Framing Violence in Popular Tales

Catalog description

Short stories have been an important literary and cultural tradition in France since 1690. Classical authors, folktale writers, translators of "oriental" fictions, aristocrats, and femmes du monde have produced a large corpus of short stories. These stories are far from being mere fairy tales; they unveil the violence of the Early Modern period while revealing the horrors of social and domestic violence. This course has two goals: the first one is to present the nature, extent and causes of domestic, social, and everyday violence in absolute regimes of the early modern times. The second one is to "read" violence and the emotions linked to it in popular tale narratives. Our repertoire will include popular French tales, such as Les Contes de Perrault, and the philosophical and political tales of Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire. Our approach will be comparative, psychoanalytic, feminist, cross-cultural, sociological, and anthropological. Format: seminar. Taught in French. Minimum requirement to join the French section is to be placed in FRENLANG22P