RLFR 230
Introduction to French Stylistics: The Art of Pastiche Spring 2014
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Generally speaking, pasticheurs are derivative artists. Yet many of France’s most original authors were agile pasticheurs, among them La Bruyère, Proust, and the experimental writers of the OuLiPo movement. What might the art of pastiche suggest about the relationship between imitation and creation, tradition and innovation, and past and present? Discussion of such questions will be grounded in the study of short texts by Rimbaud (as Villon), Zalmanski (as Madame de Sévigné), Janin (as Diderot), Flaubert (as Chateaubriand), and Queneau (as Proust). Analysis and explication of pastiches will strengthen students’ technical grasp of French. In the second half of the semester, students will apply their rhetorical, syntactical, and stylistic knowledge through weekly pastiche exercises, submitted as a final portfolio at semester’s end. Conducted in French.