Course outline
Module 1
Module 1: The Enlightenment: Voltaire and Rousseau
The Enlightenment: Voltaire and Rousseau
Knowledge check
Q1. Which Enlightenment writer is best known for his satirical novella Candide, which mocks philosophical optimism?
- A. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- B. Voltaire ✓
- C. Denis Diderot
- D. Montesquieu
Why: Voltaire published Candide in 1759, a satire of Leibnizian optimism through the misadventures of its naive protagonist, who is taught to believe 'all is for the best' despite constant suffering.
Q2. What is the title of Rousseau's 1762 treatise on education, which argues that children should learn through experience and natural development?
- A. The Social Contract
- B. Emile, or On Education ✓
- C. Confessions
- D. Philosophical Letters
Why: Emile, or On Education presents the fictional education of a boy named Emile, advocating a natural, experience-based approach that respects the child's stages of development.
Q3. Which famous opening line is associated with Rousseau's The Social Contract?
- A. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. ✓
- B. Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.
- C. Man is the measure of all things.
- D. Liberty is the right to do everything the laws permit.
Why: The Social Contract (1762) opens with 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,' framing the central problem of how legitimate political authority can be established.
Q4. Voltaire's Philosophical Letters (1734), which praised English political and religious tolerance, were partly written after he was exiled from which country?
- A. Prussia
- B. England ✓
- C. Switzerland
- D. France
Why: Voltaire had spent time in England after a dispute with a nobleman led to his imprisonment and exile from France; his observations there shaped the Philosophical Letters, which contrasted English liberty with French absolutism.
Q5. Which Enlightenment idea, central to Voltaire's and Rousseau's thought, holds that reason and critical inquiry should challenge tradition, superstition, and arbitrary authority?
- A. Romanticism
- B. Mercantilism
- C. Scholasticism
- D. Enlightenment rationalism ✓
Why: Enlightenment rationalism emphasized reason, empirical observation, and critique of inherited authority as the path to human progress and political reform, a principle both Voltaire and Rousseau embraced in different ways.
Module 2
Module 2: Salons, Philosophes and the Encyclopédie
Salons, Philosophes and the Encyclopédie
Knowledge check
Q1. Which institution, hosted mainly by aristocratic women in Paris, served as a key meeting place for writers, philosophers and patrons during the Enlightenment?
- A. The Académie française
- B. The Salon ✓
- C. The Sorbonne lecture hall
- D. The Comédie-Française
Why: Salons were private gatherings in aristocratic and wealthy homes where intellectuals discussed literature, philosophy and science. Hostesses such as Madame Geoffrin and Madame du Deffand shaped public opinion through them.
Q2. Who were the 'philosophes' of the eighteenth century?
- A. Medieval scholastic theologians
- B. Writers and thinkers who championed reason, tolerance and criticism of religious and political authority ✓
- C. Royal censors who approved published books
- D. Court musicians attached to Versailles
Why: The philosophes, including Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu and Rousseau, used reason and satire to challenge absolutism, the Church's power and social injustice.
Q3. Which monumental project, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, aimed to gather and disseminate human knowledge?
- A. Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie
- B. L'Histoire naturelle
- C. L'Encyclopédie ✓
- D. Le Contrat social
Why: Published from 1751 onward, the Encyclopédie compiled articles on arts, sciences and crafts, promoting rational inquiry and becoming a symbol of Enlightenment ideals.
Q4. Why was the Encyclopédie frequently subject to censorship and suppression by the French authorities?
- A. It was written entirely in Latin
- B. It contained criticism of the Church, the monarchy and traditional authority ✓
- C. It promoted military conquest abroad
- D. It was considered too expensive for readers
Why: Many articles challenged religious dogma and political privilege, leading the royal government to suspend publication and the Church to condemn it at various points.
Q5. Which principle was central to the philosophes' view of how society should be improved?
