Writing Desire: Sex and Sexual Politics

This seminar examines how French and francophone writers have given form to desire in novels, memoirs, poetry, polemic, and film from the nineteenth century to the present. French writing has been uniquely preoccupied with sexuality, its representation, its regulation, and the scandal that erupts when private life becomes public text. Flaubert was prosecuted for Madame Bovary, Colette scandalized and seduced in equal measure, and Duras made the novel a repository of erotic memory. In the twenty-first century, writers such as Édouard Louis, Abdellah Taïa, and Vanessa Springora have turned to memoir and autofiction to reckon with questions of queer desire, sexual violence, and consent. Moving across two centuries, we will read works that explore the boundaries between confession and fiction, between liberation and exploitation, and between secrecy and exposure. Authors include Flaubert, Baudelaire, Colette, Gide, Leduc, Duras, Ernaux, Taïa, Louis, and Springora alongside films by Malle and Campillo. This course will be taught in French.