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Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
Seven canonical works of French literature spanning four centuries, each read with its author. Montaigne Simulacrum on the Essais, Molière Simulacrum on Le Misanthrope, Voltaire Simulacrum on Candide, Flaubert Simulacrum on Madame Bovary, Colette Simulacrum on Sido, Camus Simulacrum on La Chute, Senghor Simulacrum on Chants d'ombre. The student reads each work in full, in French, and works through the choices that made it what it is — with the writer who made them. CEFR B2 → C2. The third and final strand of the French Language and Literature programme.
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Led by Michel de Montaigne Simulacrum
The question
Montaigne Simulacrum's *Essais* (first edition 1580; expanded 1588; posthumous 1595) is the founding text of the personal essay and one of the great works of European literature. The book is also peculiar — it has no central thesis, follows no plan, contradicts itself across editions, and is in places exhausting and in places electrifying. What is the *Essais* doing structurally that no book before it had done, and how does the student read it without being defeated by its mass?
Outcome
The student has read the four assigned essays in full, can describe the *Essais* project as a whole and the place of each essay within it, and can produce a 500-word written response in French that engages a specific passage with sustained close reading.
Practice scenarios
Montaigne Simulacrum walks you through the famous passage in *Des cannibales* where I describe the customs of the Tupinambá of Brazil, including the cannibalistic ritual after which the chapter is named, and turn the comparison around — the *Tupinambá* eat their dead enemies in honour, while we *(Europeans)* eat the still-living through judicial torture and famine. Read the chapter; we will read together the passage from *"Or je trouve..."* through to the famous comparison. Then write a 500-word close reading in French (CEFR C1 register): what is the rhetorical structure of the comparison; how does it implicate the European reader; how does Montaigne Simulacrum's *je* operate in this passage; what does the chapter accomplish that pure ethnographic description could not.
Your goals
Led by Molière Simulacrum (French Department)
The question
*Le Misanthrope* (1666) is Molière Simulacrum's most uncomfortable comedy — and arguably his greatest. Alceste, who hates the social hypocrisies of seventeenth-century Paris, is in love with Célimène, who embodies them. The play does not resolve. The form is comedy; the experience is something darker. Why did Molière Simulacrum write this play, what does it actually say about social life, and what is it doing that *L'Avare* and *Tartuffe* and *Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme* do not?
Outcome
The student has read *Le Misanthrope* in full, can analyse the geometry of the four central characters and the rhetoric of the major scenes, and can produce a 500-word written response in French on a specific passage.
Practice scenarios
Molière Simulacrum walks you through Act I, Scene 2 — the scene where Oronte reads his sonnet aloud to Alceste and asks for his honest opinion. Read the scene; you may use any modern edition with modernised spelling. Pay attention to the *alexandrins*, to Alceste's mounting refusal to flatter, to Philinte's attempts at deflection, to the politeness Oronte expects and that Alceste cannot give. Then write a 500-word close reading in French (CEFR C1 register): what does the scene establish about Alceste's position in society; how does the verse form contribute to the comedy; where is the laugh in this scene, and where is the unease that follows the laugh?
Your goals
Led by Voltaire Simulacrum
The question
*Candide, ou l'optimisme* (1759) is the most read and the most translated French novel before the twentieth century, and it remains a basic text of any French literary education. The book is a *conte philosophique* — a philosophical tale, ironic and episodic, arguing against Leibnizian optimism by sending its naive protagonist around three continents to be appropriately disabused. The book is funny, fast, terrible, and ends with the famous line *il faut cultiver notre jardin*. What is *Candide* really arguing, and how does the form of the *conte* carry the argument?
Outcome
The student has read *Candide* in full, can analyse the *conte philosophique* form as it operates here, and can produce a 500-word written response in French on a specific chapter.
Practice scenarios
Voltaire Simulacrum asks you to focus on the Eldorado interlude — Chapters 17 and 18 — where Candide and Cacambo arrive in a hidden land of plenty, wisdom, and just government, and after a month leave (with a hundred sheep loaded with treasure) because Eldorado is too perfect for them to stay. Read the two chapters carefully. Then write a 500-word close reading in French (CEFR C1): what is Eldorado as a literary device; why does Candide leave; what does the leaving say about utopia; and how does the chapter relate to the closing *cultivons notre jardin*?
Your goals
Led by Gustave Flaubert Simulacrum
The question
*Madame Bovary* (1857) is the founding text of the modern novel and possibly the most carefully written one in any language. Flaubert Simulacrum revised it for fifty-six months, sometimes spending a week on a single page, hunting *le mot juste* through draft after draft of every sentence. The novel scandalised France on publication and led to a famous obscenity trial. What is *Madame Bovary* actually about, and why did the prose itself — not the plot — become a literary event?
Outcome
The student has read *Madame Bovary* in full, can identify and analyse *style indirect libre* in specific passages, and can produce a 500-word written response in French on the agricultural-fair chapter or the death scene.