- A. Blind obedience to tradition
- B. Reliance on divine revelation alone
- C. Faith in human reason and progress through education ✓
- D. Preservation of aristocratic privilege
Why: The philosophes believed reason and education could reform institutions, reduce superstition and advance human happiness, which is the core of Enlightenment thought.
Module 3
Module 3: Romanticism: Hugo, Lamartine and the Self
Romanticism: Hugo, Lamartine and the Self
Knowledge check
Q1. Which literary movement emphasized individual emotion, imagination, and the self over strict classical rules?
- A. Classicism
- B. Romanticism ✓
- C. Naturalism
- D. Symbolism
Why: Romanticism, which flourished in France in the early 19th century, prioritized personal feeling, imagination, and the individual's inner life over the rational rules of Classicism.
Q2. Which poet is famous for the collection 'Méditations poétiques' (1820), which expressed personal grief and longing?
- A. Victor Hugo
- B. Alfred de Musset
- C. Alphonse de Lamartine ✓
- D. Gérard de Nerval
Why: Alphonse de Lamartine published 'Méditations poétiques' in 1820, a landmark Romantic collection that explored personal sorrow, nature, and the soul's longing.
Q3. Victor Hugo's preface to which 1830 play became a manifesto of French Romantic theater?
- A. Cromwell
- B. Hernani ✓
- C. Ruy Blas
- D. Lucrèce Borgia
Why: The 1830 premiere of Hugo's play 'Hernani' sparked the famous 'Battle of Hernani,' and its preface championed freedom from classical dramatic rules.
Q4. In Romantic poetry, what does the term 'le moi' most directly refer to?
- A. The natural world
- B. The collective nation
- C. The individual self and inner experience ✓
- D. Religious doctrine
Why: 'Le moi' means 'the self,' and Romantic writers placed the individual self and its inner experiences at the center of their work.
Q5. Which recurring Romantic theme is reflected in Lamartine's 'Le Lac,' written after the death of his beloved Julie Charles?
- A. The triumph of industry
- B. Lost love and the passage of time ✓
- C. Urban political revolution
- D. Scientific discovery
Why: 'Le Lac' meditates on lost love and the irreversibility of time, reflecting the Romantic preoccupation with melancholy, memory, and the self's emotional life.
Module 4
Module 4: Realism and Naturalism: Balzac, Flaubert and Zola
Realism and Naturalism: Balzac, Flaubert and Zola
Knowledge check
Q1. Which novelist is known for the 'Comédie humaine', a series of interconnected novels depicting French society after the Revolution?
- A. Gustave Flaubert
- B. Honoré de Balzac ✓
- C. Émile Zola
- D. Stendhal
Why: Honoré de Balzac conceived the 'Comédie humaine' as a vast cycle of novels portraying every layer of French society in the decades after the Revolution, with recurring characters appearing across many works.
Q2. Which Flaubert novel tells the story of a provincial doctor's wife who seeks romance and luxury through extramarital affairs and debt?
- A. Le Rouge et le Noir
- B. Le Père Goriot
- C. Madame Bovary ✓
- D. Thérèse Raquin
Why: Madame Bovary (1857) follows Emma Bovary, whose romantic illusions and craving for a more glamorous life lead to adultery, mounting debts, and ultimately her tragic end.
Q3. Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series is subtitled 'a natural and social history' of which family?
- A. The Balzac family
- B. The Rougon-Macquart family ✓
- C. The Bovary family
- D. The Valmont family
Why: Zola's twenty-volume series traces the fortunes of the Rougon-Macquart family across the Second Empire, illustrating how heredity and social environment shape its members.
Q4. What term is most closely associated with Zola's literary movement, which applied scientific determinism to fiction?
- A. Symbolism
- B. Romanticism
- C. Naturalism ✓
- D. Surrealism
Why: Naturalism, developed by Zola in works like the essay 'Le Roman expérimental', extends Realism by treating characters as products of heredity and environment, analyzed much like a scientist would study a specimen.
