Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

Enlightenment period. In the case of Madame Bovary the impeccable flair for purity of
form, the implementation of free indirect discourse, and the aesthetic doctrine of le mot
juste would eventually earn Flaubert the title of “Creator of the modern novel” as granted
by the likes of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, and Nathalie Sarraute. 5
To determine how the mechanics of transgression operate within society, Julius
draws from a variety of transgressive works from different media from the end of the
twentieth century and makes some similar observations regarding their perceived
immorality:
The works were taken to adopt immoral, injurious perspectives on
aspects of sexual violence: the murder and abuse of children,
assaults on women, the eroticizing of physical injury. Immoral,
because they did not condemn the vices that they represented or to
which they alluded; injurious because this failure to condemn was
thought to encourage imitative harm to others. (7)
In this statement, he illustrates how the element of shock is processed, noting that scandal
appears to be the unifying factor between these works that were considered to be both
immoral and injurious. In addition, Julius makes a number of interesting observations
that will prove instrumental in designing a conceptual framework of transgression for this
study. He observes that the preferred subject of transgression is sexual violence or more
generally, the psychological link between the two instinctual drives of sex and violence; a
point, as will be investigated below, that has been specifically stressed by critics such as
Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault following Freud’s classic treatment of this nexus in
Civilization and Its Discontents. In addition, failure to punish or condemn such conduct
is itself considered to transgress moral boundaries. By not adhering to the accepted
5 See, for example, Sarraute’s essay “Flaubert le précurseur” in the February 1965 edition of Preuves.
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