RLFR 215
The French Adventure: Word, Sound, and Image in the Digital Age
Last Offered Fall 2018
Division I
This course is not offered in the current catalog

The French Adventure examines celebrated French literary texts (from the Middle Ages to Modernity) that draw on the theme of adventure, putting them into dialogue with their graphic novel and filmic adaptations (from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). This course seeks to explore the phenomena of word (written or spoken), image (still or moving), and sound, as well as their interactions in today’s environment of multimedia and digital immersion. Why have we seen an explosion of graphic novels and films depicting French literary classics in recent decades? How can these visual and audiovisual renderings enhance our appreciation for and understanding of written texts, and what aspects of the written word remain untranslatable to the world of the image? To address these questions, we will study a series of literary texts that depict historical moments from the late Middle Ages, to Absolute Monarchy, to the Belle Époque. From our visual vantage point of the twenty-first century, we will gain familiarity with the defining figures and events that these texts represent, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. At the same time, we will interrogate the French-language graphic novel adaptations of each text, as well as portions of American-made filmic representations to consider questions of patrimoine, visual culture, and (trans)national identity. Conducted in French.