Goals
Texts & Readings
Requirements, Responsibilities, & Grades
Syllabus
Explications de texte
Course-related Items of Interest
Goals: This course begins with the understanding that the novel is a narrative in prose dealing with people and their actions, in a certain time, and in a certain space, all of which conveys a certain vision on the part of the author. The course is based on my belief in the commanding effectiveness of bibliography and its ability to lend historical lineage, credibility, and justification to our understanding and interpretation of fiction.
With these concerns in mind, the course seeks to introduce you to the major works and authors of the French Novel of the 19th century and to expand your critical vocabulary in literary analysis --but not by requiring whirlwind readings and a rapid survey of perhaps a half-dozen novels. Rather, the course seeks to achieve these goals through numerous oral and written explications de texte and by involving you in a mode of literary scholarship called "the present state of studies," which, for illustrative purposes, will focus on time in the work of Emile Zola.
This approach will provide us examples of the precise kinds of central issues, themes, and still unanswered questions that (a) rest at the foundation of the interconnecting elements of virtually any novelist's work, (b) exemplify the richness of non-theoretical approaches to literature, (c) provide an orientation for a couple of brief lectures from me, numerous explications of text by all of us, and presentations and reviews by you of specific chapters or articles from the "state of studies" bibliography, and (d) the return to which in the many other writers whom we love to read and to teach can expand and heighten the literary experience for you; in this regard, only representative texts, rather than complete works, of additional authors will be required.
I will also provide you with brief texts from other novels of Balzac and Zola
as well as texts for explication from
Note: I do not expect the paper to be a major research project. However, I do expect it to show some awareness of and reference to at least a couple of secondary sources. See the Reserve Reading list for some general studies related to the French novel.
Grades: based on class participation, explications de texte, "state of studies" presentation, and final paper--all with regard to the evaluative areas of intent, content, reasoning, language and variety of vocabulary, neatness, effort, and accuracy. As a rule, I do not accept late work. Nor do I give "Incompletes" except in very unusual circumstances and even then only if I believe that the work can be profitably completed in a reasonable amount of time.
Week 1: Introduction - Course conception, bibliography, writing requirements, required use of World Wide Web and email, lecture on time, history, and myth in Emile Zola
Week 2: Germinal, Part I
Zola's depiction of men, women, and things in a single family and precise socio-historical milieu, a corner of nature seen through his individual temperament; similarities and differences between realism and naturalism; discussion of the mimetic and performative aspects of narrative and of the extent to which the author's literary expression of history and human experience constitutes poetic transubstantiations of reality; close reading of Zola's use of technical vocabulary, emphasis on color, impressionist technique of writing, hypertrophy of detail, changing points of view, and descriptive and philosophical evocation of linear and circular conceptions of time and horizontal and vertical space in the novel; relationships between Zola's descriptive techniques and impressionist and surrealist painters' fascination with (in)tangible reality, representation and perception, appreciation of the modern, animism, color, tone, atmosphere, and light
Week 3: Germinal, Part II
Metaphors of capital versus labor; reification of the workers; doubt, faith, will, and reasoning of the miners and capitalists in the face of the social, political, and economic issues confronting them; comparison with Balzac's realism and distinction between Zola's "morality in action" ("morale en action") and the Balzacian character's "stock exchange value on moral principles" ("morale en actions")
Week 4: Germinal, Part III
Nine-month gestation period of the strike; the fair-day; poverty, corruption, and sexuality; mob psychology; Zola's presumed renunciation of individually developed characters and relationship of this feature to narrative techniques employed by Balzac and by "new novelists" of the 20th century; thematic and narrative functions of Etienne, Rasseneur, and Souvarine; fatalism and determinism; relationships between concrete reality and creative image-making in narration and painting, reconciliation of representation and perception; Daumier, Degas, Monet and Magritte: depictions of the wretched and starving, tangible atmosphere in light, intangible images, visual and verbal descriptions based on or distinct from reality; Zola's "leap into the stars from the trampoline of exact observation; truth takes flight into the realm of the symbol."
