Paris and its Representations through the Novel in the 19th-21st centuries

Paris is the frame or even the main protagonist of numerous narrative fictions that have built its history and its legend, unveiled or shown its different faces, depicted its famous monuments, its mythic areas as well as its popular or out-of-the-way districts, portrayed its inhabitants – whether they might belong to the intelligentsia, the common or the (upper) middle-class – whose variety shows cultural and social discrepancies that are a source of human richness but also of individual and collective tensions. As a consequence, this course will focus on the representations of Paris and Parisians through the multiple mirrors, either flat or kaleidoscopic – Romantic, Realistic, Surrealist, Oulipian, poetic, fantastic, ironic, and so on –, offered by some significative French novels of the 19th-21st centuries which reflect the City and question our perception of reality. To conduct our enquiry, we will study closely two novels (Ferragus de Balzac et Demain si vous le voulez bien de Nicolas Fargues) and we will also use a course reader providing chosen excerpts of Balzac, Hugo, Zola, etc. These two required texts and excerpts of different novels will thus give the opportunity to discover not only main authors, but also singular aesthetics as well as literary movements and schools.

Required texts:

Honoré de BALZAC, Ferragus, La Fille aux yeux d’or (Paris: Flammarion, 2014) Collection GF ; ISBN : 2081324741

Nicolas FARGUES, Demain si vous le voulez bien (Paris: P.OL, 2001); ISBN : 2867447801

+ A course reader providing various extracts from novels of Hugo, Zola, Huysmans, Proust, Aragon, Breton, Simenon, Modiano, etc.
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