COMP 412
Senior Seminar: Nineteenth-Century French Novel: Desperate Housewives and Extreme Makeovers
Spring 2025
Division I
D Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed
WGSS 408 / RLFR 412
Class Details
In 1834, Honoré de Balzac wrote that “Paris is a veritable ocean. Sound it: you will never know its depth.” The same can be said of the French nineteenth-century novel and its boundless ability to echo the past and illuminate the present. From the Romanticism of Stendhal and Hugo, and the Realism of Balzac and Flaubert, to the Naturalism of Zola and Maupassant, the novel became a forum for examining illicit sexuality, institutional misogyny, social injustice, criminal passions, revolutionary struggles, and Parisian pleasures in nineteenth-century France. Characters such as the miserable housewife Emma Bovary, the reluctant revolutionary Jean Valjean, the social climber Julien Sorel, the ambitious undergraduate Eugène de Rastignac, and the domestically abused Gervaise Macquart became synonymous with France’s turbulent social and political landscape from the 1830s to the 1880s. As recent film adaptations make clear, these desperate housewives and extreme makeovers continue to haunt our twenty-first century present. Reinterpreted by such actors as Gérard Depardieu, Isabelle Huppert, Uma Thurman, Claire Danes, and Jennifer Aniston, the nineteenth-century novel continues to sound out the scandalous and sensational depths of our own century. Readings to include novels by Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola. Films to include adaptations by Clément, Berri, August, Arteta, Lelouch, Chabrol. Conducted in French.
The Class:
Format: seminar
Limit: 16
Expected: 16
Class#: 3716
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Limit: 16
Expected: 16
Class#: 3716
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation:
Active class participation, midterm exam, and two papers.
Prerequisites:
A 200-level or 300-level RLFR course at Williams, or Advanced coursework during Study Abroad in France or the Francophone World, or permission of the instructor.
Enrollment Preferences:
French Majors and French Certificate students, Comparative Literature Majors, Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Majors.
Distributions:
Divison I
Difference, Power, and Equity
Notes:
This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
WGSS 408 Division II RLFR 412 Division I COMP 412 Division I
WGSS 408 Division II RLFR 412 Division I COMP 412 Division I
DPE Notes:
This course analyzes difference, power, and equity through its examination of gender diversity, institutional misogyny, urban criminality, human sexuality, social injustice, and revolutionary struggle in nineteenth-century France. In class discussions and critical essays on 1830s-1880s France, students will examine and articulate the inequities and injustices between women and men, the privileged and oppressed, the wealthy and working class, and both the rural and urban poor.
Class Grid
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COMP 412 - 01 (S) SEM Sr. Sem: 19th C. French Novel
COMP 412 - 01 (S) SEM Sr. Sem: 19th C. French NovelDivision I D Difference, Power, and EquityTR 11:20 am - 12:35 pm
3716OpenNone