The Structures of Textual Production in Maupassant's Miss Harriet

The linguistic, semantic and symbolic materials in Maupassant's apparently simple story of Miss Harriet are part of an integrated and complex structure that brings the reader face to face with the larger Why? of textual genesis through a concretisation of the How? From anagram to archetype, self reference and self genesis appear as the two complementary principles at work in the structure of opposites that constitutes the dynamic of change and metamorphosis essential to the implied æsthetic of textual production, as it is to material process in all its forms. (JAF)