HIST 1932: Fictions of Adultery: from Flaubert to Machado de Assis

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2017

Professor Sidney Chalhoub. This course seeks to analyze the ways in which Machado de Assis, the most important Brazilian novelist of all times, appropriated the European tradition of the novel of adultery. In doing so, he sought to discuss literary models (realism), scientific ideologies (social Darwinism), gender (he expected the misogyny of readers to fill the lacunae of the narration), and class conflict (characters in dependent relations, women in particular, deploy an array of strategies to deal with the potential violence of patriarchal figures). Readings: selected pieces on theoretical approaches to fiction from the perspective of social history and novels by Flaubert and Machado de Assis.