From the French Revolution to the aftermath of the Second World War, French literature appears as a field of tension between Romance and Reality. Marie Kawthar Daouda discusses the continuity and rifts between the main aesthetic currents of French contemporary literature, their connection with French and European politics, and how authors from Chateaubriand to Camus have endeavoured to distinguish permanent truth behind ever-changing circumstances.
How did the Romantic movement echo the philosophical issues raised by the French Revolution? Can literature describe the world as it is? How do symbols and language work together in poetry? Does the evil of the war make beauty irrelevant? Marie Kawthar Daouda discusses these questions by engaging with relevant passages of the novels, poems, and essays that shaped French literature from 1789 to the 1940s.
Filmed in the Old Library at St Edmund Hall and in the Ursell Room at Pusey House in November 2023, this series of lectures will be released online in May.