Literature 3120 - The Literature of Private Life

Institution:

Bard College

Subject:

Description:

French Studies,GSS, Human Rights The representation of private life in the 19thcentury French novel coincided with the advent of realism and culminated in naturalism. Novelists started to describe the institutions and dramas that shaped private life. Those dramas included the plight of the child (Sand's Fran?ois le Champi), torments of family life (Balzac's Eugénie Grandet), ambiguities of marriage (Flaubert's Madame Bovary), despair of domesticity (de Maupassant's A Woman's Life), nature of obsession (Zola's Thérèse Raquin) , and the thematization of decadence(Huysmans's ? ?Rebours) . Using influentialwritings on everyday life, students examine topics previously considered too private or too personal to be viewed as literature. In order to situate texts within a tradition that rethinks the self, the class discusses works by Locke, Descartes, Shaftesbury, Kant, Marx, Hegel, and Foucault. Students read excerpts from the recent anthology History of Private Life, an invaluable research tool that helps connect literature, philosophy, social history, and anthropology.

Credits:

4.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.bard.edu

Phone Number:

(845) 758-6822

Regional Accreditation:

Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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