Course Information
Course Offerings Home Page
||
Course Descriptions
French Literary and Cultural Works in Translation: From Romantic Passion to Existential Doubt
Professor Dennis Minahen
TR 11:30 - 1:18
Call Number: 09605-9
Available for BER, GEC, and LAR Credit Autumn Quarter 2008.
The course will open with a depiction of fatal attraction in a romantic story by Balzac and the musical evocation of passionate love in a symphony of Berlioz. A reaction to romantic excess follows in Flaubert's ironic reworking of the romantic theme and in other anti-sentimental works, such as Baudelaire's poetic celebration of a rotting carcass. An attack against conventional bourgeois values unleashed by the enfant terrible Rimbaud during the turbulent period of The Commune finds at first only a muted reflection in the hazy plays of light and dissolving boundaries of impressionist landscapes and in the ambiguous soulscapes of the poet Verlaine.
With surrealism in the twentieth century, revolutionary zeal intensifies and targets all forms and constructs, including reality itself, as typified by the story of Breton's Nadja, who wanders impulsively and surreally in a Paris of dreams and visions, testing the limits of freedom in a society that proves to be all-too-real and intolerant. Freedom is again the subject of Sartre's portrayal of a fictitious hell to which three characters are relegated by their shirking of responsibility in an existential world where "we are condemned to be free" and ethics are essentially human, relative, and situational.
We will trace these and other paths from the romantic to the modern in major narratives, plays, poetry, films, art, and music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readings, lectures, and discussions are in English. Films include English subtitles.
GEC arts and humanities literature course.
