FREN 452 - Dreams, Drugs, and Demons: The Sacred and Profane in French Literature and Culture

In this course, we will examine representations of the sacred and the profane in France from the early modern period through to the present. We will explore how they embody a human need to transcend or transgress, as well as their social meanings and how they often serve to construct or critique dualities of identity and otherness in the domains of national identity, race, class, and sex/gender. First, we will consider how the sacred is invoked to build national identity in the premodern period, via iconic figures including Joan of Arc; the medieval coronation ceremony; and the carnaval. We will also explore themes of race and gender in texts on witchcraft, demonology, and spirit possession. Next, we will explore the relationship between Enlightenment reason and atheism and the so-called “Super-Enlightenment” in which many leading eighteenth-century figures also dabbled: alchemy, the occult, the secret societies accused of plotting the Revolution, and mysticism. In the 19th century we will examine profanation, excess, and the revolt against bourgeois order in decadent poetry and the literature of the fantastique, and read texts on drugs (opium and hashish) and their relationship to dreams and the unconscious. Finally, we will explore secularization in contemporary France, the relationship of French laïcité to the “religions du Livre” (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), and French anxieties about the loss of transcendence and the retreat of religion from civic life, as well as about its simultaneous return in the form of Islam, often constructed as the religion of the ‘other.’ Taught in French. Prerequisite(s): FREN 306 Offered occasionally. (4 Credits)