L'Honneur des poètes

This course will focus on 20th century narrative attempts to give form to war, as historical and traumatic event and scene of a protagonism/narrativity in crisis. Starting with the paradigmatic battlefields of Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme and Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, we will then consider major post-1945 novels (and films) dealing notably with the second world war and the Vichy years (Perec, Simon, Duras, Resnais, Modiano, Littel, Jenni, Echenoz), along with theoretical writings on war, representation and the military-industrialized present (Baudrillard, Virilio, Chamayou, Scarry, Butler). Taught in French.