FREN 343 - Novel Strategies in Late Twentieth-Century French Fiction

This course will examine narrative strategies in novels of the second half of the twentieth century, written in French, with a focus on questions of epistemology, representation, self-narration, critical and cultural discourses, and history. By reading these texts and identifying their aesthetic or theoretical implications, we will explore how they expose or undermine assumptions about telling and knowing, about narration and selfhood, about the text and its relationship to the world, and about memory and history. We will read examples of experimental narrative in the New Novel, the game-inspired OuLiPo group, autobiography, interrogations of historical authority, narrative of individual and collective practice in public spaces, and post-colonial narrative. Discussion of these questions will originate in careful reading of the literary texts themselves, with emphasis on formal analysis of narrative, rhetorical, and linguistic operations. Readings include Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Anne Hébert, Roland Barthes, Patrick Modiano, Annie Ernaux, and Maryse Condé. Conducted in French.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): FREN 212 or equivalent
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2026-27
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).