SOURCE: Danaher, David. “Effacement of the Author and the Function of Sadism in Salammbô.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures 46, no. 1 (spring 1992): 3-20.

In the following essay, Danaher presents an analysis of Salammbô based upon the critical concepts of Russian Formalism, explaining Flaubert's use of focalization, the sadistic motif, and his ahistorical application of archeological material to impersonalize himself as the author and to estrange his readers.

Roman Jakobson has defined the dominant of an artistic work as “the focussing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components” (Russian Poetics 82). It is that element in the system of one literary text (or of an oeuvre of a particular author or of a whole literary movement) to which all other textual elements are hierarchically subordinate. As one critic has put it, the dominant of a text acts “like a structure of...