This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
The nineteenth-century novel has traditionally been seen in terms of categories or movements such as romanticism, realism, and naturalism. This module, rather than viewing novels in terms of their supposed adherence to the principles of particular aesthetic movements, reads a selection of nineteenth-century French novels as documentary fictions: fictions which document the modernity that makes them possible, and which are underpinned by incorporative documentary practices for which that modernity is also a condition of possibility. Of particular interest will be the ways in which contemporary discourses from various fields (medicine, science, historiography, social thought) are incorporated into these fictions. Rather than identifying ‘sources’, however, the emphasis will be on situating fictional texts in their wider discursive and epistemological contexts, and identifying points of commonality between literary and extraliterary discourses.
Total contact hours: 20
100% coursework
Any edition of the texts listed:
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857);
Gustave Flaubert, L'Education sentimentale (1869);
Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881);
Émile Zola, Nana (1880);
Émile Zola, La Bête humaine (1890);
Émile Zola, Le Docteur Pascal (1893)
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
Students will be able to engage critically with theories of mimesis and realism;
Students will develop critical familiarity with theories of modernity;
Students will be able to discuss literature's engagement with contemporary fields of knowledge and inquiry;
Students will develop critical awareness of literary authors' documentary writing practices, and situate it within a wider documentary culture;
Students will be able to identify points of commonality between literary and non-literary writing;
Students will be able to situate works of fiction within their wider discursive contexts;
Students will be able to explore the ways in which literature and theories of knowledge intersect;
Students will develop the ability to use theoretical and philosophical works as the basis for the analysis of works of cultural production
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