This section contains 5,786 words (approx. 20 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |
SOURCE: O'Brien, Mari H. “Cross-gendering the Hero, Cross-gendering the Reader: The (m)Othering of Antonio in Jean Giono's Le chant du monde.” Dalhousie French Studies 48 (fall 1999): 75-86.
In the following essay, O'Brien presents a feminist, deconstructive reading of Giono's Le chant du monde, countering Giono's own self-criticism that the book did not have a sufficiently pacifist message.
As Pierre Citron reveals in his 1990 biography, Jean Giono was never pleased with his best-selling, critically acclaimed novel Le chant du monde. Giono's own words, in a letter to a friend, attest to his dissatisfaction with this 1934 novel, his sixth, which he called “un livre raté”: “Le chant du monde a un petit côté imbécile et couillon en réalité” (qtd in Citron 195). Perhaps the novel's resemblance to a Hollywood western seemed, upon reflection, too frivolous for such serious times, or its “happy ending” too facile to the increasingly...
This section contains 5,786 words (approx. 20 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |