What are the listed short stories about and what are the main...

What are the listed short stories about and what are the main themes?

Fall 2014
Comp Lit 191 / French 153D
Fantastic Fictions
The Fantastic is one of the many inventions of the Nineteenth century. It has been described as
the creative reaction to a bourgeois, prosaic world, dominated by capitalism and rationalism, and
deserted by poetry, faith and the imagination. Writers of fantastic literature were fascinated by the
parallel realities of mental disorder, madness, dreams and drug-induced perceptions. The void
left by the materialistic explanations of reality became the space where a fantastic perception of
reality could develop and thrive, hesitating between the real and the supernatural, in the
intermediate space of the unexplained and unexplainable. We will read stories by Balzac,
Cortázar, Dumas, Gautier, Gogol, Hoffmann, Kafka, Maupassant, Mérimée, Edgar A. Poe, and
Villiers de l’Ile-Adam. In English.
Time: Tuesday & Thursday 12:30-1:45
Place: Theater & Dance 1701
Instructor: Dominique Jullien
Office hours: Thursday 2:30-4:30 pm & by appointment
Office: 5220 Phelps Hall
Email: [email protected]
Thursday October 2, 2014
Introduction
Tuesday October 7
E.T.A. Hoffmann “The Sand Man” (from the reader )
Thursday October 9
E.T.A. Hoffmann, “The Cremona Violin” (from the reader )
Additional reading: 1) Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (from the reader); 2) Hélène Cixous,
“Fiction and its Phantoms” (from the reader)
Tuesday October 14
H. de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin (to p.108)
Thursday October 16
Balzac cont’d (to p.194)
Tuesday October 21
Balzac cont’d (to p.285)
Thursday October 23
Prosper Mérimée, “The Venus of Ille”
(from Joan C. Kessler (ed.) Demons of the Night )
Additional reading: Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic (from the reader)