FREN 356 The Literary Experience: Experimental Literature in the 20th Century
This course plays on the double meaning of the French word expérience to mean both “experience” and “experiment” in English. We will analyze 20th century French and Francophone works that reimagine the experience of literary texts through their experimental form. We will examine how these literary texts create experiences/experiments that challenge ideas and ideals that developed in the 19th century, including consumerism, traditional bourgeois values, colonial and gender power dynamics, linguistic colonialism, and the very notion of reason and progress. We will read works by authors including Boris Vian, Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, and Aimé Césaire.