Introduction to French Literature (and film)

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

Romantic Adventure and Fairy Tales

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

Charles Perrault 1628 –1703Created 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), • Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de

verre (Cinderella), • La Barbe bleue (Bluebeard), • La Marquise de Salusses ou la

Patience de Griselidis (Patient Griselda),

Philosophical humor – satires with bite Voltaire and Rabelais

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.

Gargantua and Pantagruel as Moral Philosophers

Only one law: Do What Thou Wiltbecause 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

Voltaire François-Marie Arouet• 1694-1778• Deist• Enlightenment• Detested Ignorance• Detested Optimism• Close to Ben Franklin

• 30 cups of coffee per day!

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

Great Adventure Novels

Alexandre Dumas • The Three Musketeers• The Count of Monte Cristo• And other adventure tales

•1802-1870•Of African Descent•Comparable to American writer James Finemore Cooper, author of Last of the Mohicans

Victor-Marie Hugo

• 1802-1885• Les Misérables • Notre-Dame

de Paris

You think these stories are simple adventure tales, but as The Hunchback of Notre Dame shows, they are much deeper. In this novel, for instance, the Cathedral itself is the most significant aspect, both the main setting and the focus of the story's themes. The book portrays the Gothic era as one of extremes of architecture, passion, and religion. The theme of determinism (fate and destiny) is explored as well as revolution and social strife.

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)

• Émile Zola – father of Naturalism (depressing)• Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary• Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time

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

Some more really

depressing stuff

Aftermath of the Great20th Century Wars

Modern Individualism – leads from Proust’s memory

to Camus’ Absurb and Sartre’s Nausea

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.

Camus

“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.”

SartreHell is other people

Simone de Beavoir•Married to Jean-Paul Sartre.

•Wrote several important works including The

Second Sex.

•The Second Sex provided a new radical understanding of gender.•Beauvoir's formulation that "One is not born,

but rather becomes, a woman,” distinguishes the

terms 'sex' and 'gender.’

And if we have time: French cooking in American Film

• Sabrina: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLZB61Z7rOY

• Rattatouille: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iyjw0-zJOFM