Literature: French Literature Post 1945
Course overview
Course description
The course will begin with Camus’ classic Absurdist text, The Plague, a novel which remains an urgent communication today. Discover or rediscover this seminal work.
Our second text, Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar is a historical novel, describing the life of the Emperor Hadrian. It has a delicacy of expression and continues themes first initiated by Flaubert.
The third text is Missing Person by the second Nobel Prize winner among our authors, Patrick Modiano. Camus, is of course, the first. Modiano, underappreciated in Britain, explores issues of memory and the maintenance of identity under individual and societal pressures. He is a writer one should read, as his aesthetic and concerns arise from his experience of the postwar years.
Our fourth text is Street of Thieves by Mathias Enard, one of France’s leading contemporary novelists. Again this tackles issues of identity in a world where borders are flexed and redefined.
Our final text is by the third Nobel laureate, Annie Ernaux and is a fascinating example of auto-fiction.
As a whole the course will forge links between the politics of postwar France and the arts, between conformity and subversion and will beyond these themes inspire you to read more deeply into modern French literature.
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