La crise des idées dans la littérature française (1900-1960) / Ideas Challenges: French Literature 1900-1960

In this course we will look at how literature accompanied and reflected the evolution of ideas and of aesthetic and cultural forms, in a world overwhelmed by the great historical crises of the first half of the twentieth century. We will see the energence of a new type of thinker and writer in the person of the modern intellectual (Zola, Barrès, Péguy), and examine the influence of periodicals on the evolution of ideas and literary forms. The crisis of aesthetic values early in the century brought attempts at renewing poetry (Apollinaire) and the novel (Proust, Gide). World War I had a major impact on the novel (Radiguet, Céline, Malraux) and its aftermath saw the emergence of surrealist poetry. The notion of the absurd, linked to a crisis in thought inspired by the rise of totalitarianism and the Second World War, was manifest in the novel, theatre and essays (Sartre, Camus, Ionesco, Beckett). We will conclude with examples of the development of the social sciences after the war (Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Sartre).