ECSL6003 Post-War Cultural Movements and Texts

ECSL6004 Context and Comparison in Post-War Literature

Seminar:

Representations of Adultery

(Autumn Term)

Teacher: Dr Novella Mercuri

Description:

The three novels studied are all firmly founded on the social settings and recent past of the authors’ countries. They show the self as involved in the social world and inseparable from it. They also show, however, that sometimes social conventions and beliefs thwart individual aspirations. Women’s situation, especially in their acts of adultery, enables the three authors to explore the characteristics of a given social world, to test its moral and human worth and to analyse the different responses of the main characters to the social pressure of their environment. The manner in which the situation caused by adultery (consummated or contemplated) is analysed differs in the three authors: in Flaubert it is psychological; in Fontane it is social; in Wharton it is moral. The first part of this seminar will explore common concerns, situations, themes and techniques in the three authors; the second part focuses on the main characters, point of view and narrative in the three novels and in the corresponding three films, which must have been thoroughly read and viewed by Reading Week. Some additional photocopied material will be distributed in class.

Required reading:

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling and Paul de Man, Norton Critical Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 2005
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, trans. Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers, London, Penguin Books, 2000
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 2006

Required viewing:

'Madame Bovary', dir. Claude Chabrol (France 1991)
'Effi Briest', dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Germany 1974)
'The Age of Innocence', dir. Martin Scorsese (USA 1993)

1 Introduction

2 Flaubert and the origin of modern realism

3 The Berlin novels of Theodor Fontane

4 Edith Wharton’s New York fiction

5 Realism and formalism in Flaubert, Fontane and Wharton

6 READING WEEK

7 Love, sex, marriage, children

8 Adultery, infidelity, honour

9 The woman question

10 Narrative and focalization in the three novels and corresponding films

11 Visual leitmotifs in the novels and in the films

Last updated 2 December 2005 by Novella Mercuri.