Department of French and Italian

Feminine Voices in Early Modern France

The turmoil and transformations of early modern France were central in the shaping of modern conceptions of readership, literature, public and politics. This course will examine the role of women in these developments by attending to female voices in central and lesser-known French texts written by seventeenth-century women and men. Texts will include letters, poetry, biographies, a tragedy, fairy tales, and what is often considered the first modern novel, Mme de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. This corpus will allow us to think about questions of decorum and duty, freedom and modern selfhood, and the imagining of alternative gender roles. Weekly response papers, scaffolded final writing portfolio.  The course will be conducted in French.

Image: Madame de Lafayette, from https://snl.no/Marie_Madeleine_La_Fayette

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