| This research will investigate how French writer Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), by means of collage, integrates and combines heterogeneous, literary and non-literary material in his work. The period in France around 1900 was a time of many and rapid changes. One fascinating change was the enormous proliferation of the press. The expanding media helped diffuse a whole new mass culture of publicity and entertainment: advertising, cabaret, music-hall, revue, and café-concert. Whether faced with the growing importance of the press and journalism or the omnipresent advertising and entertainment in the city, writers and artists could not escape these changes. Art and literature were now created against a growing background of commercial entertainment, popular music, billboards, publicity slogans, sensational news and trivial language. Not surprisingly, (avant-garde) artists and writers, confronted with this culture, started using it in their works. A particular artistic form that emerges in this period and within this particular culture is the collage. Collage can not only be found in the visual arts, but also in literary texts. This is what this research hopes to show with regard to Alfred Jarry's work. The analysis focuses mostly on his prose work such as the two Almanachs du Père Ubu (1898 and 1900) and the novel Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll (1911). I will discuss this aspect of Jarry's work within its historical context and more specifically within the emergence of a mass popular culture of press, publicity and entertainment around 1900. This interesting, but little discussed feature of Jarry's work is the central theme of my thesis. The textual analysis will focus the function of Jarry's use of text collage in the narrative and the effect it has on the reader. The methodological framework for the analysis will rely on theories of collage and intertextuality. By relating Jarry's texts to the cultural context mentioned above, other interesting issues are raised: the change in the concept of authorship, the concept of originality, the relationship between art and popular culture. What does Jarry's work reveal with regard to these issues? And how can he be situated in this period around 1900 and in the early avant-garde? |
