TOPICS: THE FRANCO-AMERICAN NOVEL in Spring 2019 (CL2091)

English-language fiction has long played a vital role in shaping and inspiring French writing. The increasing cultural hegemony of the USA in the twentieth century is both part of this pattern and a more paradoxical phenomenon, inseparable from the challenge that new cultural forms, including the cinema and pop music, has placed on literary fiction. What is at stake when French fiction tries to do things à l’américaine, articulating French experience using American forms, settings and characters?

This course will consider moments of literary exchange, anxious tension and resistance between the two nations. It will map and examine moments of such implicit and explicit dialogue from the nineteenth century to the present day. In particular, it will focus on writing from the last thirty years. This course will encourage students to consider how writers have explored notions of ‘Americanness’ and ‘Frenchness’ within fiction as well as analysing the porous relationship between the ‘European’ avant-garde and ‘American’ genre writing: the detective novel; the thriller; and even the romance novel. The impact of television, TV series, and popular music will also be considered. We will read, in English translation (although they can be read in French) novels by Jean-Patrick Manchette, Frédéric Beigbeder, Bret Easton Ellis, Michel Houellebecq, Virginie Despentes, Faiza Guène and Leila Slimani. Assessment will take the form of written and digital assignments.