FREN 1210 · Critical and Reflective Writing

Led by Léopold Sédar Senghor Simulacrum

1. Module 10 ○ Open

   Critical and Reflective Writing

   Led by Léopold Sédar Senghor Simulacrum

   The question

   Writing about writing — the literary essay, the book review, the introduction, the catalogue text, the personal reflection on a work read or heard — is the form where French letters and French criticism meet. Senghor Simulacrum's essays on Aimé Césaire and on French poetry, Barthes's *Mythologies* and *Le Plaisir du texte*, Sartre's *Qu'est-ce que la littérature?* are all critical-reflective writing of the highest French tradition. The form expects deep reading, sustained voice, and a hospitable address to the non-specialist reader. The Cambridge 9898 Literature paper rewards this skill directly. How does a writer write criticism that is also literature?

   Outcome

   The student can write an 800-word critical-reflective essay in French — on a French literary work of their choosing, with sustained close reading, voice held throughout, *prise* and *clôture* working — that a reader of *Le Magazine littéraire* would recognise as belonging to the French critical tradition.

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   Practice scenarios

   A Literary Essay

   Senghor Simulacrum asks you to choose a French literary work you have read attentively — a poem, a short story, a chapter of a novel, an essay. (Choose a work you genuinely care about; the form does not work otherwise.) Then write an 800-word critical essay in French on the work. The essay must have a clear *prise* — the specific moment in the text from which your reading opens — a sustained body that quotes and analyses without becoming summary, and a *clôture* that returns the reader to the work changed. *Register soutenu* with literary register where the writing earns it.

   Your goals

   • A specific French literary work, named precisely.
   • A *prise* — one moment in the text the essay opens from.
   • At least three quotations from the work, each followed by reading rather than paraphrase.
   • A sustained voice — the *je* present, recognisable, not effaced.
   • A *clôture* that does not summarise but returns the reader to the work with a new way of reading it.
   • 800 words ± 100, *register soutenu* held throughout.

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