French 2111G
Sex and Seduction in the French Novel

Offered in English

Click here to read the article published in Western News (April 4th, 2013)

Syllabus - TBA

Course description
What is the relationship between seduction and the French novel? From its beginnings, with Mme de Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves (1678), the French novel has developed as a narrative of seduction, with sex, either explicitly or implicitly, at its centre. Yet sex also represents a form of impossibility; it is that which is gestured towards but can never be fulfilled. While all narratives can be said to be acts of seduction, the development of the novel in France repeatedly stages an encounter between desire and its prohibition. Love is always displaced, illicit and disruptive; it threatens the social order as well as the rules of gender. In these encounters between sex, seduction and the social, "love unceasingly prepares its own disappearance, acts out its dissolution" (Gilles Deleuze). This course will examine the relations among sex, seduction and the French novel through a mix of canonical and lesser-known works from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Texts (subject to change)

• Mme de Lafayette, The Princesse de Clèves (1678) (2 weeks)
• Choisy, Héritier, Perrault, History of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville (1695) (1 week)
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857) (4 weeks)
• Adolphe Belot, Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife (1870) (2 weeks)
• Henri Alain-Fournier, The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) (1913) (2 weeks)
• Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse (1984) (2 weeks)