Department of French
Paper Fr10 - French Literature, Visual Culture, Thought and History from 1890 to 1958
Reading list
Part IB texts and films 2009/2010
Download the 2009 exam paper.
Part IB students may submit a portfolio of essays for this paper; see the Faculty Guidelines for further details.
This paper will be offered for the final time in this format in 2011/2012. From 2012/2013, it will be replaced at Part IB by Fr6: Innovation and Upheaval: deformation and reformulation in the 20th and 21st centuries and at Part II by Fr12: Ethics and Experience: Literature, Thought and Visual Culture of the French-speaking World (1900 to the present).
From the turn of the twentieth century to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, French culture and politics was marked by a series of upheavals. Politically, this period saw two world wars, including the traumatic experiences of Occupation and Liberation (not to mention collaboration and épuration), along with the failure of colonial ambition in Indochina, and beginnings of its defeat in North Africa and the Indian Ocean. Intellectually, this era witnesses the impact of Bergson and Freud, Husserl and Heidegger, the development of phenomenology in French thought, and the subsequent preeminence of existentialism; culturally, it is a time of extraordinary avant-garde and Modernist innovation and experimentation, from Jarry, Dada and Surrealism, to the theatre of Maeterlinck and Artaud, to the novels of Proust and Céline. And it is also at this time that cinema establishes itself as a popular and artistically credible medium, as an instrument of investigation of man in the world, and as an object of philosophical thought.
This paper offers students the opportunity to encounter these and many other dimensions of the period. Major writers who can be studied within this paper include Apollinaire, Bataille, de Beauvoir, Colette, Malraux, Reverdy, Sartre, and Valéry; it is also possible to work on film-makers such as Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné. In addition, the paper offers two Section A topics which give an overview of the period: currently, these topics are 'Proust and the novel' and 'Avant-Gardes'.
Note: A certain number of writers and film-makers at work during this period remain active after 1958. Some of these are covered in this paper: these include Beckett, de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Bresson, for example. Others, however, are featured on the Part II paper 'Literature, Visual Culture, Thought and History in the French-Speaking World Since 1958': this latter group includes for example Blanchot, Genet, Césaire, and Resnais. A definitive list of such 'cross-over' cases is appended to the reading list for each paper, indicating on which paper the figure in question may be studied.
