FREN 4110: Quand l'art devient la vie: Bienvenue

Welcome to "Quand l'art devient la vie," a guide that supports literary research involving artists and writers from 19th-century France.  

George Sand et Frédérik Chopin by Eugene Delacroix. Used under Public Domain permissions.

The first step when preparing for your composition finale is to outline a topic of interest for your research. Many times we start the research process with a big and general topic. In the following example, a general topic is the starting point that leads to the development of a more refined topic.

• Women in 19th-century Europe 

         ⇒   This is a general topic. Let’s refine it:

• Women in 19th century France

       ⇒   Still too broad. Although we regionalized this topic by adding France, the scope is too large (women in 19th century)

• Women’s role and representation in 19th century France

       ⇒ much smaller. We refined this topic by narrowing it to the role of women

• What was the societal position of women writers in 19th-century France?

       ⇒ We defined the topic more by adding women writers and their position in 19th-century France

A syllabus is one helpful tool for drawing topics of interest. Once you have a topic, you can explore optics related to a particular literary work, or in the case of 19th-century literature, the influence of a 19th-century author within the Romantic period or forward, for example. The following example shows that before defining a topic, we gathered information about a particular work, its time period, and its influences in the 19th century and forward.

Balzac, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu

⇒ You could consider themes or the influence of this 1831 short story known as The Unknown Masterpiece:

• Published under these titles, too: Maître Frenhofer OR Catherine Lescault, conte fantastique  
• published in Balzac’s Études Philosophiques in 1837
• Integrated into the La Comédie Humaine in 1846
• Inspired film La Belle Noiseuse (1991) by Jacques Rivette
• Inspired Pablo Picasso's work Guernica
• Nicholas Poussin motifs related to death and calamity

Baudelaire, sélection de poèmes et essais

⇒ One optic could consider Baudelaire's critical writing style

• Symbolist poet
• Influence on modernism (especially modernist art) 
• critical writing
• Real life as an inspiration 
• Parisian realism

Flaubert, Madame Bovary

⇒ One optic could consider societal censorship with literary topics that make us uncomfortable

• Portrayal of adultery
• Portrayal of bourgeois mentality
• Realism in literature
• Government censorship on literary art (Flaubert was accused of obscenity and acquitted)