UCL - Literary History

[ROM2720]

[22.5h] 5 credits

This course is taught in the 1st semester.

Teacher(s): Damien Zanone

Language: French

Level: Second

Aims
Main themes
Content and teaching methods
Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

Aims

The objective of this course is to interrogate the particular link that bonds the literary work with the history to which it belongs. The aims is to find out the specific function of literature, which, through its aesthetical forms, analyses the discourses of history and brings singular answers to the diseases suffered by civilisation.
At the end of this course, students will be able to explain, thanks to the analysing tools used by the teacher and with an argumentation, the relation which links the singular discourse of a literary work with the other discourses that cross the period of its creation.

Main themes

At the master level, the literary formation prioritises the theoretical and methodological orientations. Therefore, there is no constraints regarding to the studied periods, but the questions envisaged are very precisely delimited, and the examples are chosen in order to prove concretely the efficiency of the theoretical tools which are used. The possible exportation of these tools to other corpuses will also be explained.
This course focuses on the fundamental dialogical dimension of the literary discourse : writing is not only about communicating information, it is about using the words of the Other and answering to him, about decoding what in his words was coded, unknown. Starting from this hypothesis, it will be underlined how texts are crossed by philosophical, religious, scientific, moral, political and aesthetical debates, but also which particular forms of answers they bring to the discourses of their time. The study of these interactions will rely on the history of literatures, ideas, mentalities and institutions, and will use Human Sciences which renew the research on these.

Content and teaching methods

The course will be entitled: "Women and the Novel in the days of Romanticism." While in the classical era, tradition sees the novel as a female form (because women are both authors, characters and readers), a new distribution of roles between women and the novel takes place in the first half of the nineteenth century. When the novel form is recognized as a prominent literary form, it is more and more difficult for women to be accepted as authors: the leading role only left to them is that of heroine of the fiction. The course will try to understand this major change.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

The main works studied will be the following :
- Staël, Germaine de : Delphine.
- Constant, Benjamin : Adolphe.
- Sand, George : Indiana ; Valentine.
- Balzac, Honoré de : Béatrix, Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, La Muse du département.
- Stendhal : Chroniques italiennes, Lamiel.
As far as the evaluation is concerned, students will be asked to write an essay during the semester.