The 19th century was the golden age of the French novel, producing works of lasting power and influence. From Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris and Flaubert's Madame Bovary to Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Balzac's Comedie humaine, and Zola's Germinal, French writers confronted modernity and its discontents: revolutionary ideals clashing with bourgeois values, soaring ambitions crushed by disillusionment, industrialization wreaking family structures, and individualism thwarting democratic aspirations. How did writers craft gripping narratives to offer a social and political critique of their contemporaries while forging a new aesthetics sentence by sentence? Undergraduate students will read at least three major novels in depth, while practicing close reading and stylistic analysis on short excerpts drawn from a wider canon. We will cover key literary movements - Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, and Decadence - and the social, historical, and aesthetic debates that shaped them. Emphasis on literary analysis, narration, world making, new reading and writing practices, characters and types, the birth of the anti-hero. Structured as a seminar with a "book club" spirit, the course emphasizes both the pleasures of immersive storytelling and the discipline of detailed, interpretive reading. This course is taught in French.
3-5 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit · GER: WAY-A-II
The 19th century was the golden age of the French novel, producing works of lasting power and influence. From Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris and Flaubert's Madame Bovary to Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Balzac's Comedie humaine, and Zola's Germinal, French writers confronted modernity and its discontents: revolutionary ideals clashing with bourgeois values, soaring ambitions crushed by disillusionment, industrialization wreaking family structures, and individualism thwarting democratic aspirations. How did writers craft gripping narratives to offer a social and political critique of their contemporaries while forging a new aesthetics sentence by sentence? Undergraduate students will read at least three major novels in depth, while practicing close reading and stylistic analysis on short excerpts drawn from a wider canon. We will cover key literary movements - Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, and Decadence - and the social, historical, and aesthetic debates that shaped them. Emphasis on literary analysis, narration, world making, new reading and writing practices, characters and types, the birth of the anti-hero. Structured as a seminar with a "book club" spirit, the course emphasizes both the pleasures of immersive storytelling and the discipline of detailed, interpretive reading. This course is taught in French.
Offered in Spring 2026 at Stanford University.