RLFR 412(S) Senior Seminar: Desperate Housewives and Extreme Makeovers: Novel Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Same as Women's and Gender Studies 408)
In 1834, Balzac wrote that "Paris is a veritable ocean. Sound it: you will never know its depth." The same can be said of the French nineteenth-century novel and its boundless ability to echo the historical past and reverberate in the cultural present. Desperate housewives, sex in the city, queer eyes for straight guys, and extreme makeovers fill the pages of the nineteenth-century novel. From the Romanticism of Stendhal and Hugo, and the Realism of Balzac and Flaubert, to the Naturalism of Maupassant and Zola, the novel became an extraordinary forum for examining illicit sexuality, institutional misogyny, social injustice, criminal passions, revolutionary struggles, and Parisian pleasures in nineteenth-century France. Characters such as the imprisoned housewife Emma Bovary, the reluctant revolutionary Jean Valjean, the social-climbing lover Julien Sorel, the ambitious undergraduate Rastignac, the domestically-abused Gervaise, and the man-eating courtesan Nana became synonymous with France's turbulent social and political landscape from the 1830s to the 1880s. And as recent film adaptations make clear, these characters continue to haunt our twenty-first century present. Reinterpreted by such contemporary actors as Gérard Depardieu, Isabelle Huppert, Uma Thurman, Claire Danes, and Jennifer Aniston, the nineteenth-century novel continues to sound out the scandalous and sensational depths of our own century. Readings to include novels by Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola. Films to include adaptations by Clément, Berri, August, Arteta, Lelouch, and Chabrol. Conducted in French.
Format: seminar. Requirements: active class participation, two short papers, an oral presentation, and a final paper.
Prerequisites: French 109, 110, 111 or permission of instructor. Enrollment limit: 12 (expected: 10). Preference given to French, Comparative Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies majors and those with compelling justification for admission.
Hour: MARTIN