Twilight Talk: Victor Hugo: The Man Behind 'Les Misérables (original) (raw)

A Big Book in the History Classroom: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables

The History Teacher, 2022

IN SPRING SEMESTER 2017, I offered an undergraduate senior seminar titled "History and Literature," for which the main project was a close reading of a big book: Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1862). I had long thought about a course like this, but had never even drawn up a proposal because I had reservations about the material and the approach to teaching it I envisioned, both of which seemed outdated. Les Misérables, and the nineteenth-century style in which it is written, seemed too lofty for a post-modern audience. A singular focus on a classic of Western literature also struck me as too reflective of a "great books" way of thinking, and not sensitive enough to the reasons why so many teachers (myself included) had long since reacted against a Eurocentric understanding of the world. 1 Another reservation (though also a challenge I was ready to take up) had to do with compelling students to undertake the project of reading a big book-not to mention all the other requirements of a senior seminar (additional readings, presentations, short tests, and a long final paper, with drafts). We are often informed, not only in the broader culture, but also at my own university, that we live in a visual world, which implies an inability to read or concentrate for

The Character and Moral Value in “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo

INFERENCE: Journal of English Language Teaching

The purpose of this analysis is to discover the novel's character and moral values. The method used in the research is qualitative that aims to describe the character and moral value in the novel "Les Miserables." The writer did several steps to extract the data by reading a whole book carefully, categorizing the characters and kinds of moral values, and creating tables based on the specifications of character and moral values. The findings reveal that there are several characters and moral values presented themselves explicitly. This novel has two objectives: explaining the novel's characters and analyzing moral value in the novel. 1) One of the more dominant characters is the lover. The value of lover reaches 18.5 % because this novel shows more about love and compassion. 2) Moral values in "Les Miserables" show four moral values: love and sincerity, forgiveness, sacrifice, and justice/injustice. Love and sincerity are more dominant than the other elements. The value of love and sincerity reach 42% because it shows more about love and sincerity.

Les Misérables and Christianity: The Relevance of Victor Hugo's Classic Novel for the Christian

Most Christians who have drawn inspiration from Hugo’s masterpiece—particularly the movie versions—have focused on its spiritual and ethical message. Particularly among evangelicals, emphasis is placed on the redemption of the ex-criminal Jean Valjean—his experience of God’s grace, quest to find peace and hope, and efforts to live a virtuous life. This theme in Hugo’s novel is indeed important and cannot be overlooked. But what is missing in most Christian (particularly evangelical) interpretations of Les Mis is the way Valjean’s spiritual journey of transformation from a convict to a saint mirrors the human struggle for justice and universal peace and harmony. My concern in this essay is therefore also with Hugo’s vision for a more just world—or what he describes as the march from evil to good and injustice to justice. My thesis is that Les Misérables can serve as a catalyst for Christians to re-examine some of their basic assumptions about the nature of the gospel and Christian life. (This paper is taken from the first chapter of a book I am writing tentatively entitled The Long March of Justice: Les Misérables and Jesus Ethic of the Kingdom.)

"Victor Hugo and the Melancholy Novel: Reading the Haitian Revolution in Bug-Jargal" (2018)

French Studies

In the two decades following the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804, a wide array of French writers from across the political spectrum returned, with obsessive frequency , to the subject of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in an attempt to grapple with the effects of 'traumatic' loss through discursive revisitings of the forever lost imperial object. Reflecting on the (largely disavowed) centrality of Haiti to an understanding of Romantic-era French cultural production, this article situates Victor Hugo's 1826 novel about the Haitian Revolution, Bug-Jargal, as the culminating expression of those melan-cholic narratives lamenting the loss of France's precious 'pearl of the Antilles'. It does so, specifically, by discussing the plagiaristic relation of key passages in Hugo's novel to a hitherto unidentified source, Philippe-Albert de Lattre's Campagnes des Français a ` Saint-Domingue (1805). The youthful Hugo's word-for-word reliance on this earlier account of the Haitian Revolution can, to be sure, simply be written off as yet another piece of evidence for the artistic 'immaturity' of Bug-Jargal. A very different argument will be mounted here, however: this mimetic reliance of Hugo's novel on a text that mourns the loss of Saint-Domingue, denies the legitimacy of Haitian independence, and consolidates the hierarchies of racial science, needs to be read as exemplifying — in its purest, most 'mature' form — a collective practice of retelling colonial stories that is characteristic of what Paul Gilroy has dubbed 'postimperial melancholia', and that is arguably one of the constitutive features of the literary habitus in Restoration France.

Hugo’s Les Misérables from Book to Film to more Film: Translating Emotions in Media and Language

In S. Petrilli & M. Ji (eds.), Intersemiotic Perspectives on Emotions Translating across Signs, Bodies and Values,. London and New York:Routledge, 275-300, 2023

The chapter will examine the interlingual and intersemiotic translations in the case of the film versions of Victor Hugo’s classic “Les Miserables”. The 1862 novel is famous for the deep analysis of three basic human emotions that correspond, in mid-19th century France, to significant social and religious-ethical situations that involve the emotion of fear of being discovered to lie, pity for the dispossessed, and the urge to take revenge. The translation of these emotions is examined in two films. In the 1958 (film in French, directed by Jean-Paul Le Chanois), written by Michel Audiard and René Barjavel and starring Jean Gabin as Jean Valjean, and in the 1982 Les Misérables (film in French, directed by Robert Hossein), written by Alain Decaux and Robert Hossein and starring Lino Ventura as Jean Valjean.