Collection(s) : Belin-CNED agrégation , Major
Paru le 16/10/2019 | Broché 195 pages
Agrégation
Howards End (E. M. Forster, J. Ivory) : Beyond Heritage
Reading Forster's novel and Ivory's film together gives a stunning opportunity to re-assess the representation of Pre-World War One modernity. Far from presenting Edwardian England as a golden period, Howards End explores social structures, social mobility, real estate, the ambivalent relation to culture and new technological modes of communication and transport. Stylistically, the novel breaks new ground with its Protean narrative voice, and transitions towards Modernism with its mythic, musical method. The eponymous house becomes a metaphor for ecological balance, a new kind of extended family structure, a network of connections and a new sense of community. If Howards End as a novel reinvents literary legacy and redefines personal and national heritage, Ivory's adaptation must also be reassessed as so-called heritage cinema, far from the clichés of a purely aesthetic approach. It is no period piece or marketable commodity meant to toe a conservative line, but a carefully woven creative transposition, which also raises social and gendered questions.
Catherine Lanone is Professor of British literature at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. She has published a monograph on Forster and edited three of his novels in French for Éditions Le Bruit du Temps. She has also published many articles on 19th and 20th-century British literature.
Laurent Mellet is Professor of British literature and film at the University Toulouse Jean Jaurès (CAS - EA 801). He is the author of a monograph and a collection of essays on Forster and Ivory, and of several books and articles on modernist and contemporary British fiction, film studies and adaptation.
