This course is designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. The primary goal of this course is to develop students' reading and writing skills; a series of assignments will allow them to formulate observations made in class discussions into coherent argumentative essays. Emphasis will be placed on the refinement of effective sentence, paragraph, and thesis formation, keeping in mind the notion of writing as a process. Other goals in this course are a familiarization with French literature and the specific questions that are relevant to this field. In addition, students will be introduced to different methods of literary and linguistic analysis in their nonliterary readings.

Modern western societies are intensely preoccupied with children and childhood. Childhood is seen as a uniquely precious, and dangerous time of life—the best and worst of times, we might say—and our cultural products return to it obsessively. The Swiss writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often considered to have invented childhood as we understand it in the writings he produced in the late eighteenth century across multiple genres: autobiography, the novel, philosophical and educational treatises, and more. In this course, Rousseau (alongside his much earlier model, Augustine of Hippo) will serve as a point of departure for investigating various ways of representing childhood in modern French prose. The texts we will encounter throughout the semester deal with childhood in wildly different ways, both in content and form, and in our writing and discussion we will practice making coherent arguments for what these choices might mean and why they might matter.


The history of French literature can sometimes seem to newcomers like a long (and disorienting) conversation. In that spirit, I have tried to organize our syllabus around the tensions, contradictions, and possible solutions available at given moments in that conversation. A few key themes we will work through will be (a) the education of young people, (b) the relationships between memories of childhood and social class, (c) language acquisition and literary form, and finally (d) growing up on the margins of contemporary French society. Throughout the course, we will be asking what different kinds of texts can show us about being a child. But we also want to know about the world that shapes children into adults who then reflect on and try to make sense of that process in narrative. What do the children in these texts understand about themselves and the world? Perhaps more importantly, what do they not understand? How do we as adult readers make sense of what they show us? If, as Umberto Eco commented, every text is a “lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work,” how do we figure out what kinds of work these texts ask us to do?


To get us started doing this work, we will practice close textual attention and analysis alongside research into historical and cultural context in a series of fairly short writing exercises. As an R1B, this course is designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. The primary goal of this course is to develop students' reading and writing skills; a series of assignments will allow them to formulate observations made in class discussions into coherent argumentative essays. Emphasis will be placed on the refinement of effective sentence, paragraph, and thesis formation, keeping in mind the notion of writing as a process. Other goals in this course are a familiarization with French literature and the specific questions that are relevant to this field. In addition, students will be introduced to different methods of literary and linguistic analysis in their nonliterary readings.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills