Course Schedule and Catalog

Department: French Studies

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: WHY SADE? ***** Why did the Marquis de Sade elicit such passion among twentieth-century writers and philosophers? How did the author of repetitive and at times intolerably violent narratives come to occupy a central place in twentieth- century French thought? We will begin with Sade's own tests, and branch out in two directions: ahead, to twentieth-century appropriations of Sade in the writings of Bataille, Camus, Blanchot, Klossowski and others, and backwards, to the libertine and Enlightenment traditions from which Sade emerged (readings by Diderot, Rousseau, Laclos). Repeatable for Credit.