French Literature II
Courses Degree in Humanities
The course, subtitled ‘A journey through the novel: from Flaubert to Duras’, aims to study 19th and 20th century French literature from a diachronic and culturally integrated perspective, focusing on three novels: Flaubert's ‘Madame Bovary’, paradigm of realism in literature; Proust's ‘Du côté de chez Swann”, the first part of the monumental cycle ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’, which revolutionized the art of the novel; Marguerite Yourcenar's ‘L’ Amant’, where the boundaries between fiction and autobiography are blurred. These works will be examined using the tools of narratology to detect how the evolution of narrative techniques and the status of the narrator/author are articulated with a changing worldview.
French Literature
Romance
Realism
Modernism
Autofiction
At the end of this course unit, students should be able to:
- situate three essential authors of Modern and Contemporary French Literature, relating their works to the epistemological and cultural transformations of their time;
- recognise and characterise some of the main transformations in French novel during the period covered;
- apply the appropriate knowledge, methodologies and tools to the critical exploration of narrative and the writing of a text commentary.
The aim of this curricular unit is to study leading authors and fundamental works of Modern and Contemporary French Literature, in articulation with the literary and artistic movements of that period, always in a transversal and comparative perspective.
This unit will be taught in Portuguese, with resource to translations, but will refer to the original texts whenever needed.
In order to offer a panoramic view of French Literature, three novels by three leading authors of the 19th to the 20th centuries will be studied:
Madame Bovary by Flaubert, a major work of literary realism
Swann’s Way (Combray) by Proust, the first part of the first volume of the monumental work In Search of Lost Time which introduced major changes in the art of the novel.
Refrain of Hunger by Le Clézio, French Nobel prize in 2008, and the most important french contemporary writer.
Works for full reading:
FLAUBERT, Gustave – Madame Bovary. Nouvelle édition préfacée, annotée et commentée par Jacques Neefs. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2019.
PROUST, Marcel – Du côté de chez Swann. Ed. Mathieu Vernet. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2022.
DURAS, Marguerite – L’Amant. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1984.
The rest of the bibliography will be made available with each topic throughout the semester.
E-learning
Continuous assessment is privileged: 2 digital written documents (e-folios) during the semester (40%) and a final digital test, Global e-folio (e-folio G) at the end of the semester (60%). In due time, students can alternatively choose to perform one final exam (100%).