Texts

Texts to buy:

Gens de Bretagne 1 ISBN 2258001560
E. Souvestre: Contes de Bretagne ISBN 2841411222
Course packet from WordSmith

The first two books will be available at the University Bookstore, but through no fault of their own, they will be outrageously priced: the American distributors for French books are now charging a 100% markup.

This leaves you two alternatives: you can either buy the books from the bookstore, or you can order them online from Alapage (www.alapage.com). If you take the second option, you will have to order them by the day of the first class, at the lastest, to get them on time to have the first assignment read by 13 September. If you take the second option, make sure to order the books by the ISBN number, as in each case there are several books with very similar titles, and there is no point in your going to the trouble of ordering books from France only to get the wrong ones.

Works to be read.

Chateaubriand (Académie française, 1811): Les Martyrs (1809) Livres 9-10 (available on this website)
     While there was Breton literature for centuries before the 19th century, the Breton novel really doesn't begin until then, when, for various reasons that we will examine in class, the Bretons began to write about themselves not just for themselves but for general French and even world consumption. They also began to look at, and take pride in, their past. Both of these elements occur in Chauteaubriand's endless Les Martyrs. If you want to read all three lengthy volumes, be my long-suffering guest. We will read the most famous section, where the protagonist goes to ancient Brittany and meets the maiden Velléda.
Féval: La fée des grèves (1851?) (in Gens de Bretagne 1 )
      The popular novel form for the first half of the 19th century, established by Sir Walter Scott, was the historical adventure. In France, the two great practitioners of that genre were Victor Hugo (Notre Dame de Paris, etc.) and Alexandre Dumas père (Les trois mousquetaires, etc.). Right behind them in statue, and every bit as popular, was the Breton novelist Paul Féval, best known for Le Bossu, which the French keep making into yet another movie with remarkable regularity. Féval sometimes wrote about his native Brittany, as with La fée des grèves, set on the border between Brittany and Normandy (France) in the Middle Ages, when that was really a border between two countries - and, more important, between two very different cultures. Velléda tells Eudore in Les Martyrs that she is a fée. In Feval's novel everyone is talking about a fée. Is that what that white form wandering along the Breton shore is? If you like Alexandre Dumas, you will love this.
Souvestre: Contes de Bretagne (selected contes)
     Souvestre, along with a few others, undertook the first serious collection of Breton folklore. The collections of tales that he and his colleagues published starting in the mid-nineteenth century had a major effect on how the Bretons saw themselves, and therefore how Breton novels present them.
Renan (Académie française, 1878): Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse: Préface et "Le Broyeur de lin" (1876) (available on this website)
     A native of Tréguier, Renan went on to shake the foundations of 19th century religious thought with his studies of Biblical history. His Vie de Jésus (1863) caused as much religious debate in its time as Darwin's Origins of Species (1857). As he got older, Renan mellowed and began to reflect back on his childhood and the Brittany in which he had been born and raised. This is the opening of his memoires. Like most other Bretons writing about their own times, Renan had an ambivalent attitude toward the modernization and Frenchification of what he knew to be a pays à part.
Le Braz: "Le sang de la sirène" (1901) (in Gens de Bretagne 1), "Pâques d'Islande" (available from WordSmith)
     Others before him, inspired by the Brothers Grimm, had collected Breton folklore, but Anatole Le Braz became the master of it. He also wrote some fiction strongly influenced by his ethnographic work. These stories are among the best.
H. Queffélec: Un Homme d'Ouessant (1954) (will be available from WordSmith)
     Henri Queffélec began with historical novels, of which theis is a magnificent example, set in the 18th century on an island off the west coast of the westernmost part of Brittany, Finistère.
Loti (Académie française, 1891): Propos d'exil: "Un vieux" (1884) (will be available from WordSmith)
     Pierre Loti fixed international literary attention on Brittany in 1886 with his phenomenal best-seller and masterpiece, Pêcheur d'Islande. Two years before, he had offered a very unromantic view of Breton life in this short story set in the Breton Far West, Finistère, which he wrote while he was working on Pêcheur d'Islande.
Le Goffic (Académie française, 1930): La payse (1897), Morgane (1898) (will be available from WordSmith)
      Some Bretons took mighty offense at Pêcheur d'Islande because of its mighty popularity. A non-Breton (Loti was from la Charente) certainly could not have conveyed the truth about their land correctly, they argued - and continue to argue. And so, in one way or another, all subsequent Breton writers took their stance vis-à-vis Loti's masterpiece. The first great master to do so was Charles Le Goffic, the author of some truly first-rate novels, and also some truly strange ones. (No, we will not read the strange ones for class.) In La payse Le Goffic shows what was likely to become of most small-town Breton women left alone by their men if they did not have Gaud's special gifts. This is, then, in a very real sense, a "sequel" to Pêcheur d'Islande, featuring not Gaud but the average Breton woman in her place. Morgane, on the other hand, starts of like a very ordinary tale - and suddenly we are talking about King Arthur and Revolution! Very strange, but very important, for reasons you will discover.
Drezen: Notre Dame Bigoudenn (1941) (will be available from WordSmith)
     One can't very well talk about the Breton novel and not ask the language question. Can a truly Breton novel be written in anything other than Breton? Well, to cover that question, we will read the major Breton-language novel, translated by its author into French as Notre Dame Bigoudenn. This takes place in Pont l'Abbé in the 1930s and expresses in a very powerful and suspense-filled way the mid-twentieth century Breton's resentment against "the French." This is, in some ways, a sequel to Morgane. (Lots of extra credit if you can read this in the original:)
Hélias: L'herbe d'or (1982) (in Gens de Bretagne 1)
     Like Drezen, Hélias wrote a lot of his work in Breton first, and then translated it into French. (He was in charge of Breton-language broadcasting for the Resistance during World War II.) In his later years, however, he took to writing novels in French, of which this is a masterful example.Set in a small fishing port in the Finistère not far from Quimper, on board a fishing boat, and in an inland town during the 1920s or 30s, this novel comes the closest of any to capturing the breadth and diversity of the Breton Armor et Argoat (coast and interior) before Brittany really started to become, culturally, a part of France. Truly great literature.

