Realism and Its Returns in 20th-Century France

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course will examine the influence and continuation in twentieth-century French literature of the great realist enterprise of the previous century. Beginning with the crisis of naturalism in the late nineteenth century, we will consider the inflections given to literary representation by historical cataclysm, the avant-garde critique of the novel, and the postwar "age of suspicion." We will investigate the reformulations of literature's relationship to reality offered by theories of literary commitment and by the experiments of the Nouveau Roman. Finally, we will evaluate the phenomenon of the "return to the real" in contemporary French literature. Readings will include works by Aragon, Céline, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Perec, and Pierre Michon.