Literature and Society in the Contemporary French Novel

This course studies the contemporary French novel of the last four decades through a sociological and anthropological lens. These four decades have been a time of profound societal change. The course will examine how the French novel has reacted to the issues of unemployment, pauperization, globalization, gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, immigration, or political extremism, some of which are experienced in the form of combined discriminations (intersectionality), all the while presenting a new aesthetic that is characteristic of postmodernism: the mixture of literary genres, the inclusion of scientific discourse, the avoidance of meta-narratives, the destabilization of the possible meaning of a work through the use of fractured perspectives, etc.

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