L'écrivain dans son siècle

Introduction

Remarques préliminaires sur les épreuves du CAPES rénové
“L’auteur dans son siècle” : cadrage du B.O.
Structure et intérêt du présent ouvrage
Enjeux et problématiques

Conseils méthodologiques

Appréhender les textes et aboutir à une problématique
L’introduction
Gérer son temps et s’appliquer à la mise en forme
Les attentes du jury : écueils à éviter

Main concepts and questions

From History to his-story 
Chronicling and storytelling
Destruction and reconstruction
Evolution(s) and Revolution(s)
Derision and subversion
Voice and void
Utopia and dystopia
From His-story to Her-story

The writer as satirist

The essay and the pamphlet: literary genres, political weapons

What’s in an essay?
The essay and the pamphlet: similarities and differences
The golden age of pamphlets

From Augustan satire to satire in the realistic novel

Realism versus satire 53 Introducing satire
Satirical verses in Restoration England
Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1663-1678): a mock-heroic satire
The ‘Age of (John) Dryden’

The Augustan period: the golden age of satire

Horatian or Juvenalian Satire?
Horatian satire
Juvenalian satire 

The “Scriblerus” Club: Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712): an example of Horatian satire 63
Jonathan Swift’s Juvenalian satires

Satire in the 19th-century realistic novel

Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1948)
Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854): a satire of the Industrial Revolution
George Eliot (1819-1880): bridging the gap between social realism and satire
Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875): satirizing capitalism unbound
“Nonsense” literature: an unexpected vehicle for satire
Oscar Wilde’s witty satire at the end of the Victorian era

Satire in American literature

From pre-Civil War romance to the Progressive era
Mark Twain’s satire of the romantic South

Satire at the turn of an ‘American’ century: muckrakers and essayists

Ambrose Bierce’s wicked sense of humour
H.L. Mencken, the irreverent ‘Sage of Baltimore’ 100 Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922): a satire of the Progressive era

Further developments of satire in Post-War American fiction

Philip Roth’s postwar America: “putting the ire in satire”
Satire in fantasy and “dystopian” literature

Satire today

The detective novel

The early detective novel

Not just cathartic
The birth of the modern detective story
Charles Dickens’ Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1853)
Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868): the first whodunit?
Archetypal detectives: August Dupin and Sherlock Holmes
The Case of Sherlock Holmes
Dr. Watson as narrator
A cultural construct 

The “golden age” of British detective fiction

The twenties
“The Queen of Crime”: Agatha Christie’s clue-puzzles
Sherlock Holmes Vs. Hercule Poirot

American “hard-boiled” fiction

Mass culture publishing and the American detective story: dime novels, pulp magazines and “hard-boiled” fiction
The origins of hard-boiled fiction
What is hard-boiled fiction?
The pioneer: Dashiell Hammett
Raymond Chandler’s poetic and “noir” L.A.
Atmosphere, language and characterization in The Big Sleep (1932)
Further developments of the hardboiled genre: the “noir” novels of Horace McCoy and James M. Cain
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine: from pulp to highbrow crime fiction

Post-war and contemporary crime fiction

Patricia Highsmith’s psychological thrillers
Ian Rankin’s ‘Tartan noir’ fiction

A genre in itself

War literature, fractured modern identities and the postmodern condition

Chronicling the conflicts: between journalism and fiction

The War Poets of World War I

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori?
Thomas Hardy, the disillusioned patriot
Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen: the mythification of WWI
Defining standpoint
Questioning the role of the soldier: hero or murderer?
The “sound and the fury”
Feminine Voices: assessing and challenging gender roles

The Spanish Civil War

The American expatriates of the Lost Generation: Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos: from World War I to the Spanish Civil War
Ernest Hemingway: from World War I to the Spanish Civil War 

World War II

The Literature of World War II in Great Britain
Forging political commitment through writing and writing political commitment: George Orwell
The Literature of World War II in the United States
Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 

After the Fall: post 9/11 literature – Don DeLillo’s Falling Man

Writers in their century

Outils

Bibliographie

Glossaire 

Laure Canadas, agrégée d’anglais, enseigne en classes préparatoires littéraires et en section européenne au lycée Jean-Pierre Vernant à Sèvres. Elle a coécrit un ouvrage méthodologique destiné aux étudiants du CAPES d’anglais, Réussir l’épreuve de composition (Atlande, 2015) avec Charlotte Montin, Cécile Moquet-Mokoko et Stéphane Porion, ainsi qu’un ouvrage sur la notion du CAPES 2016-2018 intitulé Voyage, parcours initiatique, exil (Atlande, 2017) en collaboration avec Jaine Chemachery et Anne-Florence Quaireau. Elle est spécialiste en littérature américaine du xxe siècle.

Sophie Chaillet est professeure certifiée d’anglais au lycée Jean-Pierre Vernant à Sèvres. Elle enseigne en classe européenne et en littérature en langue étrangère (LELE) en Terminale L.

"Western literature and history begin with great epics* featuring heroes and villains whose recorded stories reflected the larger story of their civilizations. The first great epics—Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (8th-6th century B.C.), Virgil’s Aeneid (29-19 B.C.) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 A.D.)—bring us the stories of Greek heroes, such as the Greeks Ulysses and Achilles, or Aeneas, the founder of Rome, and their poets sang the building of great civilizations to reflect their values and ideals—the very ones for which epic battles were fought. Indeed, if Helen’s “face” was, according to Homer, the face that “launched a thousand ships” from Greece to Troy, the reason for which the Trojan War was fought, such a face and Helen’s beauty in The Iliad stand for the emblem of Greece itself."