French 70B: An Introduction to 19th- through 21st-century French Literature

In this introduction to French literature from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, we will look at how questions of emotion and affect have been central to literary production and writerly preoccupations with memory, history, space, class, identity, and the experience of modernity. How, too, we will ask, does literature move us as readers and to what end? We will work through many of the movements and trends that have defined French literature over the last 200 years (Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, Existentialism…) and read across a variety of different literary genres (novels, drama, short stories, autobiographical narratives…). As we go, we will also keep in mind a question regarding the importance of perspective and representation: How does this literature that we are studying work to multiply the voices of modernity by choosing to speak from and for different points of view?