French Literature

"Face à l'autorité. Imitations, réécritures, appropriations et détournements chez les écrivains français entre le XIXe et le XXe siècle"

Every epoch in the history of literature (and more broadly of culture) has grappled with the theme of the relationship with previous "authoritative" models: admired on the one hand and felt on the other as cumbersome for one's own free expression. The course proposes to explore the different attitudes that writers belonging to different generations - between the end of the 19th century and the late 20th century - took on in front of the auctoritates, in a fertile dialectic between respect and irreverence, veneration and profanation, submission and the desire for liberation.

First part (Prof. Paraboschi)
We will start from the literary production of the late 19th century, characterised by a complacent mannerism that does not open up to new worldviews, but excels in thematic and formal experimentation and in the development of an erudite style, rich in intertextual references. A vast and eclectic literary canon, in which the Bible finds its place alongside Shakespearian tragedies, the myths of Antiquity flank the works of early 19th century authors, constitutes a rich hypothetical that the Fin-de-siècle does not hesitate to interpolate, distort, desacralise while celebrating its centrality, value and sacredness. The first module of the course will focus on the tale at the end of the 19th century, taking into consideration a number of authors (Jean Lorrain, Jules Laforgue, Jules Lemaître, Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam) with the aim of investigating the ambiguity of the relationship with authority and the plurality of rewritings.

Part Two (Prof. Preda)
Gide's short story, "Le retour de l'enfant prodigue" (1907) responds to the need to critically confront the highest cultural and religious auctoritas of the West, namely Holy Scripture. The text of reference is the Gospel of Saint Luke, the original nucleus of Departure, Self-Research and Return, on which Gide operates a reversal of meanings that testifies, rather than a distance with the Lucan parable, to a new appropriation. We intend to analyse this agonal relationship and verify in what ways rewriting a text means both bringing it back to life and annihilating its meaning.

Part Three (Prof. Sparvoli)
In Roland Barthes' "Fragments d'un discours amoureux" (1977), the most disparate cultural and literary models are summoned - in a 'counter-philological' attitude - to support a discourse that aims to be poignantly personal and at the same time declined in every place and time. Of such a discourse, we will analyse the material and the form in order to identify the way in which the "authoritative" discourses of others are exhibited, distorted, assimilated.