Department of French

Paper Fr11: Gender, Desire and Power in Nineteenth-Century French Culture

This paper will be offered at Part II from 2012/2013

This paper uses a broad thematic optic to provide students with a detailed, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking account of nineteenth-century French cultural life. The thematic approach adopted here has the double advantage of reflecting specialist research interests in the Department while simultaneously reflecting some of the most important and fruitful critical approaches to the subject that have developed in recent decades.

For 2013/2014 only, we advise Part II students who have already taken the old paper Fr9 not to take this new 19th century paper at Part II, because of the duplication of material. It would, however, be possible to undertake an Optional Dissertation in lieu of paper Fr11, providing that the student selects a topic that is sufficiently distinct from the primary material that he or she discussed in the IB Fr9 exam.

Learning Objectives

To introduce students to a robust corpus of primary texts, including both ultra-canonical and some less well-known works, with a stress on prose fiction;
To provide you with a broad contextual knowledge within which to situate the set texts;
To improve students' knowledge of the cultural and political history of nineteenth-century France;
To acquaint you with some of the major conceptual strands of research in nineteenth-century French studies over the past thirty years;
To alert you to the usefulness and to the limitations of gender and sexuality for literary and historical analysis.

Teaching methods

Students taking paper Fr11 will follow a single, 16-20 lecture core course followed by all students for the paper, divided into four separately titled 'units', plus additional introductory lectures.

Each unit will take the form of three or four lectures and be supported by two supervisions.
Each unit will typically be conceived around a core of between two and four texts; these texts may include some off-the-beaten-track material as well as canonical material.
Ample reading lists will be provided to encourage wider critical and contextual reading.
It is envisaged that each student will have a single supervisor for the entire paper (leave permitting).

Units

The units for 2013/2014 will be:

Romantic Love - Stendhal: Le Rouge et le Noir, Adolphe, Sylvie (students might focus on two of these in supervisions).
The Novel of Adultery - Both Flaubert: Madame Bovary, and Zola: Pot-Bouille.
Serial Love and Divorce - Both Maupassant: Bel-Ami, and Anatole France: Le Lys rouge.
The Gender of Literary Knowledge - One supervision on Balzac's shorter fiction: Sarrasine, Le Colonel Chabert, Adieu; the other supervision on Baudelaire: La Fanfarlo; or Sand: Mauprat.

For more details of general and critical reading, see the reading list.

Examination Structure

The exam will be comprised of three sections: A, B and C. Students will answer one question from each section (see specimen paper).

Section A: four general questions requiring a synoptic answer which refers to "a range of material from the period". Students will be expected to choose material from two of the four units in this answer.
Section B: two questions each on the four units taught in lectures in the relevant year, to elicit more focused, detailed responses. Students will be expected to discuss one particular unit in this answer.
Section C: a critical commentary exercise on one of a choice of two texts.

Further information

Please contact Dr Nick White njw16@cam.ac.uk to discuss the paper further, though he will be on leave in Easter Term 2012-2013, when Dr Claire White cew47@cam.ac.uk will be the point of contact.