Young Men From the Provinces: Honore de Balzac's Lost Illusions and Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education

Two very different French writers depict ambitious young men as they journey from the French countryside to sophisticated Paris and find the promises, perils, and illusions of modernity. Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré is an ambitious young man  from the provinces who renames and revives himself in order to swim with the tide and is torn between his genuine literary ambitions and his need to cozy up to aristocratic power-brokers. As he feels the collision between his own idealism and expediency, he participates in the onset of the bourgeois capitalist era and the beginnings of post-Enlightenment literary institutions. Flaubert, writing a generation later, is ironic and reserved where Balzac was melodramatic and reportorial. His protagonist Frédéric Moreau comes to Paris during the pivotal Revolution of 1848, torn between two motivations: his love for Madame Arnoux and the obligation he feels to advance his own interests. In seeing how writers of two very different aesthetic  inclinations cover analogous material, we appreciate the representational possibilities of the novel to paint modern life.
Continuing Education Units (CEU) : 0

You'll walk away with

• Familiarity with the portrayal of social mobility in 19th-century French literature
• The ability to compare and contrast the literary styles of Balzac and Flaubert
• An understanding of how the novels represent modernity and social change

Ideal for

• Literature buffs
• The curious and creative