Dominique Bouhours
Dominique Bouhours (15 May 1628 – 27 May 1702) was a French
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Life
Bouhours entered the
He was sent to
Bouhours died at Paris in 1702.
Works
In 1671, Bouhours published Les Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugène, which was reprinted four more times at Paris, twice at
His thoughts on the elusive je ne sais quoi that was in vogue in the seventeenth century, expressed through his characters, ends in assessing it a mystery that escapes a rational inquiry. It determined by its delicate presence, its grace and invisible charm, the sense of what pleases or displeases in Nature as well as Art, and remained an essential part of the French critical vocabulary until the advent of Romanticism.[3]
His Doutes sur la langue française proposés aux Messieurs de l'Académie française (Paris, 1674; corrected second edition, 1675) was called "the most important and best organized of his numerous commentaries on the literary language of his time"[4] when it was edited in a critical edition. His doubts are collected under five headings: vocabulary, phrases and collocations, grammatical constructions, clarity, and stylistic consistency, in each case setting literary quotations under scrutiny. His standards, expressed in the suggestions he offered for improving each example, showed the way out of ambiguities, skirting incongruous juxtapositions and untidy constructions. The work was widely accepted and Bouhours standards are still the accepted norm among literate readers today.
The chief of his other works are La Manière de bien penser sur les ouvrages d'esprit (1687), which appeared in London in 1705 under the title, The Art of Criticism, Vie de Saint Ignace de Loyola (1679), Vie de Saint François Xavier (1682),
Bibliography
- SMITH, Gerard (ed): Jesuit thinkers of the Renaissance, Milwaukee (USA), 1939, pp. 63–74.
Notes
- ^ a b c d One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Bouhours, Dominique". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 317. This cites Georges Doucieux, Un Jésuite homme de lettres au dix-septième siècle: Le père Bouhours (1886).
- ^ "conversations libres & familières qu'ont les honnêtes gens, quand ils sont amis, & que ne laissent pas d'être spirituelles, & meme savantes, quoiq'on ne songe pas à y faire paraître l'esprit, & que l'étude n'y ait point de part."
- ^ Wolfgang E. Thormann, "Again the 'Je Ne Sais Quoi'", Modern Language Notes 73.5 (May 1958:351-355).
- ^ Peter Rickard, reviewing Giovanni Dotoli and Fulvia Fiorino, ed., Dominique Bouhours: Doutes sur la langue française proposés aux Messieurs de l'Académie Française (Paris: Didier) 1998, in The Modern Language Review 96.1 (January 2001:181-182).
- ^ John Dryden Englished it, as The Life of St. Francis Xavier (London, 1688), and "respected, for the most part, Bouhours' preference, so unlike his own, for a diction purged of metaphor" (Alan Roper, "Characteristics of Dryden's Prose" English Literary History 41.4 (Winter 1974:668-692) p 671.). Roper sees in the translation "Dryden the father of English Augustanism, correct, conversational, well-bred, Dryden, indeed, as an English Bouhours" (p 673)
References
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Dominique Bouhours". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
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