FACTOID # 122: If you're Dutch or Swedish, you're among the world's most likely to end up living in a retirement home. If you're Japanese, you'll probably end up living with your children.
 
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Encyclopedia > Dictionary of Received Ideas

Dictionary of Received Ideas (in French, La Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues) is a satirical work by Gustave Flaubert, lampooning the cliches endemic to French society under the Second French Empire. The book takes its form as a dictionary of catchphrases and platitudes, most of which are as paradoxical as they are insipid. In part, the book illustrates the transformation of modern man under machine capitalism by exploring the way that dialogue becomes prefabricated, and the ways in which meaning becomes divorced from context.


At the time of Flaubert's death, it was unclear whether he intended to publish the book seperately (though he may have been wary of creating a scandal, as he had with his earlier Madame Bovary), or as an appendix to his unfinished novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet. In some of his notes, it seems that Flaubert intended the dictionary to be taken as the final creation of the two protagonists of the latter novel.


The work is similar in many respects to Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary.


  Results from FactBites:
 
Analysis of Flaubert's Dictionary (2241 words)
FEUDALISM No need to have any clear idea what it was, but thunder against it.
The medium through which French ideas have been spread throughout Europe.
Dictionary of Received Ideas: English analysis bilingual French
  More results at FactBites »


 
 

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