Course Syllabus

Syllabus 302A Winter2024-4.pdf

FREN 302 Le Monstrueux : du conte de fées au conte fantastique 

Course Description:

Bienvenue au cours de français niveau 302! This class, taught entirely in French, is intended as an introduction to the work of reading, thinking, writing, listening, and speaking about literature, film, and culture in French. While we will take time to review and refine grammatical concepts (developing your skills up to the B1.2/B2.1 proficiency level on the CEFR scale), the focus this quarter will be on using French and putting your language knowledge into action. As such, this will be a space where everyone will be encouraged to make mistakes because gaining fluency and competency in a language cannot happen if we’re afraid of being anything short of perfect. Speaking of fear…

Allez cherchez vos plaids et vos bougies ! In this wintery iteration of French 302 we will encounter texts that will take us from the marvelous realms of the fairytale to haunted mansions where protagonists teeter on the edge of madness. We will begin with Charles Perrault’s fairytales (1690s), reading them alongside twenty-first century Arabo-Muslim and Feminist rewritings (Tahar Ben Jelloun, Amélie Nothomb) before proceeding to Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film adaptation of the eighteenth-century tale “Beauty and the Beast.” We will use illustrations and successive rewritings to reflect on how the readership and meaning of texts evolves through time, allowing us to explore both novel reinterpretations and surprising textual and cultural histories.

Just as fairy tales were being revived in the nineteenth century in the wake of nationalism, another genre, the horror story – le conte fantastique – flourished under the pens of E.T.A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, and others. Through the theoretical writings of Sigmund Freud, Roger Caillois, and Tzvetan Todorov, we will consider various definition of this “littérature de la peur,” the socio-political context in which the genre emerged, and its relationship to the fairy tale. Why are we terrified of ghosts but not of ogres? What roles did fairy tales and horror stories play in the cultural and political landscape of the nineteenth century? Ultimately, we will examine how the fairy tale and the horror story affirm and/or disturb societal norms and conjure up the porous borders between the monstrous and the human.