French Studies 597P - ST-Exoticisms

This course will examine the role of the exotic in nineteenth-century French narrative works. We will explore various aesthetic and epistemological functions of exoticism and the problems and paradoxes it raises in its evolution as a romantic, realist and decadent topos. We will pay particular attention to the problems of representing difference and the unknown, the role of the exoticizing gaze with respect to subjectivity and nineteenth-century discourses of identity
-- racial, gender, class and national -- and the broader cultural and political uses of exoticism in a globalizing nineteenth-century France. Readings from Chateaubriand, Balzac, Madame de Duras, Merimee, Gautier, Baudelaire, Flaubert and Loti. Taught in French, though students outside of French Studies may write their papers in English.