The Great 19th Century French Novel: Long Stories, Short Readings

Catalog description

The 19th century was the golden age of the French novel, producing works of lasting power and influence. From Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris and Flaubert's Madame Bovary to Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Balzac's Comedie humaine, and Zola's Germinal, French writers confronted modernity and its discontents: revolutionary ideals clashing with bourgeois values, soaring ambitions crushed by disillusionment, industrialization wreaking family structures, and individualism thwarting democratic aspirations. How did writers craft gripping narratives to offer a social and political critique of their contemporaries while forging a new aesthetics sentence by sentence? Undergraduate students will read at least three major novels in depth, while practicing close reading and stylistic analysis on short excerpts drawn from a wider canon. We will cover key literary movements - Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, and Decadence - and the social, historical, and aesthetic debates that shaped them. Emphasis on literary analysis, narration, world making, new reading and writing practices, characters and types, the birth of the anti-hero. Structured as a seminar with a "book club" spirit, the course emphasizes both the pleasures of immersive storytelling and the discipline of detailed, interpretive reading. This course is taught in French.