Robert Barsky's Vanderbilt Website

FR 362 Émile Zola

Thursdays 3:10-5:30 FM207; office hours Mondays 2:30-3:30, Thursdays 2:00-3:00 (or by appointment)

Professor Robert Barsky

This course will introduce students to Emile Zola’s fiction, including examples of work from the long series of novels called Les Rougon Macquart, about a family under the Second Empire. Different facets of Zola’s writings will be discussed, including his method of researching his subject matter, the style of his writing, as well as the "environmental" influences of violence, prostitution, alcoholism and what he described as “the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world.” Students will also be introduced to appropriate theories of the novel, by Angenot and Bakhtin in particular, as well as the idea of the public intellectual, with reference to Zola’s “J’Accuse,” an open letter to the president denouncing the wrongful conviction of a Jewish officer of the French army for treason.

Lectures and assignments will be in English and French; oral presentations should be in French.

Évaluation:
*dissertation (style "essay") à remettre le 29 octobre portant sur une des oeuvres au programme : 25%
*dissertation (style "essay") à remettre à la fin de la session portants sur une ou plusieurs des oeuvres au programme : 40%
*participation et exposés oraux (3): 35%

A note on the oral presentations; each presentation should run between 15 and 30 minutes, and should discuss the novel or theoretical text in question for that day. The choice of material to be covered in the course of the oral is up to the student; ideally, the student should try to engage the class as though they were teaching, and therefore discussion should be focused upon one or several salient issues arising from the text or the approach.

Textes: All texts are available in French and English in the bookstore.

1. Émile Zola
La Curée
La Bête humaine
L'Argent
Thérèse Raquin
L'Assommoir
Nana

« J’accuse » L'Aurore le 13 janvier (1898)

Mikhaïl Bakhtine :
Esthétique et théorie du roman (accessible on-line)

Marc Angenot:
Que peut la littérature? You can consult the entire issue about Angenot via my website, or directly to the Yale Journal of Criticism at: http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/journals/yale_journal_of_criticism/toc/yale17.2.html

Michel Pierssens, Robert et Marc Angenot

Week 1, August 27th: Introduction

Introduction à la pensée de Mikhail Bakhtine, et Émile Zola en Provence; l'histoire d'une famille sous le Second Empire commence!
textes : Quelques passages d'Émile Zola, Marc Angenot interview, La Fortune des Rougon; Bakhtine; Marc Angenot, « Que peut la littérature? »

textes:
Marc Angenot, « Que peut la littérature? »
M.M. Bakhtine sur l'aesthetique et la théorie du roman.

Émile Zola, La Curée

Week 2, September 3: Thérèse Raquin et le naturalisme

Texte: Thérèse Raquin

Naturalistic writers were influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary theory and contemporary advancements in studies of the mind. Naturalists, like Zola, believe that a combination of heredity and social environment decide one's character, and that it’s possible to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (i.e. the environment or heredity) influencing these subjects' actions. Naturalistic works often include uncouth, sexual, pessimistic or sordid subject matter, an explanation of why Zola was constantly fighting the censors in the second and third Empires. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, sex, prejudice, disease, prostitution, filth, and their relation to behavior.

Thérèse Raquin tells the story of a young woman, unhappily married to her first cousin by a well-intentioned and overbearing aunt. Her cousin, Camille, is sickly and selfish, and when the opportunity arises, Thérèse enters into a tragic affair with one of Camille's friends, Laurent.

Week 3, September 10: La Curée
Texte: La Curée
Presentations:

La Curée - literally the portion of the game thrown to the dogs after a hunt, usually translated as The Kill - is a tightly-focused character study centred on three distinctive personalities: Aristide Rougon (renamed Saccard)--the youngest son of the ruthless and calculating peasant Pierre Rougon and the bourgeois Félicité (by whom he is much spoiled), both of them Bonapartistes and consumed by a desire for wealth--, Aristide's young second wife Renée (his first dying not long after their move from provincial Plassans to Paris), and Maxime, Aristide's foppish son from his first marriage.

Week 4, September 17: La Curée and the idea of modernity
Texte: La Curée; Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air
Presentations April

A discussion of Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air, and its relation to the world described by Zola.

Week 5, September 24: L’Argent
Texte: L'Argent
Presentations: Rachel, Julian

The novel focuses on the financial world of the Second Empire as embodied in the Paris Bourse and exemplified by the fictional character of Aristide Saccard. Zola's intent was to show the terrible effects of speculation and fraudulent company promotion, the culpable negligence of company directors, and the impotency of contemporary financial laws.

Émile Zola, La Fortune des Rougon

Week 6, October 1: L'Argent and the role of the intellectual or writer as muckraker and social activist
texte: l'Argent
presentation: Frances

This novel contains implicit and explicit critiques of the prevailing financial system -- an appropriate topic in today's world! -- by describing the context within which markets are ruled by greed, short-term gains, and massive destruction of public and private worlds.

