This lesson marks our last chronological division: the Twentieth Century. As with the beginning of nearly every new historical period so far, you will start with a broad overview of the cultural and historical background, and will finish the lesson with a literary excerpt. Twentieth-century France was profoundly marked by war and by political and social upheaval. In literature, new and experimental genres and movements including Dada, Surrealism, the nouveau roman, colonial and post-colonial literature, post-structuralist literary theory, and others demonstrate a questioning of received views and traditions. In our woefully short survey of French literature we will not have time to explore all of those changes. However, the next two lessons will give you an idea of how new voices emerged from France’s colonial heritage. This lesson will introduce you to the literary and political movement called la Négritude, a movement that united black colonial subjects against the mission civilisatrice of their oppressors.
After carefully studying this lesson, you should be able to identify key events of the twentieth century and their relation to literary history. You will also learn to outline the origin and philosophy of the Négritude movement. You will learn, through the study of two poems, how Damas and Senghor use poetry to give a voice to the victims of colonization, and how they exploit the language and poetic tradition of their oppressors to give alternatives to Western ideas about civilization.