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| 0680-3240-01 | Introduction to the French Novel Before the French Revolution | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF HUMANITIES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This course examines the growth and development of the French novel from the Renaissance to the French Revolution. Historical and cultural developments explain the shift from the grand and epic writing typical of the literary salons of Mademoiselle de Scudéry (1607-1701) to the intimate internal fictional space created for ideal characters (The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette), while it also reflects the affinity with realistic writing. The turning point occurred in the 18th C, when writers such as Abbé Prévost (Manon Lescaut, 1731) and Diderot (The Nun, 1760), granted elevated status to trivial characters, socially unimportant in the old world order. Employing the bourgeois world and with it characters such as Manon Lescaut ( a prostitute) or Suzanne Simonin ( a bastard) as the inspiration for writers eager to examine the fate of the individual in a now godless world led to the growth of the modern novel and its eventual recognition as a central literary genre in the history of French literature.
Course readings include the novels of Lafayette, Prévost, and Diderot. We will examine how the greatest fiction authors who wrote before the French Revolution defined their works and how they defended themselves against the conservative criticism that traditionally venerates classical poetry and denies the novel a legitimate place in conventional literature. We will also analyze the literary methods that characterize fictional writing and study the latent meanings in the shift from third-person to first-person writing. The close and dynamic connection between writing and a unique socio-cultural reality will also be studied.