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Les Récits de rêves

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Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:: A database of dream narratives as found in French literature from the Middle
Ages to 1980. Each dream account is accompanied by contextual information and
explanatory notes, situating the dream within the work from which it is taken.
One goal of the project is to clarify the relationship between dream narratives
in literature and dreamwork in psychology. The project aims to contribute to the
history of dream interpretation by making a vast corpus of dream narratives
easily accessible for study. The website will eventually consist of a searchable
database of over 1000 dream accounts, to include texts from various countries
for cross-cultural analyses.
Type of Material:: Resource collection
Recommended Uses:: Learning assignments can be developed that require students to locate, report,
compare dream narratives.
Identify Major Learning Goals:: Students of this database will be able to do close analysis of dream sequences
in the works of great Francophone authors. Language students will be able to
make comparisons in writing styles among authors. Students of psychology will be
able to trace the history of dream narratives, primarily in French literature.
Target Student Population:: Intermediate learners of French and above
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: Intermediate to advanced French reading proficiency

Rating:
Strengths:: Tight, well-written summaries of the overall literary work and the focal dream.
Excellent mechanism for learners of French to access summaries of challenging
texts and succinct descriptions of fascinating dreams. The vocabulary and
structures of the analyses are current and clear. In Documents non classes,
there are additional links to external dreamwork projects and related sites.The
project team has already assembled an international colloquium on the study of
dream narratives that will make good use of and contribute to this
ever-expanding database. The originality of this project is one of its most
excellent features.

Rating:
Strengths:: A number of exciting assignments can be built around these texts and their
summaries. As dreamwork and its symbolisms are universal, learners can swiftly
identify with the images, themes, and interpretations herein. Students of
language and literature could study the short accounts for style and
structure. Creative writing classes might use a few of these extracts as
pre-writing materials as students write their own dream narratives. The
documents non-classes contain everything from biblical dream narratives to
scientific research on dreams, providing students with a wide variety of
research sources.

Rating:
Strengths:: The structure of this database could not be more straightforward and easier to
use. The original literary text is visually annotated by the commentary in a
visually parallel frame. The texts can be accessed from an index of authors by
time period. As the project grows, the existing structure will accommodate the
large number of texts the project aims to eventually include.
Concerns:: While it appears that the indexing is a work in progress that will continue to
be tweaked as the collection grows, one suggestion would be to do an
alphabetical listing of authors within a time period. For example, the current
arrangement in the first 70 recits has Hugo before Flaubert and Zola before
Huysmanns. An alphabetical arrangement by author will be smoother as more
authors and works are added.