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" In Praise of Clumsiness: "
Levesque, Raina
Apter, Emily
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1113866
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2393641954
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| Main Entry
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Apter, Emily
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Levesque, Raina
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| Title & Author
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In Praise of Clumsiness:\ Levesque, RainaApter, Emily
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| College
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New York University
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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181
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| Abstract
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Beginning in the 16th century and extending through its first appearance in the French lexicon in the 18th century to the 20th century, French writers have identified the term and concept of “maladresse” with a lack of physical, formal, social, and linguistic skill that, as a negation of the term “adresse” from the Latin verb "dirigere" (“to direct, to guide, to keep straight”), signals a tendency to go off-track from a fixed path or to deviate from an established rule or protocol. This dissertation examines various manifestations of this use of the term and concept of “maladresse” as the site of a confrontation between a rule-based norm and an aberration from this norm. Situating our study in relation to theories of normalization by the philosophers Jacques Lacan, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, we examine how the writers Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Marivaux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Stendhal, Michel Leiris, and Henri Michaux identify the term and concept of “maladresse” with a disruption in habitual modes of conduct in order to reveal their underlying mechanism of action, shifting the emphasis from the completion of a technical task to the means of performance and replacing a singular mode of conduct with a plurality of modes in the process. Through this conceptual and philological history, we show how these writers define these different manifestations of the term and concept of “maladresse” as capacities of incapacity that initiate an interrogation of the phenomenon of normalization that has characterized French language and culture since the Renaissance.
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French literature
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Georges Canguilhem
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Pierre Bourdieu
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Pierre Marivaux
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