Readings:

Stendhal, La chartreuse de Parme (Gallimard – Folioplus); Sand, Les maîtres-sonneurs (Gallimard-Folio); Baudelaire, Naissance de la musique moderne: Richard Wagner et Tannhaüser à Paris (Fayard- Mille et une nuits); Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne (Fayard – Mille et une nuits).

Course Description:

This course is intended to help students acquire research skills while focusing on works by three nineteenth-century authors who deal in one way or another with the arrival of the phenomenon we loosely call “modernity.” We will  also study a number of different kinds of secondary sources alongside our primary texts, and learning about the social, cultural, and political history of nineteenth-century France.  We will spend a good part of the semester on Stendhal long masterpiece, La chartreuse de Parme, a novel about the production of modern forms of  political and sentimental subjectivity. Then we will turn to George Sand’s Les Maîtres Sonneurs, a novel about the fading away of certain traditional ways of life, certain landscapes, and  certain musical practices.  Finally, we will look at some critical writing (and also a few poems) by Charles Baudelaire that deal with the startling experience of modern music and art in the Paris of the 1860s.  All students will be expected  to undertake small research projects of their own dealing with one of the three authors we will be studying.

Prerequisites:
French 102 or equivalent or consent of instructor.

Additional information:

This course satisfies 1 French Major course requirement in the “Literature” (112-120) category or 1 French Major course requirement in the Elective category.  Priority enrollment for declared French majors.  Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature.

This course is designated as an “”R”” (Research-Oriented) course in the French major sequence.

Section times and locations in the Schedule of Classes