Candide: seminar 2

1. Complete your diagram / map of the Eldorado episode and bring it to the class.

2. The End of the Novel

How are we to interpret the final chapter?

Candide 2.0 ran out of time for comments to be made on this final chapter – what comments would you add? http://candide.nypl.org/text/chapter-30 Post your comments using the comments feature below.

3. Assessing the text as a whole

• Explore the motif of the journey and the idea of travel in this text. POLLY, ANDY, FAZ
• Explore the role of Candide’s various mentor figures. Does he learn anything from them? Is this a didactic text (are we as readers encouraged to learn as we read?) PETER, JORDAN
• To what extent is Candide a sceptical work? Can you find any similarities with Montaigne in this respect?
• How useful is the article ‘Teaching Candide-A Debate’,by Theodore E. D. Braun, Felicia Sturzer, and Martine Darmon Meyer, The French Review, Vol. 61, No. 4 (March 1988), pp. 569-577 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/393842 .
  • Do you favour an insider or outsider approach to the text?

 

What about other ways of reading Candide? René Pomeau wrote a chapter on the usefulness of Marx and Freud for an understanding of the text. How do you think this would work? What merits might there be in doing a feminist reading of Candide? A queer reading? Postcolonial? Can you think of others? See the Candide home page for bibliographic details.