HUGO'S PARIS in Fall 2021 (CL1099FB 9)

By the age of thirty, Hugo had begun writing his own myth. One of his poems begins with the year of his birth: “This Century was two years old! Rome was replacing Sparta/ Already Napoleon was visible in Bonaparte…” While Hugo was hardly modest, he did live through a momentous time in French history, and he wrote poems, plays, and novels that mattered a great deal to his contemporaries. His Romantic plays caused highly publicized brawls in Parisian theaters. His Hunchback of Notre Dame rescued Notre Dame cathedral from decrepitude. In Les Misérables, perhaps his best-known work today, Hugo tried to address some of the causes and effects of increasing disparities in wealth. By studying Hugo’s work in parallel with the time in which it was written, we will consider more broadly how literature and politics have interacted and try to determine what the legacy of Hugo’s humanitarian megalomania is now.By the age of thirty, Hugo had begun writing his own myth. One of his poems begins with the year of his birth: “This Century was two years old! Rome was replacing Sparta/ Already Napoleon was visible in Bonaparte…” While Hugo was hardly modest, he did live through a momentous time in French history, and he wrote poems, plays, and novels that mattered a great deal to his contemporaries. His Romantic plays caused highly publicized brawls in Parisian theaters. His Hunchback of Notre Dame rescued Notre Dame cathedral from decrepitude. In Les Misérables, perhaps his best-known work today, Hugo tried to address some of the causes and effects of increasing disparities in wealth. By studying Hugo’s work in parallel with the time in which it was written, we will consider more broadly how literature and politics have interacted and try to determine what the legacy of Hugo’s humanitarian megalomania is now.