"Theorizing the Scapegoat in Maupassant and Zola"

Roderick Cooke, PhD in French, Columbia University
Candidate for Assistant Professor of French-Newark

Both Maupassant's Boule de suif and Zola's Le Ventre de Paris are scapegoating narratives in which the protagonists are sacrificed to state power by their respective communities. This realization allows us to compare Girard's and Derrida's theoretical accounts of scapegoating for their pertinence to the two Naturalist texts. Suggesting that we can view Girard's model as 'internal' where Derrida's is 'external,' I reflect in this lecture on which of the two better accounts for the two novelists' narrative structures.