FREN 332 - Literature and Society in Pre-Revolutionary France

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2017/18b: Early Modern Écologies: A French Environmental Thought. Most people consider ecology to be a recent endeavor, just like the Anthropocene – the current geological period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment – is seen mostly as a modern epoch. Some scholars, however, date the start of the Anthropocene to 1600. What happened between the environment and human beings around that date that could justify such a theory? We analyze the extent to which human beings envisioned, cared for, and worried about their environment over the course of three centuries. Surveying French culture and literature from the Renaissance through the Baroque to the Enlightenment (les Lumières), students will read texts by François Rabelais, Michel de Montaigne, Molière, Montesquieu and Voltaire. We will put into question the radical stylistic change between the “abundance and waste” of Renaissance writing, and the subsequent “purification” of classicism, to use Bruno Latour’s theory from We have never been modern and his lectures in conferences from Face à Gaïa. Other secondary texts supplement our study of Latour’s work, and also include canonical texts in ecocriticism and environmental studies by Jeffrey Cohen, Timothy Morton, and Stacy Alaimo. Pauline Goul.

One 2-hour period.