Readings:

Balzac, Le cousin Pons; Barbey d’Aurevilly, “La vengeance d’une femme”; Baudelaire, selected poems; Desbordes-Valmore, selected poems; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Sand, Le compagnon du tour de France, Zola, Le ventre de Paris

Course Description:

Pierre Bourdieu once commented that “the physical object that a book is only turns into a social object when it meets its other half, the incorporated half that is the reader or, more exactly, the social subject or the social agent endowed with the dispositions that prompt them to read and that give them the capacity to decipher it.” In this seminar we will be interested both in works as social objects and in the different capacities to decipher them that have developed over time (and that we are developing in ourselves). To that end, we will accompany our reading of nineteenth-century literary texts with a reading of thinkers who write critically about different kinds of interpretative acts (hermeneutical, anti-hermeneutical, and other) and about their histories. (Critical readings by Auerbach, Bourdieu, Chambers, Chartier, Jameson, Johnson, Lukács, Lyon-Caen, Rancière, Skinner, and others.)

Section times and locations in the Schedule of Classes