Q5. Which defining feature distinguishes Realism from Romanticism in the works of Balzac and Flaubert?
- A. Heroic and exotic settings chosen for their emotional intensity
- B. Supernatural elements and fantastic plots
- C. Detailed, objective depiction of everyday contemporary life and society ✓
- D. Focus on dreams and the inner world of myth
Why: Realist writers like Balzac and Flaubert rejected idealized heroes and exotic escapism, instead offering precise, often unflattering portraits of ordinary life in their own time and social milieu.
Module 5
Module 5: Symbolism and Decadence: Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé
Symbolism and Decadence: Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé
Knowledge check
Q1. Which collection of poems by Charles Baudelaire, published in 1857, is considered a foundational text of Symbolism and explores urban life, beauty, and decay?
- A. Les Fleurs du mal ✓
- B. Les Chants de Maldoror
- C. Une Saison en enfer
- D. Poésies
Why: Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) combines sensual beauty with morbidity and urban alienation, and its ideas about correspondences and the poet's role shaped the Symbolist movement.
Q2. Baudelaire's concept of 'correspondances' suggests that:
- A. Poets should write only letters to each other
- B. Sensory experiences and spiritual realities are linked through hidden correspondences ✓
- C. Poetry must follow strict classical meter
- D. Language should be purged of all metaphor
Why: In the sonnet 'Correspondances', Baudelaire argues that nature is a temple of living symbols and that the senses (colors, sounds, scents) correspond with one another and with a higher spiritual reality.
Q3. Arthur Rimbaud's prose work Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) is best described as:
- A. A realist novel about rural life
- B. An autobiographical prose poem reflecting on suffering, faith, and the failure of the self ✓
- C. A treatise on French grammar
- D. A collection of fairy tales
Why: Published in 1873, A Season in Hell is a prose work in which Rimbaud reflects on his turbulent life, his failed quest for spiritual and poetic transcendence, and his rejection of conventional morality.
Q4. Rimbaud's famous call for poets to make themselves 'seers' through a 'long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses' is found in which text?
- A. Le Bateau ivre
- B. Lettre du voyant ✓
- C. Illuminations
- D. Les Chimères
Why: The 'Letter of the Seer' (Lettre du voyant, 1871), written to Paul Demeny, sets out Rimbaud's program of poetic visionary experience through the systematic disordering of the senses.
Q5. Stéphane Mallarmé is particularly known for his belief that poetry should:
- A. Describe political events directly
- B. Suggest rather than name, evoking meaning through musical language and silence ✓
- C. Imitate everyday speech as closely as possible
- D. Focus exclusively on moral instruction
Why: Mallarmé advocated 'suggestion' over direct naming, believing that the poem should evoke an idea indirectly through sound, rhythm, white space, and silence, as in his 'Un coup de dés' and 'L'Après-midi d'un faune'.
Module 6
Module 6: Modernism and the Avant-Garde: Proust, Gide and Surrealism
Modernism and the Avant-Garde: Proust, Gide and Surrealism
Knowledge check
Q1. Which Proust novel sequence is best known for its opening line about the narrator going to bed early and the memory triggered by a madeleine dipped in tea?
- A. Jean Santeuil
- B. In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) ✓
- C. The Counterfeiters
- D. Nadja
Why: Marcel Proust's monumental seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) begins with the narrator's involuntary memory evoked by a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea, a key example of how the novel explores memory and time.
Q2. What is the central theme of Proust's concept of 'involuntary memory'?
- A. Memories can only be recalled through deliberate effort and rational thought
- B. Sensory experiences can unexpectedly bring back past moments, revealing lost time beyond conscious control ✓
- C. Memory is purely a scientific process that can be measured objectively
- D. Forgetting is always harmful and should be avoided at all costs
Why: Proust contrasts voluntary memory, which relies on intellect, with involuntary memory, where a sensation such as taste or smell suddenly restores a past experience in its full emotional richness, an idea central to his literary project.
