Office: CPR 424. Phone 1(813) 974-2782.

Fax: 1(813) 974-1718; e-mail: brulotte@chuma1.cas.usf.edu

Office hours: T & R 5:00-6:00pm or on appointment

This course satisfies exit requirements in Major Works and Major Issues. The principal dimensions engaged in this course are International Perspectives, Gender, and Values and Ethics. The main thinking skills involved are conceptual and analytical.

An undergraduate 3 credit course, which offers an overview of the evolution of the concept of romantic and passionate love in French Literature throughout the centuries and its impact on western literature and thought. The course proposes an introduction to the great unforgettable love stories that this literature produced from the Middle Ages to the 20^th century.

The course is intended to familiarize the students with the Major Works and Major Issues of the crucial and complex concept of Love as it was elaborated in French literature and help them to better understand this fundamental cultural component.

The main purpose of the course is to study, in English translation, the major representative French literary fiction works that contributed to the evolution of this central concept in French Culture and Literature.

The course will study one of the major issue associated with romantic and passionate Love in French culture, which is Gender with the diverse and most decisive role women have had in the evolution of love.

The course will seek to broaden the students’ horizons, since romantic and passionate Love is also a cross-cultural concept and a universal concern of all mankind. International Perspectives will accordingly be a large component of the course.

Finally the course will focus on Values and Ethics, since the concept also raised throughout History basic cultural values and ethical issues that contributed to shape our civilization. The students will be exposed to the special historical role that the French thinkers played in refining the moral and the civilizing approach of this fundamental issue.

The class will consist of a combination of informal lectures, discussions and the showing of audio-visual materials. Everyone should do as much as possible of the reading ahead of time so as to be able to take an active part in discussions.

Lectures will be given on each major historical cycle and work in order to offer a framework and examine the specific contribution of French literature to the theme.

The students will have to read full length works in English translation as well as some excerpts so that they are given a chance to develop their own insights and draw their own conclusions on the issues by applying analytical and conceptual thinking skills in both discussions and written responses.

Students will also be exposed to audio-visual material so that they can see how this seminal concept influenced other arts and shaped the French culture as well as other Western cultures.

Much comparative attention will be given to the conception of Love in other cultures than French through anthropological visions on the subject.

This course will be inseparable from the analysis of the main philosophical works about Love which influenced the concept throughout the centuries, from Plato and Ovid to Capellanus, from Montaigne to Stendhal, from Freud to Sartre, from Breton to Fromm, from Rougemont to Ortega y Gasset and Barthes to Alberoni. The students will have access to an anthology of these philosophers.

Romantic and passionate love is not a natural given of the human condition. It is a cultural phenomenon that has been created in the early stages of civilization. The earliest Western literature, bound up as it is between myth and reality, abounds in stories of lovers caught up in a swell of passion and violence: Ulysses and Penelope, Orpheus and Eurydice, Daphnis and Chloe, Pelleas and Melisandre, Pyramus and Thysbe. The historical record tends to confirm that sexual desire and passionate love have long existed but that they also had universal enemies in both political and religious authorities. Throughout most of recorded history, until about 1500, in most cultures, passionate lovers' powerful feelings were viewed as a threat to the social, political, and religious order and were harshly controlled or suppressed. In the West, during the early Christian era, the suppression was especially uncompromising and sustained for 1,500 years, from the second century A.D. up to the 16^th century. While it was thought that Christian civilization had tamed Eros, love continued nevertheless to live and the lovers' discourse gave birth to imperishable literary and visual works of art. Undoubtedly Abélard was castrated and his beloved Héloïse retired to a nunnery, Tristan and Isolt died before even making love, Juliette stabbed herself and Romeo quaffed a dram of poison, but their tragic love stories created enduring myths that were among the great seminal ideas of Western literature.