Week 5: Germinal, Part IV
Zola's complex, constantly shifting vision of history and class struggle; social and economic dissolution of the miners, consumed by their productivity's lack of rewards or food; fusion of the "two beasts" of labor and capital; evolving meaning of "germinal" in relation to history and myth; links between Zola's descriptive techniques and cinematic techniques; artistic blend of the elements of romanticism, realism, and surrealism
Week 6: Germinal, Part V
Zola's descriptive techniques on film: selected scenes from René Clément's adaptation of L'Assommoir and Renoir's adaptation of La Bête humaine; Explication of the horizontal and vertical dimensions of hell; descriptions of Tartaret and Germinal as a geological novel; mob violence and the vision of an antediluvian revolution evoking geological time; unanimism and the novel
Week 7: Germinal, Part VI
Artistic blend of elements of romanticism, realism, symbolism, and surrealism; death in every chapter of what Zola described as this "work of pity"; social cooperation, anarchy, and romantic humanitarianism; comparison of descriptive techniques in Germinal and those in representative texts from Le Ventre de Paris, L'Assommoir, and Au Bonheur des Dames
Week 8: Germinal, Part VII
The mine, finally wounded and collapsing in its death throes, counterpointed by the miners, themselves seen as animals, the human figure submerged into the natural; comparison between the novel's opening and closing chapters; the end as beginning; similarities and differences between our interpretations of the work and Zola's own explanation of the novel as revealed in his preparatory manuscripts, correspondence, and newspaper articles; the novel as an example of twentieth-century French "literature of involvement."
Week 9: Lecture on Time & Ennui in the 19th Century Novel. Close readings of selected texts from René, La Confession d'un enfant du siècle, Madame Bovary, and Le Rouge et le noir
Week 10: La Peau de chagrin, pp. 58-82
Balzac's prefaces to The Human Comedy and La Peau de chagrin; his "human zoology" and treament of men, women, and things in relation to morals and manners, character types, catholicism, and the monarchy, all constituting a material representation of the "thought" of contemporary society; the novel as "la formule de la vie humaine, abstraction faite des individualités...le point de départ de tout mon ouvrage [...où] je suivrai les effets de la pensée dans la vie." Textual explication of descriptions of the gambling house and the curiosity shop; gambling and speculation, labor and capital, art as art or commodity, and the individual, social order and social repression; geological conception of time; patterns of antithesis and alternation; interrelationship of author, narrator, and reader
Week 11: La Peau de chagrin, pp. 82-125
Balzac's definition of "thought"; parallels among Descartes's "Je pense, donc je suis," Pascal's all-but-stated "Je pense, donc je m'ennuie," Chateaubriand's implied "Je m'ennuie, donc je suis," and the Balzacian dilemma, life-in-death or death-in-life, as developed in his characters' thought, ennui, will, power, and knowledge; Raphael's infernal contract with the skin; close reading of descriptive vocabulary, verb tenses, stylistic features, rhythm, and expressive words in representative passages from Le Père Goriot, Illusions Perdues, and Eugénie Grandet will highlight temporal and other meanings of the skin and the relationship between the "philosophical studies" and the "social studies" of The Human Comedy
Week 12: La Peau de chagrin, pp. 127-214
Discussion of the extent to which Balzac practices his theories; journalism, prostitution, and gambling; variations of the Rabelaisian theme of drunkenness with life; role of education vis-a-vis the individual in society; consumption and production in art and economics; "theory of will" and "theory of fortune"; the novel's historical resonance and the characters' discussions of monarchy, freedom, and despotism; Raphael's personal psychology, family, and sexuality; social and economic dissolution of the individual; degree to which language in the novel remains capable of expressing thought and reality; narration and autobiography as art or orgy of words
Week 13: La Peau de chagrin, pp. 214-314
Close thematic relationship of the novel to such contemporary problems as conformity to a deterministic, amoral world in which the individual is reduced to nothingness, the assertion of individuality and the resultant self-destruction as a social being, social responsibility, absolute relativism and subjectivism, divorce of morality from good will, acceptance of materialistic utilitarianism, destruction of ethical universals; time and rhythm as narrative features that are both romantic and realistic; significance of geological imagery of Mont Dore as a foundation for understanding man, art, and history; parallels between descriptions of Mont Dore and Zola's Tartaret; comparison between concluding and opening pages; the beginning as end and the end as beginning; authorial and reader interpretations of Pauline and Foedora
Week 14: Individual conferences
Week 15: 2:00 p.m.: Papers due in my office or via web site.
As indicated above, this course requires each of you to submit four 2-4
page explications de texte. They are to be submitted electronically by 11:00 a.m. of the day
prior to the class in which the related passage will be discussed, thus giving everyone else
the chance to read one another's work prior to class discussion.
The three-fold purpose of this sharing is to
You may submit and read essays either by email or by accessing the related web site. Please note that this process functions only for students who are registered for this course and have been assigned a course username and password.
Usually, my evaluative comments about these essays will be addressed on an individual basis, thus safeguarding privacy and student sensitivity while also allowing the individual to forward those comments to classmates as (s)he sees fit. However, when I believe that my comments to an individual will be helpful to all students, I will post them to the immediately above link, which you should therefore check periodically.
EMail comments to: LKamm@umassd.edu
Lew Kamm
This HTML document created by: LK
On: February 6, 1996
Last Revised:
12/11/02