Between Revolution and Oblivion: The Politics of Literature in Nineteenth-Century France

Undergraduate

This course seeks to explore the hypothesis that nineteenth-century French literature and other modes of cultural and aesthetic production are situated against the backdrop of the massive political upheavals of the century, and grapple especially with the problems of contested memories and narratives of a revolutionary past that refuses to pass. In this course, then, we will link and think 19thC literature to politics and history, interpreting a variety of nineteenth-century texts, from poems to short stories, novels, paintings and revolutionary caricatures, with/against their cultural, political, historical, and esthetic contexts.