Jacques Noiray
Faculty
Email: jnoiray@middlebury.edu
Phone: work802.443.5526
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Courses
Courses offered in the past four years.
▲ indicates offered in the current term
▹ indicates offered in the upcoming term[s]
FREN 6672 - Landscape in 19&20C French Lit ▹
Landscape in 19th and 20th Century French Literature / le paysage dans la literature des 19 et 20ième siècles
This course will explore in the poetry and the French novel aspects and the evolution of a major theme of the literary and artistic creation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the representation of landscape. We will look first at the romantic landscape, focusing on the contemplation of nature and the effects that this contemplation occurs on the spectator's soul: countryside (Lamartine), mountain (Senancour), sea (Hugo), exoticism (Chateaubriand ), etc.. Then we'll see how the interest of the observer moves from nature to the city, and how the birth of a city (Paris) supports the development of modernity (Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola, Apollinaris, etc..). This change is accompanied by the emergence of new landscapes: industrial landscape, landscape of ruins, war, etc.. We will study the links that the landscape has with psychological analysis (Proust), and we will show how the emergence of new forms of fiction (Céline, Giono, New Roman) causes a change in the representation of space. The thematic study of the landscape will be accompanied by the means of its literary representation in relation to painting: realism, impressionism, abstraction, etc. We will work on short extracts to be distributed to students in class.
Evaluation: each student will make a brief oral and written work of a dozen pages related to the topics covered during the course.
LiteratureSummer 2012
FREN 6712 - Theory of the Novel
La théorie du roman / Theory of the Novel
N.B. This course meets from June 30 to July 20, 2 hours per day
This course will examine (thru theoretical texts such as forewords, correspondences, essays, etc.), how the French novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries considered the genre and their own craft. Balzac’s, Flaubert’s, Zola’s, Proust’s works will be studied to show how the realistic novel was born and how it evolved. Then a few attempts at renewal will be looked into : Gide’s Faux Monnayeurs, Sartre’s ‘existentialist’ novel, Robbe-Grillet’s ‘Nouveau Roman’. This course will provide a general survey of the evolution of the French novel between 1830 and 1960, with a final opening onto the next period.
The course material will be short excerpts given as handouts to students.
LiteratureSummer 2011
FREN 6713 - Camus
FREN 6714 - Passion in 19 & 20C French Lit ▹
Passion in the French Novel of the 19th & 20th centuries / La passion dans les romans des 19 et 20ième siècles
""Passion," Balzac said, "is all humanity." This course will explore different representations of the human passions in the French novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will first study in Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir the conflict of love and ambition; then in La Curée by Emile Zola the portrait of speculators associated with that of the ""imperial party"" in the corrupt society of the Second Empire; in Un Amour de Swann by Marcel Proust the fine analysis of the evolution of passion and jealousy, and finally in a Un Roi sans divertissement by Jean Giono the quest for the absolute and its tragic outcome. These texts should be read in full.
Each student will make at least one oral presentation and a written work of a dozen pages related to the theme of the course.
Required texts:
1) Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, Hachette, Le Livre de poche classiques, ISBN 978 225 300 6206
2) Émile Zola, La Curée, Gallimard, Folio classique, nº 3302, ISBN 978 207 041 1412
3) Marcel Proust, Un amour de Swann, Gallimard, Folio, nº 780, ISBN 207 036 7800
4) Jean Giono, Un roi sans divertissement, Gallimard, Folio, nº 220, ISBN 978 207 036 2202
Summer 2012
FREN 6725 - Image of Souths in French Lit
L’image des Suds dans la littérature française (XIXe-XXe siècles) / The Image of the Souths in French Literature (19th & 20th Centuries)
This course, addressed to advanced students, aims to examine the image of the Mediterranean world in French literature from the Romantic period to the present. Multiple but convergent points of view will be taken in order to develop a global perspective. We will first concentrate on the origins of the theme by studying the idea of exoticism, particularly oriental exoticism beginning with the late 18th C. We will consider the genre of the "Voyage in the Orient" with brief insights from several major authors (Chateaubriand, Nerval). We will analyze in greater detail the Voyage en Espagne of Théophile Gautier, a narrative representative of the genre. The Lettres de mon Moulin of Alphonse Daudet, will demonstrate how in the 19th C., both in the fable and the realist novel, a picturesque image of the South in France (Languedoc and Provence) developed. We will also examine the influence of Classical Mediterranean civilizations on Giono, Valéry, Gide, Camus, and how this influence, important in the first part of the 20th C., helped form a very different image of the South. Literature from the Maghreb, particularly the novel of Mouloud Mammeri, La Colline oubliée will broaden our perspective on the French literature of the Mediterranean world.
Texts: Théophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne (Gallimard, Folio classique, nº 1295); Alphonse Daudet, Lettres de mon moulin (Gallimard, Folio classique, nº 3239); Jean Giono, Regain, Hachette, Le Livre de poche, nº 382; Mouloud Mammeri, La Colline oubliée, Gallimard, Folio, nº 2353.
In addition, a collection of short texts will be provided.
Summer 2008
FREN 6764 - French Literature 1900-1960
La crise des idées dans la literature française (1900-1960) / Ideas Challenged : French Literature 1900-1960
N.B. This course will meet two hours daily for three weeks (July 1 to July 21).
This course will examine how literature reflected the evolution of ideas and cultural and aesthetic forms amid the major crises of the first half of the century. Specifically : the emergence of a new type of writer-thinker (Zola, Barrès, Gide, Romain Rolland) and the role of the major reviews like the Mercure de France and the Nouvelle Revue française ; the crisis in aesthetic values and attempts to renew poetry (Apollinaire) and the novel (Proust, Gide) ; the impact of World War I on literature and its legacy in the 1920’s with surrealism and in the novel (Céline, Malraux, Giono). The question of meaning and the absurd in response to the rise of totalitarianism and exacerbated by World War II will be examined in the novel and essay (Sartre, Camus), and theater (Ionesco, Beckett). Finally, we will look at the development of the social sciences after the war in some of its typical texts (Lévi-Strauss, Barthes).
LiteratureSummer 2010
FREN 6766 - Literature and Journalism
Littérature et journalisme (XIXe-XXe siècles) / Literature and Journalism (XIXe-XXe centuries)
In this course we will explore the complex and often difficult relations that have developed between literature and written journalism in France from the en of the 19th century to the present. We will first examine Balzac’s pejorative image, growing out of his own experience in this milieu, of the press and journalists in his novel Illusions perdues. It is this image that dominated literary representations of the press and that is evident again in Goncourt’s Charles Demailly, as well as in the second great 19th C. novel, Bel-Ami by Maupassant, that we will study in more depth. However this deprecatory image dramatically changes after 1880 under the influence of more modern writers, such as Zola, conscious of the possibilities that journalism offers to literature. Literature borrows new genres: the chronicle, the reporting. We will also study examples of great chroniclers : Proust, Barbusse, Vialatte, Giono, and then, in the 20th C., famous writer-reporters : Albert Londres, Simenon, Kessel, Roger Vailland. Finally we will analyse, using the work of two major authors, Camus and Mauriac, how the 20th C. writer uses the press as a forum to promulgate views on political and social issues, thereby achieving intellectual and moral authority. We will finish by considering the contemporary period examining whether the union of writer and journalist still exists in a period of general decline of the traditional written press (and literature itself?).
Texts : Mauriac, Bloc-Notes, t. V, 1968-1970, éd. du Seuil, Points-Essais, nº 270, EAN 13 : 9782020128186; A collection of texts will also be provided.
LiteratureSummer 2008, Summer 2009
