France and the World Seminar with Margaret Cohen (Stanford) -- Pre-Circulated Paper

Romance Languages and Literatures invites you to an exciting event that the France and the World seminar is co-sponsoring with the Novel Theory seminar at the MHC at which Christie McDonald (RLL Emerita) will be guiding our discussion of a pre-circulated paper by Margaret Cohen (Stanford) on October 14 at 6pm in Barker 133 and on Zoom. 

Cohen's paper, "Who Has the Right to Tragedy?," discusses the novels of Claire de Duras, the author chosen to represent the 19th century for the French agrégation 2026, as inheritor of the post-Revolutionary sentimental novel where women writers took a leading role. One essential feature of these novels is to represent a crisis in community that examines conflicts in Revolutionary ideals when they are put into practice, as Cohen has argued in The Sentimental Education of the Novel. In Ourika, Edouard and Olivier, Duras modifies post-Revolutionary sentimental fiction to ask how readers engage with the sufferings of characters when the values of the community are the source of their oppression. If the protagonist does not have the ability to act within a community, how does such isolation impact tragic poetics?  

The paper can be downloaded at the bottom of the page. To open the file, you must register for the event to get the required password. That password is also the same for the Zoom meeting if any of you would like to attend remotely. If you have any trouble obtaining the paper online, feel free to contact Hannah Frydman (hfrydman@fas.harvard.edu) and she will be happy to share it with you.