3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1844-46) is widely regarded as one of the most popular novels of all time and as one of the best adventure novels ever written. Perhaps no other masterpiece of French literature has been subjected around the world to such countless film adaptations, including animation, television series, and serials. This course aims to study and contextualize the reasons behind this sustained transnational and transcultural interest. Close reading and analysis of Dumas' novel will provide a good point of departure to explore problems that cut across nineteenth-century French society: politics, social class, revolution, family, love and desire, revenge, justice, science, and religion. Course conducted in French; most films in English or with English subtitles.