French Studies 485 - Jules Verne & French Steampunk

This course, open to all students with an advanced level of French, will focus on a few contemporary steampunk stories inspired by Jules Verne's novels 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island and will concentrate on the main characteristics of French steampunk fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries through the study of an anthology of short stories, two comic books, and two video games. The representation of the Nautilus, the submarine imagined by Jules Verne, will be a common thread in all these stories to question the ideas of progress and civilization before addressing, still from a fictional perspective, the way the relationship between Jules Verne and the United States is perceived.