Flaubert’s Lesson: Repetition and the Effects of Literature

If you’ve ever learnt anything about Gustave Flaubert, you will have learnt that he has no lessons to teach. Flaubert, the great advocate of art for art’s sake, who sought to write a “book about nothing” consisting only of “style,” relentlessly mocked the very logic of the lesson, from Madame Bovary to Bouvard and Pécuchet. What, then, is conveyed by a writing which refuses to educate, edify, or cohere a picture of the world? This presentation will consider Flaubert as a writer for whom effect takes the place of education and even communication. What are literature’s effects, once they are (if indeed they can be) decoupled from instruction? This presentation will explore this question through Flaubert’s use of what I call critical repetition.

Conall Cash is currently Assistant Professor of English and French Literature at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. He previously taught in French Studies at the University of Melbourne, and completed a PhD in French literature at Cornell University in 2022. His research works across modernist literature, cinema, European philosophy and social theory. He has recent publications in New Literary History, Film-Philosophy and Angelaki, and his volume Far from the Masters: Experimentations in Post-New Wave French Cinema, co-edited with Corey Cribb, was published with Index Press last year. His presentation will be of material from his current book project on Gustave Flaubert.