Bucknell University Bucknell Digital Commons Faculty Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 10-2015 Increasing Engagement in French and Francophone Studies: Structured Journaling on the Emotions in La Fayette's La princesse de Clèves Logan Connors Bucknell University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/fac_journ Part of the French and Francophone Literature Commons, Reading and Language Commons, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons Recommended Citation Connors, Logan. "Increasing Engagement in French and Francophone Studies: Structured Journaling on the Emotions in La Fayette's La princesse de Clèves." PMLA (2015) : 1476-1480. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. [ PMLA the changing profession Increasing Engagement in French and Francophone Studies: Structured Journaling LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF EMOTIONS FASCINATE US AS READERS; THEY CONNECT TO US LOGICALLY AND NATURALLY BECAUSE WE EXPE- on the Emotions in La Fayette’s La princesse rience in our daily lives many of the emotional events depicted in novels, plays, and poems. Students are intrigued by the similarities de Clèves and diferences between their everyday feelings and the emotions represented in literature. Emotions are thus interesting processes to study, and in classroom discussions and activities most students logan j. connors have something to say about them. For this reason, I use emotion (broadly deined) as an important subject of inquiry in my literature and culture classes. In what follows, I share a structured journaling assignment based on emotion that helps students read with more detail, improves their foreign language skills, and boosts their en- gagement with diicult subject matter. Emotions are complex, socially constructed states that have “both cognitive and afective components” (Matravers 4). When we focus student reading, journaling, and discussion on the sources, LOGAN J. CONNORS is the NEH Chair in deployments, manifestations, and consequences of emotion, we can the Humanities and associate professor of French and francophone studies at beneit from the growing academic interest in emotion in the ields Bucknell University. He is the author of of neuroscience, psychology, and animal behavior, which are some Dramatic Battles in Eighteenth- Century of the most popular majors at my school and, according to a few re- France: Philosophes, Anti-philosophes cent studies, around the country.1 More signiicantly, reading, writ- and Polemical Theatre (Voltaire Founda- ing, and talking about emotion tap into the experienced reality of tion, 2012), a critical edition of Pierre de our college students—young and not-so- young adults who are go- Bel loy’s Le siège de Calais (Mod. Humani- ties Research Assn., 2014), and numer- ing through periods of profound self- questioning and change. Re- ous articles about French theater, the cent changes to how I teach Madame de La Fayette’s La princesse European Enlightenment, and literature de Clèves in a survey class on French literature serve as examples pedagogy. In 2015 he edited a double is- of how to build transferable skills and boost the quality and attrac- sue of Restoration and Eighteenth- Century tion of courses through close- reading techniques and the analysis of Theatre Research devoted to antitheatri- emotion in novels. From a broader perspective, this close- reading as- cal discourses in early modern Europe, signment helps assert the knowledge- building power of the emotions and he is working on a book about theo- ries of emotional response in the writ- and of iction and perhaps even serves to combat several possible ings of antitheatricalists and proponents reasons behind student attrition in early modern French studies, a of the stage in early modern France. particularly vulnerable subield in an already vulnerable discipline.2 © 2015 logan j. connors 1476 PMLA 130.5 (2015), published by the Modern Language Association of America 130.5 ] Logan J. Connors 1477 La Fayette’s novel, published in 1678, at that student motivation was determined by profession changing the the height of Louis XIV’s reign, is the cen- forces outside my control and pedagogy: stu- terpiece of my survey course of French lit- dents with a preexisting interest in literature erature and culture from the Middle Ages to seemed engaged; those who were in the class the Revolution. he course is a requirement because it was a requirement or because they for the French and francophone studies ma- had a vague interest in history or general jor, yet students are oten reluctant to enroll: French culture or a desire to improve their many can’t bring themselves to take the class French were not. until their senior year. Most have never been I decided to make a change: I refocused exposed to texts, in any language, from the my emphasis from people, places, and things medieval or early modern period, and some to the ambiguous emotional lexicon that sophomores (who brave the class early in characterizes early modern France and the their studies) have never read a complete inner lives of the characters in the novel. My novel in French. he students’ initial feelings primary goals remained the same: I wanted of strangeness and distance vis- à- vis the size my students to read closely in order to engage and diiculty of the texts and the remoteness with the text on a meaningful level. I wanted of the periods in question are diicult to over- them to analyze formal elements of the narra- come. Halfway through the semester, we read tive (character development, foreshadowing, our irst long novel, La princesse de Clèves, a stylistics) as well as cull information about seventeenth- century masterpiece and grand early modern French society from the novel. classique of French literature that, despite its In this new version of my survey course, renown in the French canon, reveals a host our discussion of the emotions starts before of diiculties for my (mostly) American stu- I assign any reading. In the classroom, the dents. How do I get students through the irst students and I examine together several pas- section of the novel—an onslaught of dates, sages in the first thirty pages that describe characters, and relationships? How do I get emotions. I draw the students’ attention to them not to give up before the main narra- terms such as “touché” (50), “modestie noble” tive, the princess’s story, even begins? And (50), “respect” (51), “ambition” (53), “chaleur how do I overcome the seemingly impos- extraordinaire” (55), “reconnaissance” (61), sible cultural differences between the rigid and “inclination” (61).3 I do not provide much sixteenth- century court that Clèves and com- context; I ask the students what these words pany navigate in the novel and the everyday mean to them as twenty- irst- century college experiences of my students? students and urge them to pay attention while I began teaching this course with a rather reading to the diferences between their per- standard approach: I assigned the irst thirty sonal deinitions and how the words are used or so pages of La princesse de Clèves and then by La Fayette. hen I assign a journal exercise asked the students to tell what happened in conjunction with the reading for the next there, focusing on people, places, and things. class, inviting students to write about some If they better understood the plot of La Fa- of the emotion words that we had studied to- yette’s novel, I thought, they would be more gether in class. I ask them to contextualize, in motivated to continue reading. On the day the irst part of the story, words like inclina- when the irst section was assigned, I asked tion, trouble, passion, rougeur, froideur, mo- such plot questions as, What is the relation- des tie, respect, and intelligence—words that ship between the king and Diane de Poitiers? La Fayette uses to describe the emotional Who is the duc de Nemours? Which families events of the novel and that sometimes have are in conlict? Since when and why? I found radically different definitions today. I give 1478 Increasing Engagement in French and Francophone Studies [ PMLA each student a diferent word but assign the erly used emotions to remind the reader of most ambiguous words (e.g., inclination and earlier events in the novel. trouble) to multiple students if the class is Through these in- class and homework large. (Although the number varies from year activities, students saw irsthand that there to year, there are typically between twelve was a lot of confusion over how the emotions and twenty- four students in my survey class.) worked in early modern times—a psychologi- This change to how I approach the be- cal ambiguity that undergirds the period yet ginning of La princesse de Clèves boosted the provides for a host of exciting moments in energy of the class in discussions and overall La Fayette’s novel. To introduce the students student engagement with the novel. A student to research methods in early modern litera- the changing profession changing the who was asked to work on trouble, for example, ture and speciically to the use of secondary traced the term to a process of visual or touch sources in literary research and analysis, I perception that is catalyzed by social factors, discuss excerpts of several works by schol- such as the relationship between the person ars of early modern emotionality, including, troubled and the one who troubles, the class for example, Daniel Gross. In his analysis of and social status of both parties, and the layout early modern European philosophers, rheto- of the venue in which the troubling occurs (a ricians, and literary authors, Gross conirms party, a ceremony, an intimate salon, etc.).