The Country and the City: Writing Nature in Nineteenth-Century France

Conducted in French. Our current vexed relationship with what we call "nature" is nothing new. If debate rages today as to whether our impact on the environment amounts to a new geological age, the so-called Anthropocene, it was in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as urbanization took off in France, that writers engaged with the countryside, writing about rural life and describing landscapes as well as their experiences of being in "nature." This course will engage with this literature; our readings will span the "long" nineteenth century, including, among others, Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Lamartine, Sand, Baudelaire, Zola, and Proust. We will consider the usefulness of the narrative that writing about the countryside and nature is the result of an estrangement from them. Engaging broadly with literary studies, especially ecocriticism, as well as the environmental humanities and the new materialism, this class aims to read literature to destabilize our understanding of the relationship between humans and nature, the city and the countryside, as well as between literature and the natural sciences.