Novels for presentation by graduate students. (Most of these will have to be obtained through OhioLink or even Interlibrary Loan, so make sure you order what you need LONG before you are scheduled to present it.)

Balzac:
     Les Chouans
     One of the first novels that Balzac signed (his first he published under other names or anonymously). An historical novel in the style of Sir Walter Scott, then the most popular novelist in Europe. In my opinion, far too long, but if you really like Balzac you might enjoy it. (I didn't.) As you might guess, a very negative depiction of the Breton peasantry and nobility during the Revolution. Very much a part of the negative depiction of Brittany practiced by non-Breton Frenchmen, especially before 1870.
     The same can be said of Victor Hugo's Quatre-vingt-treize. All of the above applies.
Feval:
    Chateaupauvre
    This novel is very funny, and also very important for understanding 19th century views on the Bretons and their language. Much of the dialogue is in gallo, however, a mixture of French, Breton, English, Latin, and a few other things. For this reason, it should be attempted only be a native speaker of French. It is, however, very funny: a classic in the wily-peasant-outwits-city-slicker genre, of which Green Acres was only a much more recent version.
Le Braz:
    Le gardien du feu
    Rather melodramatic, and not as good, either as literature or as literature about Brittany, as his better short stories, this novel still conveys some interesting things about Brittany as Le Braz, the great collector of Breton folk culture, saw it. If you like melodrama, this is your cup of tea.
H. Queffélec:
     Un recteur de l'île de Sein
     Queffélec's first success, about a young fisherman who gets turned into a priest, at least somewhat against his will, by the other residents of l'Ile de Sein, a desolate island off the west coast of Brittany, because they do not like being without a "recteur." This was turned into a movie, Dieu a besoin des hommes, and is probably the best-known of Queffélec's novels. I like Un Homme d'Ouessant better, but this is still a fun novel.
    Un royaume sous la mer
    Awarded a prize by the Académie française, this is an important Queffélec novel, but you really have to know your fishing vocabulary in French.
Loti:
    Pêcheur d'Islande
    More than any other work of 19th century French literature, Pêcheur d'Islande fixed an image of Brittany in the French, and indeed in the world's, imagination. If you haven't read this already as an undergraduate, this is the novel you need to choose to present, because you cannot understand the Breton novel without having read it. We will also talk about it, incessantly, in class.
    Mon frère Yves
    Only parts of this novel take place in Brittany. Still, those scenes are very interesting. If you have already read Pêcheur d'Islande and enjoyed it, you might want to present this.
Le Goffic:
    Le crucifié de Keralès
    Perhaps Le Goffic's most famous novel, but with a very gruesome ending. Not for the faint of stomach. A study in superstition and religious fanaticism.
    Le pirate de l'île de Lern
    This is really a first-rate novel: suspense, a ship's captain haunted by the loss of his men at sea, lots of Breton culture, romance. I couldn't put it down. A great read.
     Croc d'argent (originally titled: L'Erreur de Florence)
     There is a lot of interest in this novel, but unfortunately, also a fair amount of routine. It is the story of change coming to the interior of Brittany: an English mining company wants to reopen mines that date from Roman times with new technology that will change the lives and customs of the inhabitants around Le Huelgoat. The discussions on that issue are fascinating: the good and the bad of old Brittany, the value and danger of modernization, etc.. There is, however, also a love story that is less interesting. Not a great novel, therefore, but an often enjoyable and interesting one.
     Les Bonnets rouges
     Like Croc d'argent, this novel has its ups and downs. It deals with a famous peasant uprising in 1675, triggered by excessive taxes but arising from resentment at the way the French had treated Brittany since annexing it. Children abducted to steal an inheritance, lots of sword-play, etc. Very much in the style of Alexandre Dumas père.

Attendance