FLIM (FLaubert IMages)

The project “Gustave Flaubert and the power of images” is the development of a first research process (“Fractal”: “Flaubert: Religions, Antiquity, Creation”) that addressed the implication of religions, mythography and Antiquity in the writing processes. The aim is to define both the visual paradigm that rules Flaubert’s work and the new dialectical status that Flaubert establishes between text and image in terms of reciprocal tension and autonomy. Flaubert’s poetics will be thoroughly reconsidered from this angle: how does iconographic knowledge inform the text and its genesis, how does writing capture the image’s specificity to establish a new understanding of the visible and create a new status of the written image? What new theory of the image will arise from this twofold epistemological initiative? Three series of questions will allow us to organize our investigation in dialogic terms: the dialectics of transcendence (believing and knowing) opposing the ontology of the image and a kind of desecration of the imagery and the cliché; the dialectics of vision (seeing and imagining), where the visual as a sign of reality is opposed to the dream or hallucination; the dialectics of representation (writing with and against the image), where writing vies with painting, photography and illustration, redefining the image as document, structure and figure. An intranet working platform will optimize synergies between the German and French researchers for the exchange and sharing of their studies and later, for the circulation of the data and results. ITEM will create a new digital image library: a data base, structured and annotated, making available the principal visual resources related to Gustave Flaubert’s works and life. Both teams will synthesize their results in a dictionary titled “Gustave Flaubert. An Image Index” grouping the lexical contributions of all the researchers involved in this project: a thematic dictionary that will renew the terminology and our knowledge of this research field so as to make it intelligible in all its complexity.