Originally posted: February 2014
This quarter UW students will study how Québécois writers and filmmakers coped with the rapid and radical changes of the 1960s’ Quiet Revolution in the course “Québécois Literature.” The class is taught by Associate Professor of French Denyse Delcourt and offered jointly by the French and Italian Studies department and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. The course is conducted in French and draws on novels, plays, and poetry to explore how artists grapple with the task of representing their complex culture and defining the identity of the new “Québécois,” a term coined in the 1960s. Students will consider the “exhilaration and bewilderment” Québécois writers and filmmakers felt with the disappearance of traditions, the different ways artists define Québécois identity, and the “ambivalent role” played by the past in the quest for a new Québécois identity.
Denyse Delcourt is a writer and a medievalist. She has been teaching at the University of Washington since 1990. Other teaching experiences include Queens (Canada), Emory, Northwestern and Duke universities. Her teaching interests are Old French language and literature, contemporary Québécois literature and French fairy tales.