Seminar in French Literature of the Renaissance: Secrets of Renaissance Literature

This seminar explores le secret as a defining feature of Renaissance French literature. Studying major works of poetry and prose, we ask how literature emerges during the 16th century as a privileged space of secrecy. Examining the secret as a phenomenon at once aesthetic and political, sacred and erotic, we situate it in relation to a wide range of shifting notions and categories in Renaissance France including: privacy, visibility, the body, gender, power, sincerity, belief, desire, censorship, and freedom. Renaissance texts are put in dialogue with modern theoretical works (Freud, Foucault, Irigaray, Derrida, Butler).