The French Novel of Disillusionment (Level 5)

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 5
• Convenor and tutor: Damian Catani
• Assessment: an in-class test essay or commentary (40%) and 1500-word essay (60%)

This module aims to examine the notion of disillusionment as figured by three representative novelists from three different centuries in the post-Enlightenment era: Musset, Céline and Houellebecq.

Analysis of the novels will be clustered around different articulations of disillusionment (‘mal de siecle’, ‘ennui’, ‘nihilism’) and will also be contextualised, where appropriate, by historical causes of this disillusionment: post-Napoleonic defeatism  (Musset); post-war trauma and economic Depression (Céline); the alienation of late twentieth-century bourgeois technocratic society (Houellebecq).

The course will be taught primarily in French and the primary texts will be studied in French.

indicative module syllabus

• Musset, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1833)
• Céline: Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932)
• Houellebecq, Les Particules élémentaires (1998)

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• demonstrate detailed factual knowledge about the prescribed texts, their contexts and the issues under discussion
• evaluate the prescribed texts at a thematic as well as linguistic and stylistic level
• work within historical and theoretical frameworks in the interpretation of the prescribed texts.