NOTE: Duchess of Langeais will be presented at the Belcourt Theater by Robert Barsky: Thursday, Oct 1 at 7pm (Balzac)

Week 7, October 8: L'Assommoir
texte: L'Assommoir
presentation: Rachel

The novel is essentially the story of Gervaise Macquart, who was featured briefly in the first novel in the series, La Fortune des Rougon, running away to Paris with her shiftless lover Lantier to work as a washerwoman in a hot, busy laundry in one of the seedier areas of the city. L'Assommoir begins with Gervaise and her two young sons being abandoned by Lantier, who takes off for parts unknown; she later takes up with Coupeau, a teetotal roofing engineer, and they are married in one of the great set-pieces of Zola's fiction; the account of the wedding party's chaotic trip to the Louvre is perhaps the novelist's most famous passage. Through a combination of happy circumstances Gervaise is able to raise enough money to open her own laundry, and the couple's happiness appears to be complete with the birth of a daughter, Anna, nicknamed Nana (the heroine of Zola's later novel of the same title).

Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin

Week 8, October 15th: L'Assommoir (part 2)
textes: L'Assommoir
presentations: April

The second half of the novel deals with the downward trajectory of Gervaise's life from this happy high point. Coupeau is injured in a fall from the roof of a new hospital he is working on, and during his lengthy and painful convalescence he takes to drink. Only a few chapters pass before Coupeau is a vindictive alcoholic, with no intention of trying to find more work; Gervaise struggles to keep her home together, but her excessive pride leads her to a number of embarrassing failures and before long everything is going downhill. The home is further disrupted by the return of Lantier, warmly welcomed by Coupeau - by this point losing interest in both Gervaise and life itself, and becoming seriously ill - and the ensuing chaos and financial strain is too much for Gervaise, who loses her laundry-shop and is sucked into debt. She decides to join Coupeau in the drinking and soon slides into heavy alcoholism too, prompting Nana - already suffering from the chaotic life at home and getting into trouble on a daily basis - to run away to Paris for good. The novel continues in this unhappy vein until the end.

October 22nd, fall break

Week 9, October 29th: Nana et le carnavalesque
textes: Nana et Bakhtine
presentations: Rachel, Frances

Nana tells the story of Nana Coupeau's rise from streetwalker to high-class cocotte during the last three years of the French Second Empire. Nana first appears in the end of L'Assommoir (1877), in which she is portrayed as the daughter of an abusive drunk; in the end, she is living in the streets and just beginning a life of prostitution.

The novel will be discussed as regards Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque in literature, which includes notions of topsy turvydom, the celebration of the lower bodily stratum, the suspension of ordinary life, clowning around, feasting….

PAPER DUE! dissertation (style "essay") à remettre, portant sur une (ou plusieurs) des oeuvres au programme : 25%

Émile Zola, La Bête humaine

Week 10, November 5th: Nana et la Passion
textes: Nana, Le Philosophe et la passion
presentations: Julian, April

Michel Meyer has discussed the relationship between passion and reason in his celebrated text Le Philosophe et la Passion; we’ll pursue our discussion of this novel with reference to this tension.

Week 11, November 12th: Nana et La Bête humaine
Texte: La Bête humaine
Presentations: Julian, Frances

Lantier, the “human beast” of the title, suffers from an hereditary madness which has several times in his life led him to want to murder women. At the beginning of the story he is an engine driver, in control of his engine “La Lison”. His relationship with "La Lison" is almost sexual and provides some sort of control over his mania.As a result of a chance remark, Roubaud suspects that Séverine has had an affair some years earlier, with Grandmorin one of the directors of the railway company, who had acted as her patron and who had helped Roubaud get his job. He forces a confession out of her and makes her write him a letter telling to take a particular train that evening, the same train Roubaud and Séverine are taking back to Le Havre. Meanwhile, Lantier who is not working while his engine is being repaired goes to visit his Aunt Phasie who lives in an isolated house by the railway. On leaving he meets his cousin Flore, with whom he has had a longstanding mutual attraction. After a brief conversation with her his passions become inflamed and he is on the verge of forcibly having sex with her but this in turn brings on his homicidal mania. He has a desire to stab her but just about controls himself and rushes away. Finding himself beside the railway track as the train from Paris passes, he sees, in a split second, a figure on the train holding a knife, bent over another person. Shortly after, he finds the body of Grandmorin beside the track with his throat cut. It was also discovered that he had been robbed of his watch and some money….

Week 12, November 19th, La Bête humaine and debates about the nature/nurture question.

November 26th: Thanksgiving!

December 3rd: Conclusions and a return to theorizing the novel.

Week 13, December 10th: The Dreyfus Affair