Meaning of succès de scandale | Babel Free

Definitions

The success of work of art due primarily to scandalous subject matter rather than artistic merit.

Examples

“Whatever else, Irréversible is already a succès de scandale.”

“The book was a success – of a kind: a succès de scandale; but it secured him a valuable patron.”

“She, on the other hand, was famous or infamous as the writer of a first novel which had had a succès de scandale ... the last thing she had wanted or expected, not realizing that honest probing of matters generally discussed with lifted eyebrows at dinner tables could shock.”

“She first achieved succès de scandale as a teenager with the novel Puberty Blues, which was made into a major film and a TV miniseries.”

“In 1972, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari registered a succès de scandale with the French publication of Anti-Oedipus, now widely considered one of the most important poststructuralist texts.”

“Nabokov may well have attended also, in early June 1921, the Busch-conducted premiere of Paul Hindemith's one-act operas Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, and Das NuschNuschi, a major succès de scandale.”

“Some of the major controversies of the 1990s and beyond have been sparked off by, and coalesced around, arguments about or between writers, their aesthetic and political views, as well as the succes de scandale of individual works.”

“Weill's first collaboration as composer with Bertolt Brecht was on the singspiel (or “songspiel,” as he called it) Mahagonny (1927), which was a succes de scandale at the Baden—Baden (Germany) Festival in 1927.”

“An early succes de scandale was A Modern Nativity Play, written in 1962 and permitted a brief stage run in Poznan in 1965 before being taken off.”

CEFR level