Instructor:
Malina Stefanovska
Taking as a point of departure the title of Tzvetan Todorov’s book Nous et les autres (Us and the Others), we shall study the role of travel, and its relationship to French literature. The travels we will be taking belong to real lives, to fiction, even to “science-fiction,” and follow real or imaginary encounters with “otherness” be it a Persian visiting France, an Italian in London, an inhabitant of Saturn visiting earth, a Peruvian princess in exile. They have all been used as an opening to “otherness” and a critique of the European culture by such Enlightenment authors as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Casanova, Rousseau and Mme de Graffigny. Taught in French.