The course will focus on the substantial French literary contribution to the history of romantic and passionate love. It will study the evolution of this major literary theme from the Middle Ages to present. As a cultural construction, passionate love was re-invented as a courtly art by the poets in the middle ages in reaction against the Catholic church (amor being the exact inversion of Roma) and was developed by romance tellers and in fairy tales of the 16^th and 17^th century (through the famous "Carte du Tendre"). It was soon reinterpreted and transformed into anti-courtly mythical figures of seduction such as Don Juan or reshaped as it was confronted to the "Age of Reason" during the 18^th century when it blossomed into the full expression of sexual desire during a massive production of erotic literature. In the late 18^th century, it gave birth to the cult of passion for passion's sake, when not used as a mental perversity, before becoming a quest for the absolute and a devastating passion during the 19^th century, a stroke of luck and a pure wonder at the turn of the 20^th , and the only positive intimate and anti-racist value left to the human condition at the end of our century, whatever the sexual orientation might be.

The main purpose of the course is to study, in English translation, the major representative French fiction literary works that contributed to the evolution of love. The real love story of professor Abélard and his student Héloïse as it was repressed by the French medieval society was emblematic of the early bold opposition between Christian values and sexual desire. Their love story inspired many subsequent European writers up to the 20^th century including Rousseau (The New Héloïse) and Rilke (Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910). As a courtly art, love generated the beautiful legend of Tristan and Isolt who, along with Launcelot and Guinevere, were archetypal adulterers. It became the very powerful feeling analyzed by Madame de Lafayette in her famous chef-d'oeuvre The Princess of Clèves in the 17^th century. It inspired the fairy tales of Perrault, such as in La Belle au bois dormant (Sleeping Beauty) which were celebrated by musicians and filmmakers, including Walt Disney. The theme of love went also through a major reconfiguration during the 17^th century with the anti-courtly myth of Don Juan (as seen by Molière) and the victimized feminine viewpoint as in the long censored The Portuguese Letters: Love Letters of a Nun to a French Officer. Confronted by the extremely refined Age of Enlightenment, love became a new center of preoccupation and reached unprecedented levels of sophistication. A writer such as Marivaux gave his name to a French word "marivaudage" to design this new playful sentimental approach and the new affected manners related to it, that he presented in his plays. During the 18^th century, love became a means to wipe out the social classes, thus contributing to the precipitation of the French Revolution. From beginning to end, the 18^th century also analyzed the dark side of passion with Manon Lescaut and Dangerous Liaisons. The first is a famous love story written by a priest who portrayed the irrational attachment of a man for an unfaithful woman, which ends with a tragic deportation to Louisiana. The second belongs to the trend of "romans libertins" and, after being censored, was rediscovered and re-evaluated by the 20^th century. It shows an anti-clerical hero who coldly uses love for perverse intentions but who becomes infatuated in the process. Both works had a prestigious cultural posterity including film adaptations and operas. Passion will become a more positive cult with Rousseau who transformed the grand passion from what it was in the Middle Ages –a demonic possession– into a social obligation, and promoted it from the rank of a disease to that of the only true and natural form of love. The French Romantic poets of the 19^th century followed him, and Stendhal developed his famous theory of "crystallization" (1822), a process of the mind which creates an image of perfection of its beloved. During the second half of the 19^th century, Flaubert in his monumental Madame Bovary depicted his view of love as a devastating longing, while many writers of that period were obsessed by the development of syphilis and its dramatic effects on sexual desire. The popularity of gothic novels on the other hand influenced Victor Hugo in his imposing chef-d'oeuvre Notre-Dame of Paris in which he depicts the breathtaking one-way love story between the ugly and the beautiful, Quasimodo and Esmeralda. The development of Fantastic literature in France at that time further tried to relate love to an unreal world, such as experiences from beyond the grave (as in Vera by Villers de l'Isle-Adam, a short representative piece, or in The Venus of Ille by Mérimée). At the beginning of the 20^th century, when Proust in Remembrance of Things Past was analyzing jealousy as a way of introspection and was redefining love as a disease of the imagination, the Surrealists perceived "l'amour fou" as a new form of hope and a pure wonder in the mechanical and industrial age, and the only efficient irrational weapon against the domination of Reason (Breton, Nadja). Under the influence of psychoanalysis, writers developed new ways of writing about love, more sexually explicit and more conscious of family mediated love (such as in Ma Mère by Georges Bataille). During the first half of the 20^th century, Gide was interested in the reciprocal "decrystallization" of love by which a husband and wife after many years of marriage need room to breathe (The Counterfeits). Cocteau gave his homosexual interpretation of the concept of love (The Testament of Orpheus). During the second half of the century, love was transformed by the existentialist disenchantment into detached and serial "perfect moments" by, among others, the feminist and successful Françoise Sagan (Bonjour tristesse). Whereas in totalitarian cultures (in China for instance) love was perceived in a negative fashion as an individualistic "bourgeois" feeling and repressed as such, the threatened institution of marriage in the free world needed to be defended as a loving model by Bourbon-Busset (L'Amour durable). For his part, Albert Cohen published in 1968 a monumental classic work of our time on love, Belle du seigneur, to reflect on the confining feeling that may bond two heterosexual individuals to the point of cutting them off from the rest of the world. In this instance, the illusion of fusion imprisons the couple into an aesthetic nightmare that drives nowhere but to emptiness and destruction. The suppression of censorship in the mid 70s generated passionate debates around controversial erotic works such as Story of O and Emmanuelle that were also adapted for cinema. Feminist issues were raised as well as aesthetic questions such as what is pornography and what is not. Marguerite Duras became popular at the same time with numerous literary works and films focused on the theme of hypnotic love and the relationship between passion and madness, including The Ravishing of Lol Stein and her chef-d'oeuvre, The Lover, where she also explored the intercultural aspects of passion. We will finally examine the recent success of short autobiographical love narratives such as Passion Perfect by Annie Ernaux, perceived as a once-in-a-life-time epiphany, which also involves the new massive presence of women writers on the French literary scene. More conscious than ever before of the inherent finitude of love, younger writers represented serial monogamy in their works as the modern way of loving (Barillé, for instance). Mainly devoted to the study of great French love stories, this course will be inseparable from the analysis of the main philosophical works about Love which influenced the concept throughout the centuries, from Plato and Ovid to Capellanus, from Montaigne to Stendhal, from Freud to Sartre, from Breton to Fromm, from Rougemont to Ortega y Gasset and Barthes to Alberoni.

