FREN 332 - Literature and Society in Pre-Revolutionary France

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15b: Sugar, Slaves, and the French Atlantic. This seminar explores the tension between purity and “mixture” in the French imagination, and inquires into how the evolution of this relationship led to successive framings of French colonies, slaves and the goods they produced. From pre-Revolutionary France, where this dialectic was at the center of a nexus of sugar, slavery, and empire, to the Enlightenment and an ever-greater ambivalence towards slavery, we explore the ethical problematics set in motion by French colonization and trade practices. By investigating paradigms as diverse as luxury, libertinage and monstrosity, we discover a literary culture grappling with material desires and fears of mixing. We crisscross the Atlantic with readings of texts from both metropolitan France and the new world, in particular, Haiti and Louisiana, where we find new literary and cultural iterations of this dialectic in the Creole language, métissage and material as mixed as Haitian vaudou and New Orleans gumbo. Authors include Descartes, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Claire de Duras, Doin, de Staël, paired with activists and ethnographers such as Toussaint Louverture and Charles-César Robin. Mr. Parker.

One 2-hour period.