French Culture Ii

The course will focus on the relations between literature and justice referring both to the engagement perspective and the aesthetics of crime with particular regard to the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century French Novel.

Unit 1

The first didactic unit will explore the large and detailed literary debate on justice starting from the definition of "affinity" (in French "parenté") elaborated by Jacques Vergès. The unit will propose an analysis of those works which offer a game of mirrors, exchanges, references and mutual influences between the literary imaginary and law, starting from the founding myth of the "justice revealed" in Aeschylus's Eumenides.

Unit 2

The second didactic unit will focus on the representation of justice both as a "killing machine" and a "factory of miscarriage of justice" in some emblematic works of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth "engaged literature", in particular in "Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné" by Victor Hugo, "Souvenirs de la Cour d'Assises" bu Gide and "Cour d'Assises" by Simeon where the two writers denounce the weakness, the arbitrariness and the spectacularization of the penal system.

Unit 3
The third didactic unit will propose some considerations about the detention imaginary. The French contemporary literature offers, in fact, a lot of examples about how the prison imaginary can be represented according to the three perspectives of law, pulsionality and writing and the unit will focus, in particular, on the analysis of René Frégni's work, Où se perdent les hommes? In the condition of mutual attraction between the cell and literature, the prison becomes, to borrow from Foucault, a heterotopic symbol of humanity and its conflicts.