While there is no pretense that this course will be exhaustive or all-encompassing, it is intended to familiarize the students with the Major Works and Major Issues of this crucial and complex concept as it was elaborated in French literature so that they are given a chance to draw their own conclusions on its issues by applying analytical and conceptual thinking skills in both written responses and exams.

Since romantic and passionate love is a cross-cultural concept and a universal concern of all mankind, International Perspectives are a large component of the course in that a great deal of comparative attention will be given to the conception of Love in other cultures through anthropological studies on the subject as well as different major literary works from Genji to Kawabata and Tanizaki in the Japanese world, from Werther by Goethe to the love stories by Thomas Mann (such as Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain) in the German one, from Dante to Calvino in the Italian one or from Chaucer to D.M. Thomas in the British one, for Cervantes to Sabato in the Hispanic one, etc.

This question will also raise concerns about the attitudes toward women and the contemporary issue of feminism which is related to new behaviors and new sets of concerns and literary works worldwide. Thus, of course, one of the major issue associated with romantic and passionate love is Gender with the diverse and most decisive role women have had in the evolution of love, from an extreme negative status during the Christian misogynist medieval era to an idealized one in the courtly period, from a victim of seduction to a liberated status, from an alienated passive object to an active modern and responsible subject. We will use both conceptual and analytical thinking skills to develop our own insights on this crucial issue.

Values and Ethics are also a major component of the course for many obvious reasons, including particularly the special role that the French writers and thinkers played throughout history in refining the moral approach to love. For each of the cycles when passionate love was repressed by its political and religious enemies or on the contrary socially promoted, it also raised each time basic cultural values and ethical issues that contributed to shape our world. We will employ both conceptual and analytical thinking skills in examining the specific contribution of French literature to the theme.

