Modernism and Identity: The Subject of Madame Bovary

Abstract:This article reads Flaubert's Madame Bovary as a work of 'modernist pedagogy': whereas recent readers, such as Rancière, and Vallury in MLN 134:4, understand Flaubert as an author of disidentification and impersonality, I read his work in terms of a dynamic of disidentification and reidentification, drawing on contemporary theories of 'practical identity' (Korsgaard, Hägglund). Flaubert's modernist pedagogy disidentifies the reader's immersion in the fictional world so as to promote reflection on the self-defeating ways in which his characters define themselves, and solicits this reader's cultivation of a reflexive attitude towards identity as a revisable and social activity, beyond the failings of identity Madame Bovary depicts.