FRE 341: 19th-Century French Novel

This interdisciplinary study opens up new perspectives on 19th-century medical discourse about female sexuality, focusing on the work of two major authors of this period, the Goncourt brothers. Through a Foucauldian reading of the history of sexuality, Barbara Giraud studies the way in which the Goncourts used their medical knowledge to express, in their novels, their thoughts on how bourgeois society dealt with problems of abnormality in the second half of the 19th century.

Many see in the Goncourt Journal, the subject of this essay, nothing but gossip and calumnies. In this book, Roger Kempf argues that this view misjudges the Goncourt brothers.