1. Introduction. The concept of love from the Greeks and Romans to the Middle Ages.
2. The Middle Ages. The social context in France. Early Christianity and its conception of love. Love VS Religion. The famous love story of Abelard and Heloise. The Art of Courtly Love. The theory of Capellanus (Chapelain). The mythical love story of Tristan and Isolt.
3. Love in the 16^th Century. Theory: the Baroque and inconsistency. The thoughts of Montaigne on Love. The romances of the early 17^th century: Mme de Lafayette and her masterpiece novel The Princess of Clèves.
4. The prestige of fairy tales during the 17^th century and beyond. Perrault: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty. The musical adaptations: Tchaikovsky (a ballet), Ravel (Ma Mère l'oye, "Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant"), Respighi.
5. Love in the second part of the 17^th century. The French interpretation of the Don Juan myth. From Molière to Mozart (in a famous opera): A comparison and a discussion. The other side of seduction: the feminine victim. Discussion about the censored The Portuguese Letters: Love Letters of a Nun to a French Officer and quiz. Paper due on Molière. Introduction to the masterpiece novel Manon Lescaut published in the early part of the century. Reading of Manon Lescaut.
6. Love in the 18^th century. Historical perspectives and social context: from the Regency to the Revolution. The first part of the century: love in an era of refinement and extreme sophistication. Study of Marivaux and "marivaudage". Prévost and his successful chef-d'oeuvre Manon Lescaut.
7. The second part of the 18^th century and the "Age of Reason". The figure of Casanova and his Memoirs written in French. Love and the French Revolution. The invention of sadism. Study of Dangerous Liaisons.
8. The rehabilitation of passion. The cult of passion for passion's sake: the sentimental vision of Rousseau. Love in the French 19^th century. In the path of Rousseau: French romantic poetry. The theory of Stendhal (Love).
9. Madame Bovary and the social context. The obsession of 19^th century French writers with syphilis and its impact on sexual desire. The vision of love by Maupassant, Baudelaire, Barbey. Love, the Unreal and the Fantastic during the 19^th century: love beyond death. Study of the representative short story Vera by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.
10. Notre-Dame of Paris by Victor Hugo: a literary masterpiece and its adaptations: operas, films, musicals. The concepts of ugliness and beauty. The mythical figure of Quasimodo. Quiz.
11. Love in the 20th century. Theory: Freud and the end of innocence. Proust. A Swann's Love (love as disease of the imagination). Love and Surrealism: "l'amour fou" (love as a new wonder). Breton and Nadja. Cocteau and The Difficulty of Being. Study of The Testament of Orpheus, the play and the film by Cocteau (homosexual love).
12. Love and existentialism: a period of cold distanciation from passion. Love and indifference: The Stranger by Camus. Love challenged and suppressed in the totalitarian world. The theory of Sartre: love and masochism. Beauvoir and The Second Sex. Jean Paulhan and the controversial sadomasochistic Story of O by Dominique Aury. The "perfect moments": Sagan and the success of Bonjour tristesse, a feminist approach to love in the 50s. Cohen and his monumental work Belle du seigneur demystifying love.
13. A reaction to existentialism: love as hypnosis and loss of lucidity. Love and anti-racism in a multicultural world: Marguerite Duras The Lover (viewing of the film and discussion). The theory of Barthes and the intelligence of a feeling that challenges intelligence. French contemporary intellectual eroticism: between the rapture by the loved one and serial experiences.

The principal written work of the course will be a midterm exam, a final exam, 6 short papers (2-3pp each) and 6 quizzes. For each century, there will be reading material, group discussions and a paper (2-3pp) on a topic suggested by the professor. The 6 papers will have to be remitted every two weeks approximately. The reading and audio-visual material will be subject to short quizzes and answers should be written in complete sentences.

Exams (midterm and final) will consist of two essays each.

