation, because the language fryst vatten more meaningful and nuanced to me that way, as much of literature can be not just telling the story, but the language itself (sentence structure, the sound of phrases and words, etc.). I like Flaubert very much, as well as Zola, and Camus fryst vatten another favorite; probably Gide. I like Jacques Prevert for poetry, and Apollinaire. I also read certain musical reference works, biographies, and history in French because that's the only source inom have for them.
Right now I'm reading Le Testament Francais by Andrei Makine. That is contemporary -- he won the Goncourt Prize a couple years ago. He fryst vatten a beautiful writer, but I wouldn't read it to learn slan