V45.0868Inventing the Ordinary: Representations of Everyday Life in Modern French Literature Prof. Richard Sieburth Basing itself (very loosely) on the concept of the quotidien (or the “everyday”) as elaborated by such social and literary theorists as Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes and Michel de Certeau, this course will investigate a series of texts from a variety of genres and historical periods which in one way or another engage with the question: what is it to live—or to write—the “ordinary”? Readings will include: A few texts by Montaigne (“On Presumption,” “On Repentance,” “On Experience”) and a few by Rousseau (drawn from the Reveries of a Solitary Walker) in order to illustrate the relation of the essay as a genre to the habits and improvisations of the ordinary. Then a unit on Baudelaire, which will focus on the poetics of everyday city life via the “Tableaux parisiens” section of Les fleurs du mal, his prose poems and his essay on “The Painter of Modern Life.” This will be followed by a unit juxtaposing Huysman’s short novel of urban ennui and disgust, A Vau l’eau (variously translated as Downstream or With the Flow) with Sartre’s existentialist Nausea. This will lead into by a unit on the surrealist sense of le merveilleux quotidian, that is, the “uncanniness” of the everyday: Freud’s essay on The Uncanny will be read in conjunction with Breton’s Nadja and Leiris’s L’Age d’homme (Manhood). Selections from Céline’s Mort à Crédit (Death on the Installment Plan) will in turn register the sonic boom occasioned by the irruption of his revolutionary stylistics of “ordinary” (i.e. “lower-class”) language and experience. Finally, Barthes’ various essays on daily life (such as those in Mythologies) will be read in conjunction with selections from George Perec (Species of Spaces and Other Places). Time permitting, we will look at a few “new wave” documentary takes on the quotidien: Morin/Rouche, Chronique d’un été; Godard, Masculin/Féminin; Varda, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse. Taught in English. Readings in English and/or French (if being taken for strict French credit). |
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