French Studies 424 - Renaissance Prose

Course taught in French. The purpose of this course is to acquaint the participants with some works of late-medieval and Renaissance storytellers (French "conteurs"). We will read a variety of texts in the storytelling tradition, from /Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles/ to Beroalde de Verville's /Le Moyen de parvenir/. We will place emphasis on genre definition, narratology, aesthetics and cultural history. Among the problems we will discuss together are the following: the relationship between ideology (courtly love, feudalism, humanism, evangelism, "Querelle des femmes", etc.) and literature; rhetoric and truth, historicity and exemplarity; imitation; intertextuality; "vraisemblance"; authority, authorship and gendered discourse; exemplarity, self-referentiality and identity.