Love, Death, and Other (Narrative) Obsessions

French 261 The Modern French Novel in Translation Mondays, Thursdays 1:10-2:25 PM HW 207

This course offers an English-language survey of the twentieth-century French novel. The books we will read this semester are obsessive texts. As the protagonists of each novel are driven to emotional (Proust, Robbe-Grillet, Duras) and physical (Redonnet, Céline) extremes, the frontiers between opposing terms such as love and hatred, pleasure and pain, and life and death become irreparably blurred. Each novel’s thematic obsessions are communicated through experiments with narrative form. We will explore the various obsessions which drive each book while paying close attention to the textual tropes and structural devices used to stage them. By the end of the semester, you will have gained familiarity with important writers in the French tradition and with narrative forms and literary movements (the new novel, existentialism, the OuLiPo, the new new novel) which have strongly marked contemporary fiction in France.

Primary Texts Please make sure to use these editions.

Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: Swann’s Way. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, D.J. Enright. New York: Modern Library, 1998. ISBN: 0375751548

Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journey to the End of Night. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1988. ISBN: 0811216543.

Alain Robbe-Grillet. Two Novels. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1989. ISBN: 080215106X

Georges Perec. Things / A Man Asleep. Trans. David Bellos. New York: David R. Godine, 2003. ISBN: 1567921574.

Marguerite Duras. Four Novels. Trans. Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Press, 1990. ISBN: 0802151116.

Marie Redonnet. Hotel Splendid. Trans. Jordan Stump. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. ISBN: 0803289537

Jean Echenoz. Cherokee. 1983. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. ISBN 080326724X