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Literary Criticism General

Jacques Chessex

Calvinism and the Text

by (author) David Bond

Publisher
University of Toronto Press
Initial publish date
Jun 1994
Category
General
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780802005557
    Publish Date
    Jun 1994
    List Price
    $91.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781442633896
    Publish Date
    Dec 1994
    List Price
    $24.95

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Description

Despite an impressive body of poems, novels, short stories, and literary criticism; high praise for his writing by French and Swiss critics; and a collection of honours that includes the prestigious Prix Goncourt, awarded for his novel L’Ogre in 1973, Jacques Chessex is relatively unknown outside France and Switzerland. With this book, David J. Bond provides the first comprehensive study of his work in any language – a study that reveals Chessex’s deep ambivalence towards his Calvinist heritage and his efforts to resolve this dilemma through his texts.

Born in 1934 in Payerne, in the region of French-speaking Switzerland known as the Vaud, Chessex grew up amid the pervasive influence of the Calvinist church. His writing, which tells of Vaud society and the hypocrisy of many of its leading members, reveals his preoccupation with a rigid morality, sin, remorse, and death. Bond shows that while Chessex uses his texts to escape this heritage and affirm alternate values, particularly sexual pleasure and enjoyment of life, his writing reveals a deep nostalgia for the stability and security of a strict religious system in a world that he finds unstable and even absurd without it. Chessex looks to the text as a univocal organizing principle that might impose order and sense. Bond sees in Chessex’s writing an attempt to find unity in opposing values, to establish contact with others, and to overcome an obsession with death and the passing of time.

About the author

David J. Bond is Professor of French at the University of Saskatchewan.

David Bond's profile page