Transgression in Nineteenth-Century French Culture

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor and tutor: Damian Catani

Transgression is a topical word in literary and cultural discourse that can be seen to have a particular resonance when examining the politics and aesthetics of nineteenth-century France. This was a period often referred to as the bourgeois century, a time of economic expansion, social upheaval and emergent political forces, all of which were reflected in some of the key literature and culture of the time. However, several canonical authors, particularly in the second half of the century, sought to break away from what they saw as the constrictive and at times repressive nature of a society whose increasingly bourgeois values constituted a threat to individual and aesthetic freedom. Consequently they produced provocative, transgressive works that sought to challenge the complacency of their predominantly bourgeois readership. The transgressive nature of these texts is evident in their deliberate subversion and re-examination of established and normative bourgeois values in the realm of sexuality, aesthetics, politics and morality. This module shows how very different transgressive works, whether novels or poems, highlight the points at which culture and society, aesthetics and politics collide, albeit in ways that are thematically interesting and formally innovative.

This module will be taught in English: the texts should be read in French.

texts

• Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857)
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)
• Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices (1899)
• Arthur Rimbaud, Les Illuminations (1872)
• Émile Zola, Nana (1880)