French Sixteenth-Century Literary Studies in the United States Today

Until recently American graduate programs in French divided the literary tradition into manageable morsels: Middle Ages, Sixteenth Century, Seventeenth Century, Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century, and Francophone Literature. The introduction of a Literary Theory component and of Cultural Studies changed that picture only to the extent that, since French Studies are not an expanding, but a contracting or at best stable area in the humanities, certain periods of the Continental tradition might be collapsed (say, Middle Ages to Renaissance, or Seventeenth to Eighteenth centuries) or eliminated entirely when hiring decisions are made. Among the traditional periods, the sixteenth century is the least attractive, seen from the point of view of the undergraduate curriculum. Why is that? It is not a matter of the absence of wonderful literature; arguably the greatest comic genius in prose, the greatest writer of love poems, and the greatest moral and personal essayist of the French language all wrote during this century. Rather, a practical difficulty faces American students venturing into the literature of the Renaissance. The works that these writers composed are neither in Old French (and thus available in a modem French translation in cheap editions, such as Livre de poche's collection Lettres gothiques), nor are they in the quite accessible French of the seventeenth century. For an American undergraduate, the prose of Montaigne is considerably more difficult than the writing of Proust, let alone Duras or Camus. But also more difficult than medieval romance: the American undergraduate will almost never be asked to read Chretien de Troyes in anything but modem French. In addition, the Middle Ages are, for lack of a better word, cute: knights, damsels, adulterous love, castles, etc. Medieval narratives can resemble the basic structure of Hollywood movies, from Westerns to Star Wars. But moving from Yvain to the genealogy of Pantagruel or to Montaigne's De la vanite means moving from a recognizable imaginary world to a kind of writing dependent on a much greater variety of sources, of genres, of discourses. The