The French Novel Today

What does today's French novel look like? Reading ten prominent short novels (in English translation) from the last 20 years, students will be acquainted with the novelistic landscape of contemporary France, while also learning to approach through analysis and narrative theory the novel as genre. We will consider what kinds of questions these novels pose and how - be it regarding conditions specific to our time (human/inhuman, identity, technology, the globalized world, the everyday, dystopia...) or those unceasing questions of life, time, love, predicament, that every novel must ask, even while sometimes seeming not to. Taught in English.