Unit name | French Novel |
---|---|
Unit code | FREN20023 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | I/5 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
Unit director | Professor. Stephens |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | Department of French |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
The novels studied are taken from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, a period which saw the rise of the novel from a genre without prestige to one with a position of dominance. Introductory lectures (in French) and seminars (in English).
This unit will involve study of a selection of novels from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. There will be both close analysis of the texts in their specific historical contexts and comparisons between the different types of narrative that we find in them. These approaches will be used to discuss what we understand by the novel as a literary genre. The unit begins by examining one of the earliest French novels, La Princesse de Clèves (1678), seen as the beginning of the modern psychological novel in its exploration of the tension between private and public desires. Such tensions are explored further in Manon Lescaut (1731) before examining the move into Romanticism and the age of unbridled individualism, exemplified by Adolphe (1816). The empowerment of the individual and the collapse of absolutism in the wake of the Revolution and Napoleon are then considered in the scandalous Madame Bovary (1856) as an unsettling new reality, whose difficulties can only be fully probed by fiction. The unit concludes with the move into Modernism in Les Caves du Vatican (1914), paying particular attention to the blurred lines between fact and fiction and the playfulness of narrative voice in resisting any certainties.
Aims:
Successful students will:
Normally one lecture hour and one seminar hour per week across one teaching block (22 contact hours), often with student presentations. In units with a smaller number of students the lecture hour may be replaced by a second seminar or a workshop. Units involving film may require students to view films outside the timetabled contact hours.
A written assignment of 2000 words and a two hour exam (50% each)
Madame de Lafayette La Princesse de Clèves (Livre de Poche)
Abbé Prévost Manon Lescaut (Garnier-Flammarion)
Benjamin Constant Adolphe (Folio)
Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (Garnier-Flammarion)
André Gide Les Caves du Vatican (Folio)