Special Topics: Survey of the French Gay Novel (MCLS 4/50095)
Webpage: http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rberrong/mcls95

Instructor: Berrong
Office: 307-E Satterfield
Office hours:
Office phone: 672-1820
e-mail: rberrong@kent.edu

Texts

Loti: Aziyadé     Kegan Paul Intl: ISBN: 0710303165
Gide: The Immoralist   Vintage Books: ISBN: 0679741917 or Dover: ISBN: 0486292371
Eekhoud: Escal-Vigor   out of print at the moment; if it doesn't come back in print, we'll use a xerox of the 1965 edition
Proust: Sodom and Gemorrah, Part I    Modern Library ISBN: 0375753109 (we'll only read about 30 pages of this, so you may just want to use a xerox)
Cocteau: The White Book    City Lights Books: ISBN: 0872862380 (also very short)
Genet: Querelle   Grove Press: ISBN: 0802151574
Navarre: Our Share of Time    Dalkey Archive Press: ISBN: 0916583287
Tremblay: Making Room/The Heart Laid Bare   out of print at the moment; if it doesn't come back in print, we'll use a xerox of the 1989 edition
An AIDS novel

Attendance
Attendance is mandatory. A student with more than one week's worth of absences not excused under official university policy will have his/her grade reduced one letter grade for each unexcused absence past that one. Students should be sure they understand what constitutes an excused absence before they take one and should notify the instructor concerning the reasons for all their excused absences when they return to class. It is the student's responsibility to present written documentation for all absences to the instructor upon returning to class; the instructor will not ask for it. Absences for which no reason is provided will be assumed to be unexcused.

Grading

30%: Final exam
50%: Final paper
20%: Participation in class discussion (for graduate students: presentation of a French gay novel not read in class)

The final paper should be 10-15 pages in length, typed and double-spaced, for undergraduates, 15-20 pages for graduate students. Graduate student papers should show evidence of significant research using secondary sources. Undergraduates may use secondary sources, but are not required to do so. In either case, while secondary sources will/may be used, the topic of the paper and its main points should be original with the student submitting it. In other words, this is not a book report, and I do not want simply a summary of other writers' ideas. Nor do I want a summary of my own lectures.

Papers will be judged on the interest and originality of the argument, the clarity of the organization, and the student's use of the literary text to support the different points of his or her argument.

Students may receive no outside help with any written or oral work submitted for a grade in this class. This means that they may not ask others to go over their papers.

No assignment will be accepted late without a university-approved excuse. Students not present for the final at its scheduled time cannot request a make-up unless they have a documented excused absence.

Regular participation in class discussions of the literature being read is mandatory. A student who fails to participate regularly will have his/her grade reduced significantly, at the professor's discretion.

Students with disabilities
In accordance with University policy, if you have a documented disability and require accommodations to obtain equal access in this course, please contact the instructor at the beginning of the semester or when given an assignment for which an accommodation is required. Students with disabilities must verify their eligibility through the Office of Student Disability Servides (SDS) in the Michael Schwartz Student Services Center (672-3391).

Respectful Student Conduct
The Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies follows University regulations regarding student behavior in the classroom. It is expected that each student will be respectful to the instructor as well as to follow classmates.
Use of profanity, rudeness toward fellow students or the instructor, angry outbursts, refusal to participate in classroom activities, repeated tardiness, and leaving the classroom prior to class dismissal are just some examples of disruptive behavior. The instructor will ask the disruptive student to cease and desist and will inform the student of possible suspension and/or dismissal from the class.
Guidelines pertaining to class disruptions are outlined in the Digest of Rules and Regulations to be found in the Kent State University Telephone Directory.

Calendar

(The Professor reserves the right to make alterations.)

Week One: Introduction: The Beginning of the Idea of Homosexual Men in the second half of the nineteenth century

Weeks Two-Three: Gays Begin to Respond: The beginning of the gay novel in France: Pierre Loti's Aziyadé

In his entry, "The Novel: Gay Male," in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, Michael N. Stanton defines the gay male novel as "a form of fiction in which male homosexuality is central--not always a central problem, but certainly a central concern" (518). Given that definition, Loti's first novel, Aziyadé, probably qualifies as the first gay novel in French literature, the first French novel in which male homosexual desire is a central concern, though presented largely indirectly. Set in the Near East, it makes an implicit critique of European attitudes toward non-standard morality.