Q3. André Gide, a major figure of the early twentieth-century French literary scene, co-founded which influential literary journal in 1909?
- A. La Nouvelle Revue Française ✓
- B. Le Mercure de France
- C. Les Temps Modernes
- D. La Revue Blanche
Why: Gide co-founded the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF) in 1909 with other writers, and it became one of the most important platforms for modernist French literature, publishing works by Proust and others.
Q4. Which movement, launched by André Breton's 1924 Manifesto, sought to liberate the unconscious mind through techniques such as automatic writing and dream analysis?
- A. Symbolism
- B. Naturalism
- C. Surrealism ✓
- D. Existentialism
Why: Breton's Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 defined Surrealism as a movement aiming to tap into the unconscious, using methods like automatic writing and dream imagery to challenge rational conventions in art and literature.
Q5. Which of the following is a key characteristic of the avant-garde in early twentieth-century French literature?
- A. A strict adherence to classical forms and traditional narrative structures
- B. Experimentation with form, language, and style that challenged established conventions ✓
- C. A rejection of all artistic expression in favour of political pamphleteering
- D. A commitment to realist depictions of rural village life
Why: The avant-garde sought to break with tradition through experimentation with form, language, and style, a spirit shared by modernists such as Gide and the Surrealists who questioned inherited literary norms.
Module 7
Module 7: Postmodern Fiction: Robbe-Grillet, Perec and the Nouveau Roman
Postmodern Fiction: Robbe-Grillet, Perec and the Nouveau Roman
Knowledge check
Q1. Which novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet is often cited as a foundational text of the nouveau roman, focusing on a traveling salesman's perception of objects and space?
- A. Nadja
- B. La Jalousie ✓
- C. Les Mots
- D. Zazie dans le métro
Why: La Jalousie (1957) is a key nouveau roman work by Robbe-Grillet. It is told through a detailed, objective description of surroundings and objects that obsessively circle around an unseen jealousy, exemplifying the movement's rejection of traditional character psychology and plot.
Q2. Georges Perec's novel La Disparition is famous for a constraint that makes it lipogrammatic. What is that constraint?
- A. Every chapter begins with the same word
- B. The letter 'e' does not appear anywhere in the text ✓
- C. Each sentence contains exactly seven words
- D. The narrative is told backwards from its final sentence
Why: La Disparition (1969) is written entirely without the letter 'e', the most common letter in French. This OuLiPo-inspired constraint is a playful demonstration of how formal limits can generate literary creativity, a hallmark of Perec's experimental work.
Q3. Which central idea of the nouveau roman challenges the traditional realist novel's emphasis on characters?
- A. Characters should always represent social classes
- B. The author should appear as an omniscient narrator
- C. Characters are often reduced to surfaces and perceptions, with psychological depth deliberately withheld ✓
- D. Novels should follow a strict three-act structure
Why: Nouveau roman writers such as Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute rejected the psychologically rich, fully defined character of the realist tradition. Instead, characters are often known only through external description and perception, shifting the focus to the text's surfaces and structures.
Q4. Which Nouveau Roman writer is associated with the concept of the 'anti-roman' and wrote the essay 'Pour un nouveau roman'?
- A. Marguerite Duras
- B. Alain Robbe-Grillet ✓
- C. Samuel Beckett
- D. Jean-Paul Sartre
Why: Alain Robbe-Grillet articulated the aesthetic principles of the nouveau roman in his essays, notably 'Pour un nouveau roman' (1963), which argues for a fiction freed from traditional narrative conventions, humanist psychology, and metaphorical language.
Q5. What is the name of the literary group founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, of which Georges Perec was a member?
- A. Oulipo ✓
- B. Tel Quel
- C. Les Hydropathes
- D. Surrealist Group
Why: OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Its members, including Georges Perec, create works using self-imposed formal constraints, exploring how such rules can generate new literary possibilities.