This course will examine major 19th century corks and their representations of modern life through multiple facets: cultural phenomena (the press, travel, art and music), society (the rise of the bourgeois, urbanization, industry), history (Revolution, Napoleon, the Second Empire), and major philosophical discourses (the human relationship to nature, romantic aesthetic theories, Marxism). Major readings will include Chateaubriand’s René, Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, Hugo’s Hernani, selections from Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, and Zola’s Germinal.