Meeting the other, love, friendship

Introduction

“La rencontre avec l’autre, l’amour, l’amitié” :

 cadrage du B.O.       14

Structure et intérêt du présent ouvrage    15

Enjeux et problématiques     16

Conseils méthodologiques

Appréhender les textes

et aboutir à une problématique        19

L’introduction          23

Notion ou thématique ?         24

Gérer son temps et s’appliquer à la mise en forme  25

Les attentes du jury : écueils à éviter          26

A brief overview of love in literature

Meeting the other: a definition

La Rencontre/ “Meeting”

Friendship: meeting the other as self-discovery

‘Meeting the other’

as a disquieting experience

leading to the experience of loss

Art as an attempt to fight against loss: literature as an encounter between artists and their readers

The problem of “love”

A definition of love

The Platonic ideal of love in The Symposium

The elegiac mode

From the first elegies to the sonnet

The Matter of Romance       53

Chaucer’s irreverent yet virtuoso use of the vernacular 55

Elegiac poetry in the Renaissance Age

Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella:

first forays into English sonnet writing     63

Shakespeare’s sonnets: love’s infinite faces          65

Shakespeare’s debt to Christopher Marlowe        70

Love and Friendship in Shakespeare’s plays

Love in Shakespeare’s plays: young love

versus the necessary end of marriage         76

The comedy of love: a mechanism

that enhances the dramatic plot      77

Tragic* love in Shakespeare’s plays           82

Elegy* and love in the Age of John Donne (1572-1631)

Feminine expressions of love and friendship

 during and after the Restoration

Lyric and elegiac poetry

from the Romantics to the Moderns

Lyric poetry in the 18th century     105

Romanticism*, the “Romantics” and “romantic” poetry    106

The Lake School poets          107

The Romantic project           108

The importance of imagination in Blake,

Coleridge, and De Quincey’s writings        113

The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron  120

Love and friendship in Victorian poetry     127

In Memoriam, Lord Alfred Tennyson (1850)         137

The Moderns, “Modernism*” and meeting the other          138

T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)        139

W.H. Auden, the 20th century’s great poet of love?         143

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), raging against the dying of the light           148

Variations on the theme of the couple in classic literary works: mythical friends, lovers, spouses, and nemeses

Love and marriage in the romantic and gothic periods

The shortcomings and resolutions

of romantic entanglements in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma      159

Looking at incipits     160

First encounters       166

The Brontë sisters: gothic representations

of love in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre           174

Charlotte Brontë 1816-1855          174

Emily Brontë 1818-1848      181

The figure of the double in Victorian gothic literature – Frankenstein (1818), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1895)

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 1818

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1895)

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson          194

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1895)           197

Meeting the other in colonial and postcolonial literature

Huck and Jim: escaping institutionalized racism in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Marlow’s search for ‘existential’ friendships in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900)

The impossibility of interracial friendship in 

E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924)

Interracial friendship in

 Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing (1950)

Interracial friendship as an awakening in

Andre Brink’s A Dry White Season (1979)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013):

of love, foreignness and belonging

Bibliography

Variations on the theme of the couple;

The figure of the double       242

Meeting the other in colonial

and postcolonial literature 243

Glossary                                 

Laure Canadas, agrégée d'Anglais, enseigne au lycée Jean Pierre Vernant à Sèvres en classe préparatoire littéraire, en section européenne, et a enseignée la littérature étrangère en langue étrangère (LELE). Elle est spécialiste de littérature américaine du vingtième siècle. 

Sophie Chaillet est professeure certifiée au lycée Jen Pierre vernant à Sèvres. Elle y enseigne en classe européenne et la littérature étrangère en langue étrangère (LELE) en terminale L. 

Meeting the other”: the phrase conjures up a thousand scenes, images and words in Western literature. When Francisco Petrarca, known to the English literary world as Petrarch (1304-1374) initiated the Renaissance Age and encouraged the spread of humanism* through the study of classical ‘humanities’ (“humanitas” in Latin refers to the study of Ancient Greek and Roman texts)—the Italian poet steered Western thought and art toward the exploration of human encounters, putting love and friendship at the center storytelling and writing.