For a very basic introduction to French Literature for non-French language students.

1. Introduction to French Literature (and film)

2. Major Themes Adventure – especially high-Romance stories and fairy tales Philosophical humor – satires which still bite like those of Voltaire and Rabelais Liberal Humanism – ties in with Realism, especially in the 19th Century Modern Individualism – leads from Proust’s memory to Camus’ Absurb and Sartre’s Nausea

3. Romantic Adventure and Fairy Tales

4. High Romance Chrétien de Troyes, author of the tales of England’s Knights of the Round Table Invention of Lancelot Long, long, long poems Focus is on adventure first, morality second, and love third

5. Charles Perrault 1628 –1703 Created the fairy tale, Author of many including: Le Petit Chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood), La Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty), Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté (Puss in Boots), Cendrillonou la petite pantoufle de verre (Cinderella), La Barbebleue (Bluebeard), La Marquise de Salussesou la Patience de Griselidis (Patient Griselda),

6. Philosophical humor – satires with bite Voltaire and Rabelais

7. Rabelais and his gentle giants 1494-1553 Renaissance thinker Emphasis on Free Will The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure.

8. Gargantuaand Pantagruel as Moral Philosophers Only one law: Do What Thou Wilt because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved

9. Voltaire François-Marie Arouet 1694-1778 Deist Enlightenment Detested Ignorance Detested Optimism Close to Ben Franklin 30 cups of coffee per day!

10. Voltaire’s Masterpiece: Candide, or The Optimist Candide is a man who sees the good in everthing, even in the Spanish Inquisition, until he is confronted with the reality of the world (and ends up a pragmatist, maybe) An immediate success, the novella was condemned by both secular and religious authorities

11. Great Adventure Novels

13. Of African Descent

15. Liberal Humanism and “Realism” This 19th Century movement came after the rise and fall of Napoleon, the birth and end of Romanticism, and the Industrial Revolution with its subsequent destruction of the “commoners” Honoré de Balzac – Human Comedy (over 2,000 characters) ÉmileZola – father of Naturalism (depressing) Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time

16. Let’s skip all that depressing stuff and move on to talk about…. Some more really depressing stuff

17. Aftermath of the Great20th Century Wars Modern Individualism – leads from Proust’s memory to Camus’ Absurb and Sartre’s Nausea

18. Camus Albert Camus dissociated himself from the existentialists but acknowledged man’s lonely condition in the universe. His “man of the absurd” (or absurd hero) rejects despair and commits himself to the anguish and responsibility of living as best he can. Basically, man creates himself through the choices he makes. There are no guides for these choices, but he has to make them anyway, which renders life absurd.

19. SartreHell is other people “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” “It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.”

21. Wrote several important works including The Second Sex.

22. The Second Sex provided a new radical understanding of gender.