• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.109-131
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• 2022

This paper compares the French Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) and the Vietnamese Vũ Trọng Phụng (1912-1939), and explores transformations of their aesthetic experiences that led to the autonomization of French literary field in the nineteenth century and Vietnamese in the early twentieth century. Inspired from the term "archive" coined by Michel Foucault, this article argues that Flaubert, in abandoning the bourgeois tastes, contested realism and built his own writing ideology and style, which is called subjective realism. On the other hand, it also argues that Vũ Trọng Phụng, through the popular report genre, he gained success and evolved his own novel writing style, aptly called the realism of speech. It is ostensible that the transformation in the two authors' writing style and aesthetic experience was derived from the way they distanced themselves from their contemporaries' common tastes while making use of free indirect speeches, all with the aim of granting readers the autonomy of reading.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.171-194
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• 2005

The essay attempts at a critical reading of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) in terms of character and socio-cultural change. Juxtaposing the story of Michael Henchard's career with the social and economic changes in the agricultural town, it attempts to elaborate on the complex ways in which Hardy relates the old modes of life and thinking to the material culture. Though the novel is centered on the story of Henchard, the Henchard-Farfrae clash represents the conflict of "old" and "new" modes of socio-economic organization and consciousness. The story of the rustic man of character struggling with his contradictory traits of strong will-power and emotional collapse suggests that Hardy's literary representation of the rural community and the rustic protagonist is deeply rooted in historical reality. However, while there is the interlocking of the changes in personal fate and social change, the representation is a "reinvented" literary construction with complex mediation. Despite the narrator's emphasis on Henchard's immutability, peculiarity, and resilience, his character is, in a complex, mediated way, shaped by the material conditions of English rural community in the late 19th century. The mediating role of Elizabeth-Jane as a narrative resolution embodies Hardy's ambivalent historical position concerning the period undergoing change and conflict.