Midterm and final: 40%; quizzes and papers: 50%; class participation, and improvement over the course of the semester: 10%. Regular attendance will be an absolute prerequisite for a quality grade. The grading scale used will be the following: A = 90-100; B= 80-89; C= 70-79; D= 60-69; F= 59 and less; I = Incomplete.

Breton Nadja. A short novel. NY, Grove Press. ISBN 0802150268

Ernaux, Annie. Simple Passion. A short novella. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993, 64p. ISBN 0345382544

The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Transl. by Betty Radice, NY, Penguin Books, 1974 (excerpts).

Proust, Marcel, Swann's Way (excerpts). NY: Modern Library, 1992

Cocteau, Jean. The Testament of Orpheus. A play. NY: Marion Boyars, 1985.

Sagan, Françoise. Bonjour tristesse. (excerpts)NY. Dutton, 1955.

Cohen, Albert, Belle du seigneur (excerpts). NY, Viking, 1995.

Duras, Marguerite. The Lover (excerpts) NY: Harper Perennial, 1992.

*Capellanus, Andreas. The Art of Courtly Love. NY, Columbia UP, 1990.

Cocteau, Jean. The Difficulty of Being. NY: Da Capo Press, 1995.

Duras, Marguerite. The Ravishing of Lol Stein. NY: Pantheon Books, 1986.

*Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. NY: Pantheon Books.

Fowlie, Wallace. Love and Literature. Studies in Symbolic Expression. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1965.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on Sexuality. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.

Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. NY: Harper & Row, 1989.

Guillebaud, Jean-Claude. La Tyrannie du plaisir. Paris, Seuil, 1998.

Jankowiak, William. Romantic Passion. A universal experience. New York, Columbia U.P., 1995.

Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. New York, Columbia U.P., 1987.

Montaigne. Complete Essays. NY: Penguin Books, 1991.

Ortega y Gasset, José. On Love. Aspects of a Single Theme. Newe Tork: Meridian Books, 1957

*Plato, The Banquet (The Symposium). Santa Barbara, Ca: Concord Grove Press, 1985.

*De Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. New York, Pantheon, 1956.

--- Love Declared. Essays on the Myths of Love. NY: Pantheon, 1963.

Stendhal. Love. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

Sullerot, E. Women on Love: Eight Centuries of Feminine Writing. Garden City (NY): Doubleday, 1979

Wald Lasowski, Patrick. Libertines. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.

--- Syphilis. Paris: Gallimard, 1982.

Young, Lailan. Love around the World. Hodder & Stoughton, 1985.

