Aims

At the end of the course, the student:
1. will know and have a critical view on the history of the main literary theories since the beginning of stylistics as a scientific discipline at the end of the 19th century.
2. will be able to use this knowledge in a personal analysis of texts from our modern pieces of literature (Mallarmé, Proust, Ponge, Duras, Blanchot…)

This relatively advanced course aims to help the students to further their knowledge in literary theory (new areas will also be studied). It allows them to practice ideas studied on difficult or even abstruse texts of the 20th century French-speaking literature. It means that the students will acquire skills in the critical analysis of literary texts.

Main themes

The General aesthetics course - which is also a course of literary theory and deals with the tragic discourse - covers literature starting from the Greeks, when literature was dominated by discursive features and developed through the medium of art, various structural relationships (religious, political, inter-subjective) between the subject and another. On the other hand, literary stylistics, whose theoretical and artistic contents are restricted to the second half of the 20th century, aims to study in depth the aesthetical and textual system of a modern literary masterpiece.

Content and teaching methods

The course first covers the history of stylistics based on the following subjects :
1. The history of style and stylistics, as well as the philosophical contexts which gave to them a scientific status at the end of the 19th century.
2. The history of the main ideas in stylistics, of their epistemological theories and methods of analysis (including the Swiss tradition : Bally and his followers) and the German tradition (especially Spitzer, and in-depth analysis of his theories).
3. The epistemological break-away (Nietzsche, Freud…), which led to idealistic literary stylistics linked to the hermeneutic circle, being abandoned, and to the rise in contemporary thought on literary theory, with the Russian formalist school and Bakhtin's theories, narratology, theories of writing and reading.

On the basis of these works, the course will analyse one masterpiece in greater detail and one major literary school of thought depending on the year: Mallarmé's Un coup de dés, Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (Combray in particular), some texts from Ponge's Parti-pris des choses and La rage de l'expression, the postmodern current. Other literary examples, French or foreigner, will be called forth like Joyce, Lautréamont or Bulgakhov.

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

Teaching method: The course will be centred on problem-solving, mainly in the form of lectures which will analyse works from different periods.
Course materials : Poetic, narrative or theatrical texts; selected bibliography on the major literary thought and authors to be studied.
Assessment : A written exam based on the theoritical contents of the syllabus and the student's personal contribution of textual analysis.

Other credits in programs