FRENCH 219 Love/Death

Thematics of love and death are central to writings in French from the medieval period to contemporary times. Affection, tenderness, love, desire and sexuality in its various forms are invariably  linked to frustration, jealousy, loss, death and mourning in the interplay between literature and film and the fundamental concerns of our lives.

What is fascinating is the recurrence of these themes in all historical periods and in different genres, in which gender and race inflect the treatment of longing and loss, desire  and  death.  We will study excerpts of a medieval roman, a seventeenth-century novel written by a woman, an eighteenth-century text taking the form of a confession, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictions.  At times the works celebrate the exhilaration of passion as well as dread its loss, as in Manon Lescaut, whereas others contemplate the narrator's own death, as in Bourdin's treatment of AIDS in Le Fil.  Contrasting with adults' reaction to love and loss, children's mourning will become the object of our examination in a stirring film,either Jeux interdits or Ponette.

This approach demonstrates not only our investment as readers and spectators, but also the role of literary and cinematic form in modulating that investment. We will  pursue the ways in which texts mobilize the reader's desires and expectations, including the role of narrators, metaphoric patterns, beginnings, foreshadowings and endings.

Our study will therefore accentuate the human import of literature and film, the interconnectedness of theme and form, of content and the experience of reading, as well as continuities in the rich variety of French fiction from ancient times to today's world.

 Texts:

Tristan et Iseult, (excerpts)

La Princesse de Clèves, Madame de Lafayette.

Manon Lescaut, Abbé Prévost.

Ourika, Claire de Durfort, Duchesse de Duras, (novella)

Le Rideau Cramoisi, Barbey dAurevilly (short story)

Moderato Cantabile, Marguerite Duras.

Une Mort très douce, Simone de Beauvoir.

Juletane, Warner-Vieyra

Jeux Interdits, René Clément (film)

Ponette, Jacques Doillon (film)

Le Fil, Christophe Bourdin.

One short paper. One final paper.