James's Debt to Alphonse Daudet

Binary opposition is the most important aspect that can reveal how humans think, how humans produce meaning and understand reality (Culler, 1976). Therefore, the discovery of binary oppositions is useful in providing clues to the workings of human reason. In the context of narrative analysis, binary opposition can reveal how the logic behind a narrative is made. Based on this, this study highlights how the formation of binary opposition contained in the novel "Lettres de Mon Moulin" by Alphonse Daudet uses Lévi Strauss's theory of binary opposition (1955) and structural analysis using Freytag's plot theory (1863). The corpus of the research consists of six stories contained in the novel forming a binary opposition. After doing the analysis, it was found that a pair of words with binary opposition were included in the exclusive category and two pairs of words that were included in the non-exclusive binary opposition category. From these findings, it was found that the author of the novel, Daudet, gave directions on what was good and bad by giving a clear line of separation. This is in line with the context of making stories during the industrial revolution, which mapped the world into two things, namely traditional and modern life.

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Dictionnaire Alphonse Daudet

10.14375/np.9782745350756 ◽

2019 ◽

Keyword(s):

Alphonse Daudet

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‘Grass grows, a passer-by is an event and everybody knows everybody else’

The Marais ◽

10.3828/liverpool/9781789621044.003.0003 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 43-78

Author(s):

Keith Reader

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Victor Hugo ◽

Theophile Gautier ◽

Film Maker ◽

Alphonse Daudet

This recounts the story of our quartier between 1789 and the turn of the nineteenth century. Canonical literary and cultural figures such as Balzac – the supreme chronicler of nineteenth-century Paris – Victor Hugo and the film-maker Marcel Carné, whose Les Enfants du paradis is set at the limit of the area, are discussed side by side with less prominent but nonetheless important names such as the influential Romantic Théophile Gautier, Alphonse Daudet and Eugène Sue whose Les Mystères de Paris is a much-undervalued precursor of Naturalism. This period saw the appearance of the first guide-books, references to the Marais in which are cited and analysed, and towards the end the arrival of increasing numbers of Jewish residents, whose presence then and thereafter has been a major factor in the quartier’s identity.

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