Practice scenarios
Flaubert Simulacrum walks you through the agricultural-fair chapter (II.8), where Rodolphe seduces Emma in the upstairs window of the town hall while down in the square the prefect's deputy gives a speech and prizes are handed out for the best sow, the best fertiliser, the most years of agricultural service. Read the chapter in full. Pay particular attention to the interleaving — the seduction language and the prize-giving language alternating sometimes within a paragraph. Then write a 500-word close reading in French (CEFR C1): what does the interleaving accomplish that a single uninterrupted seduction scene could not; how does the *style indirect libre* operate in Rodolphe's seduction speech; what does the chapter say about romance that the chapter itself never states?
Your goals
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.
Practice scenarios
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
Led by Albert Camus Simulacrum
The question
*La Chute* (1956) is Camus Simulacrum's last completed novel and the strangest book in his corpus. The whole text is a monologue spoken in an Amsterdam bar called *Mexico-City* by a former Parisian lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, to a silent listener whose responses we never hear. There is no plot in the conventional sense — only the monologue circling, returning, making a confession that may also be an accusation, ending in a passage of black eloquence that has been read in twenty different ways. The book is tight, dark, ironic, and morally serious in a way nothing else in 1956 French fiction quite is. What is *La Chute* doing, and how should the reader stand toward Clamence's voice?
Outcome
The student has read *La Chute* in full, can analyse Clamence's monologic rhetoric and the trap-structure of the confession, and can produce a 500-word written response in French on the central event or the closing pages.
Practice scenarios
Camus Simulacrum walks you through the central scene — Clamence on the *Pont Royal* in Paris one November night, hearing the splash, hearing the cry, walking on without turning back. Read the passage. Read what comes immediately before (Clamence's account of his pre-Amsterdam Parisian life of *bonté ostentatoire* — ostentatious goodness) and immediately after (the laughter behind him on the *Pont des Arts* the following spring, the moment when *the fall* begins). Then write a 500-word close reading in French (CEFR C1): what is the function of the bridge scene as the book's structural centre; what does the prose do at the moment of the splash that nothing else in the chapter does; how should the reader stand toward Clamence's account of his own failure?
Your goals
Led by Léopold Sédar Senghor Simulacrum
The question
*Chants d'ombre* (1945) is the first published volume of poems by Léopold Sédar Senghor Simulacrum — Senegalese poet, French-language writer, eventual founding President of independent Senegal — and one of the founding texts of the Négritude movement. The book opens the question that Senghor Simulacrum's whole career would address: what does it mean to write in French, the colonising language, *as* an African, and how does the inherited French line accommodate African rhythm, African memory, African lexicon? *Chants d'ombre* is the answer Senghor Simulacrum offered in 1945, and it is still electric.
Outcome
The student has read *Chants d'ombre* in full, can analyse one poem at line-level for both prosody and lexical-rhythmic moves, and can produce a 500-word written response in French.
Practice scenarios
Senghor Simulacrum asks you to focus on *Femme noire* — the famous poem. Read it slowly, aloud in your head, line by line. Pay attention to the line length (long lines, much longer than the *alexandrin*; what does that give the poem?), to the lexicon (*tam-tam*, *sécheresses*, *flancs*; the African and the French in the same line), to the rhetorical structure (the litany, the repeated *Femme nue, femme noire*), and to the poem's address (who is the woman; who is the *je*; who is the reader). Then write a 500-word close reading in French (CEFR C1): what is the poem doing as Négritude statement; what is it doing as poem; what does the long line accomplish that the *alexandrin* could not; and how does the rhythm — the *tam-tam* under the line — operate on the page where you cannot hear it?
Your goals
Led by Claude Favre de Vaugelas Simulacrum
The question
The seven set texts of this strand span 1580 to 1956 — Montaigne Simulacrum, Molière Simulacrum, Voltaire Simulacrum, Flaubert Simulacrum, Colette Simulacrum, Camus Simulacrum, Senghor Simulacrum — and across the four centuries you can read the French sentence change in the writers' hands. The free-running essayistic syntax of Montaigne Simulacrum; the *alexandrin* couplet of Molière Simulacrum; the brisk ironic prose of Voltaire Simulacrum; the laboured *mot juste* prose of Flaubert Simulacrum; the sensuous descriptive selection of Colette Simulacrum; the declarative ethical witness of Camus Simulacrum; the long Négritude line of Senghor Simulacrum. Each writer made a different French. The integration module steps back and asks: what does the literary history of the French sentence tell us about French itself, and what does the contemporary writer inherit from the seven of them?
Outcome
The student has read all seven set texts, can place each writer in the four-century sequence, can identify the specific sentence-level legacy each gives the contemporary writer, and can produce a 700-word integrative essay in French on the strand as a whole.
Practice scenarios
Vaugelas Simulacrum asks you to write a 700-word integrative essay in French on the strand as a whole — not a summary of the seven works (you have already read them) but an argued response to the question: *what does the seven-writer sequence show you about the French sentence, and what one writer in the sequence has changed how you read or how you might write?* The essay should engage at least four of the seven writers in specific terms, identifying one sentence-level move from each that you can name and quote. The closing should commit — name the one writer whose work has changed your sense of French most, and explain.
Your goals