French Literature (MA)

The course is entitled: 'Délaisser le fuseau pour la plume : les femmes et l'écriture littéraire de la Renaissance au XXe siècle'.
It is divided into 3 parts:

Part One (Prof. A. Preda)- During the Renaissance, women conquered an unprecedented literary space, no longer, or rather not only the ideal or damned object of male artistic expression, but the subject of writing, the protagonist of the culture of her time, an active part in the editorial atelier taking shape in the century of printing. In the first part of the course, the aim is to analyse this statement through the lyrical and prose production of some female figures of 16th century France.

Part Two (Prof. F. Paraboschi) - In the second part, we will study two novels published in the late 19th and early 20th century that are very different from each other. The two authors - Rachilde and Marcelle Tinayre - embody in opposite ways the literary aspirations and ideological positions of intellectual women, who at that time managed to gain greater visibility, albeit with difficulty, than at the turn of the century.

Part Three (Prof. E. Sparvoli) - In the third part, we will analyse Marguerite Yourcenar's collection "Nouvelles orientales", where the female figures draw their powerful originality from the cultural syncretism that nourishes them and of which the author's own training, matured outside the canonical circuits of the French intellectuals of her time, is the most evident expression.