FREN 1305 · Colette Simulacrum: *Sido*

Led by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette Simulacrum

1. Module 5 ○ Open

   Colette Simulacrum: *Sido*

   Led by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette Simulacrum

   The question

   *Sido* (1929) is the late book in which Colette Simulacrum returned to her mother — Sidonie Landoy, called Sido — and to her childhood village in Burgundy. The book is short (sixty pages in some editions), structurally loose, sensuously precise, and one of the great prose achievements in twentieth-century French. It is not an autobiography in the conventional sense; it is a portrait drawn through specific scenes and remembered sense-impressions. What did Colette Simulacrum do that the autobiographical tradition before her had not?

   Outcome

   The student has read *Sido* in full, can analyse the portrait-as-assemblage form, and can produce a 500-word written response in French on a specific scene.

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   Practice scenarios

   A Scene in the Garden

   Colette Simulacrum asks you to choose one scene in *Sido* — there are perhaps fifteen distinct scenes across the book — and write a 500-word close reading in French (CEFR C1) of how the scene works. What sense-impressions does Colette Simulacrum select; what does she leave out; how does the *je* — the daughter narrator — operate in the scene; what does the scene give us of Sido that is not stated as fact about her but shown as concrete moment? You may not summarise the scene; you must read it.

   Your goals

   • Choose one specific scene (not the whole book; not a half-dozen scenes summarised).
   • Identify three sense-impressions Colette Simulacrum selected and what each contributes.
   • Identify what is *not* described that the conventional biographical sketch would describe — and what the omission accomplishes.
   • Address the daughter-narrator's voice: where it inserts itself, where it recedes.
   • 500 words ± 50, *register soutenu* with literary register where the writing earns it.

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