1. Introduction. The concept of love from the Greeks and Romans to the Middle Ages. The influence of Plato and Ovid. Early Christianity and its conception of woman and love. Love VS Religion Introduction to the famous love story of Abelard and Heloise. Reading of selected letters by Héloïse to Abélard.
2. The Middle Ages, second part. Group discussion on the famous love story of Abelard and Heloise. The new medieval social context in France. The Art of Courtly Love. Reading of Tristan and Isolt (excerpts) and theoretical material (Capellanus: excerpts).
3. Discussion on the theory of Capellanus (Chapelain) and the mythical love story of Tristan and Isolt. The love duet as interpreted by Wagner. Introduction to the Renaissance. Reading of The Princess of Clèves and theoretical material (Montaigne: excerpts).
4. Love in the 16^th Century. Theory: the Baroque and inconsistency. The thoughts of Montaigne on Love. The romances of the early 17^th century: Mme de Lafayette and her masterpiece novel The Princess of Clèves. Paper due on Mme de Lafayette. Reading of the short fairy tales Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty.
5. The prestige of fairy tales during the 17^th century and beyond. Perrault: Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty. The musical adaptations: Tchaikovsky (a ballet), Ravel (Ma Mère l'oye, "Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant"), Respighi. Viewing of the animated adaptation by Walt Disney. Discussion and quiz. Reading of Don Juan a comedy by Molière and the censored The Portuguese Letters: Love Letters of a Nun to a French Officer (excerpts)
6. Love in the second part of the 17^th century. The French interpretation of the Don Juan myth. From Molière to Mozart (in a famous opera): A comparison and a discussion. The other side of seduction: the feminine victim: discussion about The Portuguese Letters: Love Letters of a Nun to a French Officer and quiz. Paper due on Molière. Introduction to the masterpiece novel Manon Lescaut published in the early part of the 18^th century. Reading of La Dispute a short play by Marivaux. Reading of Manon Lescaut.
7. Love in the 18^th century. Historical perspectives and social context: from the Regency to the Revolution. The first part of the century: love in an era of refinement and extreme sophistication. Study of Marivaux and the "marivaudage". Discussion of La Dispute a short play by Marivaux. Prévost and his successful chef-d'oeuvre Manon Lescaut. Paper due on Manon Lescaut. Review for mid-term.
8. Mid-term exam. Exam will consist of two essays in which the students will have to discuss major issues developed in the course. Each essay will involve the use of analytical and conceptual skills.
9. The second part of the 18^th century and the "Age of Reason". The figure of Casanova and his Memoirs written in French. Love and the French Revolution. The invention of sadism. Discussion on excerpts of Dangerous Liaisons. Film viewing: an adaptation of the novel by Laclos. Reading of The Red and the Black (excerpts) by Stendhal and theoretical material (Stendhal: excerpts).
10. The rehabilitation of passion. The cult of passion for passion's sake: the vision of Rousseau. Love in the French 19^th century. In the path of Rousseau: French romantic poetry. The theory of Stendhal (Love). Discussion of The Red and the Black (excerpts). Quiz. Introduction to Flaubert. Reading of Flaubert's Madame Bovary (excerpts) and the short story Vera by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.
11. Madame Bovary and the social context. The obsession of 19^th century French writers with syphilis and its impact on sexual desire. The vision of love by Maupassant, Baudelaire, Barbey. Love, the Unreal and the Fantastic during the 19^th century: love beyond death. Discussions around the representative short story Vera by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Paper due on Flaubert. Reading of Notre-Dame of Paris (excerpts).
12. Notre-Dame of Paris by Hugo: a literary masterpiece and its adaptations: operas, films, musicals. The concepts of ugliness and beauty. Discussion of the mythical figure of Quasimodo. Quiz on Hugo and the 19^th century trends. Reading of Breton, Nadja and theoretical material (Breton, Cocteau: excerpts).
13. Love in the 20th century. Theory: Freud and the end of innocence. Proust. A Swann's Love (love as disease of the imagination). Love and Surrealism: "l'amour fou" (love as a new wonder). Breton and Nadja. Cocteau and The Difficulty of Being. Discussion around The Testament of Orpheus, the play and the film by Cocteau (homosexual love). Paper due on Breton. Reading of Sagan, Bonjour tristesse (excerpts) and Cohen, Belle du seigneur (excerpts) and theoretical material (Sartre, Cocteau: excerpts).
14. Love and existentialism: a period of cold distanciation from passion. Love and indifference: The Stranger by Camus. Love challenged and suppressed in the totalitarian world. The theory of Sartre: love and masochism. Beauvoir and The Second Sex. Jean Paulhan and the controversial sadomasochistic Story of O by Dominique Aury. The "perfect moments": Sagan and the success of Bonjour tristesse, a feminist approach to love in the 50s. Cohen and his monumental work Belle du seigneur demystifying love. Discussion and quiz. Reading of The Lover by Duras (excerpts) and the short novelle Passion Perfect by Annie Ernaux and theoretical material (Rougemont, Barthes, Alberoni: excerpts).
15. A reaction to existentialism: love as hypnosis and loss of lucidity. Love and anti-racism in a multicultural world: Marguerite Duras The Lover (viewing of the film and discussion). The theory of Barthes and the intelligence of a feeling that challenges intelligence. French contemporary intellectual eroticism: between the rapture by the loved one and serial experiences. Paper due on the short autobiographical piece Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux. Review for final
16. Final exam. Exam will consist of two essays in which the students will have to discuss major issues developed in the second part of the course. Each essay will involve the use of analytical and conceptual skills.