Texts for outside reports: Balzac, Old Man Goriot (parts I-III): an interestingly ambivalent depiction of a male character who apparently experiences same-sex desire, Vautrin;

Weeks Four-Five: Gay Love Out in the Open: Georges Eekhoud's Escal Vigor

Eekhoud was censored for this novel in his native Belgium, and it became a sort of cause célèbre among European intellectuals. Set in Europe, Escal Vigor is a very romantic presentation of a loving gay couple and the prejudices they have to face in European society.

Texts for outside reports:

Week Six: The aftermath of the Oscar Wilde affair: André Gide's The Immoralist

In his Proust and the Art of Love, a very fine study of homosexuality in the works of that French novelist, J. E. Rivers wrote, "the Wilde affair cast a pall of paranoia over the subject of homosexuality" (110). And indeed it did. Suddenly everyone was talking about that previously taboo subject, much as the Clinton/Lewinsky affair has made it "all right" to talk about previously not-for-public-discussion sexual practices, and the talk was almost uniformly negative. Even in France, where, unlike in England, homosexuality had not been illegal since the eighteenth century, the atmosphere became more homophobic. This change could not help but produce paranoia among gays, as Rivers notes, and French gay authors dealt with it in various ways. Gide's novel takes one approach to dealing with the issue of homosexuality in a time of closeting reaction.

Texts for outside reports: Jean Lorrain, Monsieur de Phocas: another example of how a gay author reacted, this time quite defensively, to the Wilde affair.

Week Seven: Inversion: Marcel Proust's Sodom and Gemorrah: Part I and Jean Cocteau's The White Book (both very short)

One of the most prevalent explanations for homosexuality at the turn of the century was inversion: the notion that a gay man was really a woman trapped inside a man's body. Proust and Cocteau were both major intellects, and both accepted this idea. As you might imagine, it led to some very sad outlooks.

Texts for outside reports: Gide, Corydon: Gide's defense of his own kind of homosexuality - pederasty - in the wake of Proust's negative depiction of homosexuals as inverts.

Weeks Eight-Nine: Glorification and Self-Hatred: Jean Genet's Querelle (or one of his later novels)

One way to deal with homophobia, one still common in part of the gay community today, was to accept the insults that heterosexual society hurled and glorify them. The problem with this, of course, is that one risks still accepting the negativity that those insults originally conveyed. No one went further in this direction than Jean Genet, which made him one of France's most outrageous authors. We will probably read his last novel, Querelle, used by gay director Fassbender for his last film, in which Genet depicts men's inability to deal with emotion, even many closeted and unself-aware gay men, and how gay men who accept themselves for what they are (at least as Genet saw them/himself) might be able to help.

Texts for outside reports: Loti, My Brother Yves, against which Genet, in Querelle, wrote a very different take on the same story; Genet, Thief's Diary, Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites: more of the same; Tournier, Gemini; or, for a woman's presentation of the same thing (internalized self-hatred), Marguerite Yourcenar's Alexis

Weeks Ten-Eleven: Having come to terms with homosexuality: Yves Navarre's Our Share of Time

Navarre is one of the most interesting contemporary French gay novelists. Our Share of Time deals with a protagonist who has no problems with being gay, but has real problems trying to find someone else with whom to share his life.

Weeks Twelve-Thirteen: The Modern Gay Man: Michel Tremblay's Making Room/The Heart Laid Bare

By the 1970s, French-language gay authors, if still not altogether comfortable with themselves as different, had nevertheless, at least some of them, come to the point where they could write about gay issues without having to explain or justify homosexuality itself. One of the more interesting of these novelists is Canadian Michel Tremblay.

Texts for outside reports: Loti, The Disenchanted: a coded call for consciousness raising among gay men;

Weeks Fourteen-Fifteen: AIDS: ?

AIDS has obviously had a devastating effect on gay men. It only follows that it would have a similarly powerful effect on their literature. There are already a lot of French-language AIDS novels, most of which I don't particularly care for and the rest of which are not yet available in English. Depending on availability in English, we will read one of the good ones here.

Texts for outside reports: Collard, Savage Nights: a grim and very negative depiction of the effects of AIDS on several characters, subsequently made into a film of the same name by the author serving as director; Dominique Fernandez, La gloire du paria: a very different take on having AIDS; Guibert, Compassion Protocol: the diary of an AIDS sufferer, or To the Friend who did not save my life, notable for a thinly disguised depiction of Michel Foucault, who died of AIDS but would never publically admit to being gay, much less having the disease; other possibilities here as well.

Week Fifteen: Final paper due.

Final exam