Module description
In nineteenth-century France, class was fundamental to the social imagination, determining how people worked, dressed, interacted, travelled, and relaxed. It also became the guiding idea that defined those moments of violent political conflict which punctuated the century, whether the era of revolutions culminating in the Paris Commune, or the confrontations in later decades between an increasingly mobilised workforce and a dominant capitalist order. We will explore the idea of class through some of the most canonical works of French literature and visual art from across the nineteenth century, works which reflected, and participated in, their culture's attachment to the social legibility that class could provide, just as they also sought to challenge its symbolic structures of entitlement, power, and exclusion. The set texts and images will be analysed alongside a range of other nineteenth-century material and discourses – including political pamphlets, cartoons, songs, journalism, and sociological studies – with the aim of exploring how writers and artists constructed, and critiqued, a language and iconography of class, testing in the process the French revolution's universalist rhetoric of equality and fraternity.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/french/modules/level6/6aaff367.aspx
Assessment details
Coursework
One 4000 word essay (100%)
Teaching pattern
Two hours per week