Forbidden Passion in French Literature & Film
Margaret Gray
French & Italian
This course will scrutinize the theme of forbidden passion—its conflicts, transgressions, implications, and consequences – across a variety of temporal and cultural contexts, as well as across a variety of literary genres. We will consider the codes and conventions, the rules and traditions, that construe passion as forbidden within particular circumstances, including self-imposed interdiction. Attentive to the struggle of internal as well as external social and cultural pressures, we will ask what such love stories tell us about the human heart in the face of individual or collective attempts to control it; about the individual’s fraught relationship to cultural dictates; about powerful constraints of normativity and conformism imposed upon emotions. In studying the films our texts have inspired, we will explore the ways these adaptations approach their textual sources – as well as what questions our works pose of their cultures, and of each other as they negotiate the “eternal return” (Cocteau’s title for his adaptation of the “Tristan” legend) of forbidden passion. Our texts (and film excerpts) will include:
A fairy tale : Mme LePrince de Beaumont’s 1757 tale, « Beauty and the Beast », with scenes from Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film
A legend : « Tristan and Iseult, » as retold by Joseph Bédier in _The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, _and using scenes from Jean Cocteau’s 1943 modernized adaptation, The Eternal Return
A novella : Vercors’s The Silence of the Sea, set during the German occupation of France during World War II and compared to scenes from Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1949 adaptation
A play: Edmond de Rostand’s _Cyrano de Bergerac, _set in 17th-century France during the time of the Musketeers, and drawing on scenes ranging from an early silent film to Steve Martin’s 1987 spoof, to Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s 1990 swashbuckling interpretation
A novel: David Foenkinos’s 2009 _Delicacy, _a contemporary interpretation of love between colleagues, with scenes drawn from the 2011 film by the author and his brother
Catalog Information: HON-H 233 GREAT AUTHORS, COMPOSERS, AND ARTISTS