SELCUK UNIVERSITESI EDEBIYAT FAKULTESI DERGISI-SELCUK UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF FACULTY OF LETTERS, vol.21, pp.29-44, 2009 (ESCI)
The subject undertaken in this article is the possible critical similarity between French novels, The Lily of the Valley by Balzac, Madame Bouary by Flaubert, The Red and the Black by Stendhal, and the film, Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis) by one of the most prominent directors of French Poetic Realism, Marcel Came. This article defines this critical similarity as a tradition based on criticism towards the hypocrisy of capitalism thought between the time it emerged in the 1800s as structured around Western idealism, and ideologically defined as a grand world project, and the decadence of capitalism as a humankind ideal. Consequently, even though the abovementioned novels and the film bear a stylistic antagonism or difference, the present study aims at proving the existence of a similarity between them in terms of intellectual content and narrative as basic concepts for the assumption. The article considers both the socio-economic and the cultural structure of the periods of the previously mentioned artworks as texts, and in order to depict the critical similarities and narrative differences between these 'texts', or in other words, to prove the main assumption, makes use of the 'intertextuality' method.