The Function of Gift Exchange in Stendhal and Balzac

Twentieth-century French thinkers such as Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Alain Caillé (a member of the MAUSS group, an acronym for Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales) have launched repeated attacks on economism and have proposed the gift as an alternative form of social regulation. In this book, a selection of writings by Stendhal and Balzac is studied to see how gift exchange functions in these authors' representations of France in the early nineteenth century, a period during which money emerged as a universal social mediator. The gift is studied from two main perspectives: true gift as a means of establishing a positive relationship and gift as a façade masking and facilitating commercial transactions.

Auteur

The Author: Doreen Thesen received her Ph.D. in French literature from the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Alberta in 1996. She has taught French at the college and university level for eleven years.