Victor Hugo was a 19th-century French Romantic poet, dramatist, novelist, and essayist. Most people know him as the author of Les Misérables, which has become a cultural touchstone in our time. Notre-Dame de Paris, also called The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, is an earlier novel, and the story it tells is also well known in the U.S. largely because of the film version produced by Disney. It is a Gothic novel that paints a rich portrait of life in Paris in the 15th century with themes of good and evil, physical beauty and moral beauty, loyalty and betrayal, justice and injustice. The cathedral of Notre-Dame is as important a character as any of the human figures, and Hugo wrote the novel partially to call attention to the unfortunate destruction of many fine examples of Gothic architecture that was occurring in Hugo’s time.

In the course we will practice close reading of the text, and because the cathedral has been much in the news recently due to its partial destruction and restoration after a fire in 2019, we will also talk about the structure and its importance in French culture. I look forward to sharing this complex and poignant novel with you.