French Literature Course

Lesson 1 • Historical Periods at a Glance

Maps major literary periods from the Middle Ages to the present. Provides the chronological scaffold on which later chapters build.

Lesson 2 • Core Literary Terminology

Builds a working vocabulary of narrative, poetic, and dramatic terms. Precise terminology enables accurate textual analysis throughout the course.

Lesson 3 • Writing About Literature

Covers thesis construction, textual evidence integration, and academic citation. Prepares students for written assignments in every subsequent chapter.

Lesson 4 • What Is French Literature

Defines French literature's scope, from medieval manuscripts to contemporary novels. Situates the field within broader cultural and linguistic history.

Lesson 1 • Epic Poetry and Chansons de Geste

Analyzes the heroic epic tradition, focusing on structure, oral performance, and feudal ideology. Builds close-reading skills on extended narrative verse.

Lesson 2 • Medieval Prose and Romance

Covers Arthurian romance and early prose narrative, examining idealized adventure and moral allegory. Connects prose development to later novelistic forms.

Lesson 3 • Origins of French as a Literary Language

Traces the emergence of Old and Middle French as vehicles for literary expression. Connects linguistic evolution to the texts produced in each era.

Lesson 4 • Courtly Love and Lyric Poetry

Explores troubadour and trouvere traditions and the fin'amor ideology. Develops skills in reading lyric form and gendered discourse.

Lesson 1 • Classicism: Rules, Reason, and Form

Defines classical doctrine, including the three unities and bienséance, and their application to drama and poetry. Grounds students in the aesthetic ideology of the era.

Lesson 2 • Tragedy and the Theater of Power

Examines classical tragedy's exploration of fate, duty, and political authority. Develops skills in dramatic analysis and character motivation.

Lesson 3 • Enlightenment Philosophy and Literature

Explores how philosophes used literary forms to advance rational and political ideas. Analyzes the essay, dialogue, and conte philosophique as argumentative tools.

Lesson 4 • Epistolary Fiction and Private Life

Examines the rise of the novel of letters and its representation of interiority and social constraint. Connects narrative form to emerging concepts of the individual.

Lesson 1 • Romantic Ideology and Aesthetic Revolt

Defines Romanticism's rejection of classical rules and its embrace of emotion, nature, and the individual. Establishes the ideological stakes for the century's literature.

Lesson 2 • The Romantic Novel and Drama

Examines historical novels and melodramatic theater as expressions of Romantic aesthetics. Connects genre experimentation to social and political contexts.

Lesson 3 • Romantic Poetry and the Lyric Self

Analyzes lyric poetry's expression of subjective experience, melancholy, and transcendence. Builds skills in prosodic analysis and thematic interpretation.

Lesson 4 • Realism: Society, Class, and the Novel

Introduces Realist principles of observation, documentation, and social critique. Analyzes how novelists constructed detailed portraits of class and ambition.

Lesson 1 • Mallarmé and the Limits of Language

Analyzes Mallarmé's pursuit of pure poetry and the crisis of representation. Develops advanced skills in reading syntactically complex and semantically dense verse.

Lesson 2 • Decadence, Aestheticism, and Transgression

Explores Decadent literature's celebration of artifice, excess, and moral transgression. Connects aesthetic ideology to broader cultural anxieties of the fin de siècle.

Lesson 3 • Symbolist Poetics and Musicality

Defines Symbolism's privileging of suggestion, musicality, and the symbol over direct statement. Develops skills in reading indirection and ambiguity in verse.

Lesson 4 • Rimbaud and Radical Poetic Rupture

Examines Rimbaud's systematic derangement of the senses and visionary poetics. Analyzes how his work dismantled conventional poetic subjectivity.

Lesson 1 • Theater of the Absurd

Analyzes dramatic works that use illogic, repetition, and silence to express existential meaninglessness. Develops skills in reading stage directions and theatrical language.

Lesson 2 • Poetry After the War

Examines how poets responded to World War II, the Holocaust, and decolonization through formal and thematic innovation. Connects historical trauma to poetic witness.

Lesson 3 • Existentialism and Committed Literature

Analyzes Existentialist philosophy as expressed in fiction, drama, and the essay. Develops skills in reading philosophical argument embedded in literary narrative.

Lesson 4 • The New Novel and Narrative Experiment

Examines the Nouveau Roman's rejection of traditional plot, character, and psychology. Analyzes how formal disruption challenges reader expectations and mimetic conventions.

Lesson 1 • Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Studies

Introduces key postcolonial concepts—hybridity, mimicry, and the subaltern—as analytical tools. Grounds students in the theoretical framework for reading Francophone texts.

Lesson 2 • Sub-Saharan African Francophone Fiction

Analyzes novels from West and Central Africa that engage with tradition, independence, and corruption. Connects oral storytelling traditions to written narrative forms.

Lesson 3 • Maghrebi Literature in French

Examines novels and autobiographies from North Africa that negotiate colonial history and cultural duality. Develops skills in reading bilingual and bicultural literary identity.

Lesson 4 • Negritude and Caribbean Voices

Analyzes the Negritude movement's affirmation of Black identity and its literary forms. Connects Caribbean writers to both French modernism and African oral traditions.

Lesson 1 • Gender, Sexuality, and Literary Theory

Applies feminist and queer theoretical frameworks to French literary texts across periods. Develops skills in identifying gendered power structures and subversive strategies.

Lesson 2 • Autofiction and the Self-Novel

Examines the autofiction genre's blurring of autobiography and fiction. Analyzes how writers construct and destabilize the authorial self on the page.

Lesson 3 • World Literature and Migrant Writing

Analyzes contemporary novels that cross cultural and linguistic borders, challenging national literary categories. Connects migrant experience to formal and thematic innovation.

Lesson 4 • Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Beyond

Introduces major French critical theories and their application to literary texts. Equips students with advanced interpretive tools for independent scholarly work.