Sections offered SPRING 2023:
#31354 |
MARGARET GRAY |
TuTh 11:30 AM–12:45 PM |
BH 336 |
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html
This course explores the tangled questions that inform gendered, racial and cultural relationships as expressed within a range of modern novels in French, all authored by women. Our narratives will include the part-narrative, part-epistolary 1900 fiction of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery — who took as her pen name “Rachilde.” Her hybrid novel The Juggler studies the daring effort of an iconoclastic Creole widow to carve an identity within the stifling bourgeois norms and conventions of turn-of-the-century Paris. From the French Antilles and the racial and cultural context to which Eliante longs to return, we will travel to Belgium with Jacqueline Harpman’s novel Orlanda (1996) and the subtle, contemporary dystopia of a young woman’s journey to awareness of her confinement within the roles of successful professor and beloved companion. Written as a riposte to the conformist ending of Virginia Woolf’s romp through gendered convention in her 1928 novel, Orlando, Harpman’s narrative engages fantasy to oppose gendered norms through the conflict opposing two halves of a single person : the timid, feminine Aline and her outrageous masculine double, Orlanda. Fred Vargas’s Seeking Whom He May Devour takes us to a corner of rugged, rural France, and a climate of suspicion and superstition, where we will pursue the entwined narratives of a young African man and a young French woman composer/plumber/truck-driver as they negotiate cultural hostility motivated by racial and gendered prejudice. Just as the text overturns certain assumptions (among them, the assumption that its author is a man), it also overturns literary as well as sociocultural conventions. Selected scenes from the novel’s film adaptation will be consulted to test, contest and/or expand our reading. How to Cook One’s Husband African Style (2000) by Cameroonian immigrant to Paris Calixthe Beyala, pursues similar questions of racial and gendered identity within a contemporary Paris as its protagonist struggles to reconcile her traditionalist African past with a cosmopolitan present filled with false solutions. Across these various narratives and their differing geographies, we will be constantly attentive to the formal choices made by our fictions as they explore gendered, racial and cultural tensions. Student performance will be evaluated on the basis of a range of activities, including active class participation ; an oral presentation ; a midterm essay exam or analytical paper; and a final exercise consisting of a choice between an essay exam or an analytical paper. A final creative piece in dialogue with one of our novels (a “long-lost” chapter? An epilogue?) will be accepted pending permission of the professor.