Module description

“There is a very dangerous thing in literature,” wrote one of Balzac’s critics in 1847, “and that is the excess of truth.” Like many critics of the mid-nineteenth century, this one worried that novelists were unveiling things one might simply not want to see. What he called the “incessant, merciless observation” of the “physiological” novelists came increasingly to be labelled by other critics as a “realist” vision that endangered literary and social values.

Twentieth century critics--among them Lukács, Auerbach, Barthes, and Jameson--have given us retooled notions of what served, in the nineteenth century, as a label of denigration. We take for granted today that the nineteenth century novel tradition includes something we might call “realist” and that the visual avant-garde of the mid-nineteenth century might best be grouped under that label.

This module sets out to re-examine those premises, by looking at the material conditions for the definition of “realism” in the nineteenth century. Through readings of contemporary press criticism of the novel and painting, we will try to reposition the concept of realism. Through discussions of nineteenth-century theories of vision we will elaborate a different framework for thinking about the realist gaze. Student presentations will develop new ways of thinking about nineteenth-century observation and the visual and literary realms it engaged.

Topics to be considered: Realism as a critical concept; “realism” in Stendhal and Delacroix and the tragedies of history; Balzac and vision; the social novel; women “realists”?; the reception of Courbet and Manet; censorship and the realist novel; naturalism, the morgue, and the ends of realism; and photography’s real. Novels by Stendhal, Balzac, Sue, Flaubert, and Zola. Painting, photography, 19th-century criticism, and contemporary theoretical texts also to be considered.

Preparatory Reading and Required Texts:


	Suggested *background reading* before our course: Flaubert, Madame Bovary (bring a copy of the "Procès," included in any modern ed., to our first class)
	
	
	Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir (Garnier-Flammarion or Livre de poche)
	

	Eugène Sue, Les Mystères de Paris (Gallimard Quarto, ed. Lyon-Caen; or the 4-vol. Charles Gosselin 18431844 edition via Gallica), Première-Sixième Parties
	
	
	Honoré de Balzac, Cousine Bette (ONLY Folio edition, ed. Pierre Barbéris)
	
	
	Gustave Flaubert, L'Éducation sentimentale (any modern edition)
	
	
	Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin (Gallimard Folio Classiques or Gallimard Folio Plus)
	
	
	Paintings by Eugène Delacroix (esp. Liberté guidant le peuple, Musée du Louvre)
	

	Gustave Courbet (see Gustave Courbet, Exh. Cat. Grand Palais/Metropolitan Museum, 2008), and Édouard Manet (see Françoise Cachin, et al., Edouard Manet, Exh. Cat. Grand Palais/Metropolitan Museum, 1983).
	

	Photography by Bruno Braquehais and Auguste Bell
	
	
	Secondary Reading
	

	Critical texts will include excerpts from Auerbach, Watt, Lukács, Barthes, Bersani, J. Hillis Miller, Franco Moretti, Fredric Jameson, as well as readings from the following:
	
	
	Linda Nochlin, Realism
	
	
	Michael Fried, Courbet's Modernism
	
	
	T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life
	
	
	Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer
	

	Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast, Spectacles of Realism
	
	
	Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel
	
	
	Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848-1871
	
Please note: This module description is accurate at the time of publication. Amendments may be made prior to the start of the academic year.