FRENCH 077 - The Bad Place: Dystopia à la Française

The French novelist Stendhal once described the novel as “un miroir qu’on promène le long d’un chemin,” a mirror we carry along the road. This course examines dystopian French novels (and some films) in order to explore what sort of reflection of reality such narratives of catastrophe, corruption, destruction, and dysfunction reveal to us. What does it mean to write the dystopian from within dystopia? What does it mean to be human at a moment in history where we are constantly poised at the edge of the end of humanity? What can and does literature (and the imagination) do for us?

Course conducted in French.