Romantic Boredom, Boring Romances : Madame Bovary

Rarely had boredom ever been such an entertainment. Emma waits, she looks out the window and daydreams of the bourgeois next door. Monsieur Bovary, the remarkable character of unambition and naive irrelevance. Rodolphe, Léon and their replacements : as many objects for Emma’s furtive existential fantasies. The scene is set : a banal, uneventful village out of Rouen in the first half of the 19th century. A story “about nothing”, the ultimate goal of Flaubert. And yet, one of the most transparent and engaging experiments on the questions of individuality and culture in our modern world.

Madame Bovary owes up to its thorough success, immediately after publication in 1856-1857, and its universal acclaim, ever since. After many years of personal and literary quests, and over four years of daily labour on each sentence of this story, Flaubert signed a defining moment and turning point in the history of literature. Imagination and craft reach a peak through the masterpiece of the author. Gustave delivered and refined every character, every instant of the dramatic narration through months of reflection, to condense in one ordinary scenario the atemporal tensions of human psychology and social organisation. Flaubert’s writing is a treat, each expression targeting delight and surprise in the reader, when even the basest of human habits becomes an elegant literary formula. Madame Bovary sets a standard, an ideal, perhaps, for the genre of a certain literature, a particular, ironically humanist and pre-existential portrayal of the world around us, and the many characters of its endless play.

Madame Bovary deserves its attentive study for anyone even remotely interested in literature and philosophy. But rarely can university courses dedicate the scale of time required for the minute appreciation which such a refined piece of human creativity should demand. This course is thus conceived and designed to respond to this demand and satisfy the aesthetic and reflective delight Madame Bovary can offer to all. The participative approach is particularly highlighted, through the course of this programme, as each session will cover the progressive, chronological development of the story, while also coinciding with a thematic study of the topics evoked : desire, imitation, feminism, romanticism, individuality, boredom, existentialism, urbanisation, industrialisation, class struggle… While the instructor orients and frames the reflections through conceptual and biographical comments, participants are invited to meditate upon their own sensibility to the text, via questions, debates and reflections, in a collective and dynamic manner.