French Graduate Courses
Note: Not all courses listed are offered every semester Students should check the current class schedule for current offerings
FR 501 History of the French Language (3)
The objective of this course is to acquaint students with the internal, technical linguistics changes which characterize the emergence of French from Latin, as well as the external, historic events which influences this development. the nature of language change, teh development of dialects and the emergence of national standards will be discussed. The course will consist of two lectures and one lab/discussion period per week involving linguistic problem sets and brief translations of early French Texts.
FR 504 Introduction to the Structure of Modern French (3)
This course describes present-day French from a modern linguistic standpoint. Phonology, morphology and syntax and lexical change will be successively covered to give the student a better understanding of the structure of French and a broader comprehension of the function of language in general. Weekly travaux pratiques enable students to apply the analytical theory to real language problems. LEC
FR 509 Special Topics: Italian and French Spatial Modernities (3)
This seminar will focus on exchanges and intersections between French and Italian spaces of modernity in 19th to 21st century literature. We will study how space has been reconfigured in modernity and how literature has participated in, interacted with and responded to the many resulting changes. Reading a wide-ranging selection of texts at the crossroads of literature, culture, and history, we will follow their spatial aspects, asking how they interrelate and alter each other. The textual and real spaces we will analyze lie at the intersection of the sensual and the intellectual, the lived and the imagined, the exterior and the interior, the constructed and the natural, the ordinary and the exceptional, the national and the transnational. Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire’s poetry will be our point of departure for the seminar; we will then consider the forms of spatiality that are staged in Italian and French Decadence (Huysmans and D’Annunzio), in Italian and French avant-garde literatures (especially Futurism and Surrealism), and in modernist and post-modern writing (Duras, Calvino, Morante, Pasolini, Proust, Perec), including some recent francophone and italophone texts. A selection of critical texts and visual materials on issues of space will accompany the weekly reading. This is an interdisciplinary seminar, and students will be encouraged to develop areas of research that connect to their specific interests. Course assignments include oral presentations and a final essay. The course is taught in English but students are welcome to read the texts in the original.
FR 525 Special Topics: Figures of the Amateur in French Cinema (3)
What is an « amateur » ? It is both a person who engages in an activity as a pastime rather than for a gain (unlike a professional), which is characterized by a love or passion for this activity (« amateur » comes from the Latin "amator", which means lover) but can also be characterized by a certain unskillness in a subject or activity. These different definitions can be found in the practice of the amateur filmmaker. The amateur filmmaker makes movies without wish for a gain, he loves his work, he has a vexed relationship with the issue of mastery. With the new digital opportunities that promote democratic practices, the « amateur » has become the center of film practices.
This course aims at observing how the figure of the amateur is pregnant in French cinema, that is characterized by a dialectical relationship between industry and more experimental practices. The issue of "the amateur" draws a complex frontier between industry and private practices.
The purpose of this course is to scrutinize how this issue divides each division of French cinema : experimental film, auteur's cinema, artist’s film, documentary. We will then analyze some specific historical phenomena like found footage, family film, film diary. We will study some films by Man Ray, Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, Joseph Morder, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Alain Cavalier, Adolfo Arrieta. We will observe the actor's in French cinema : Robert Bresson, Laurent Cantet.
This class will be taught in French.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Notes sur le cinématographe, Robert Bresson
Entretiens sur le cinématographe, Jean Cocteau
Le Je filmé, Centre Georges Pompidou, catalogue
Le film de famille. Usage privé, usage public, Roger Odin
« Le cinéma en amateur », Communications n°68, Roger Odin (dir.)
Roland Barthes par lui-même, Roland Barthes
FR 526 Special Topics: HISTORY OF FRANCOPHONE SUBJECTS (3)
In this course, we will explore how the writing of subjectivity involves the writing of history and stories, or histoires. More specifically, we will delve into the writing of such histoires as they appear in twentieth- and twenty-first century works of various genres, particularly those associated with la francophonie. While we will at times discuss specific events in and cultures of non-European francophone regions and their relevance to the works themselves, we will examine more frequently the writing of various histoires and how aspects such as content, point of view, and style play a role in such writing. To further the debate, we will consider how author and reader are involved in such textual operations. We will also work to situate our discussion temporally, studying how the writing of such histoires has transformed from the late 1930s until today, as well as how such texts have fueled developments in and debates about writing, its conceptualization, and its recognition.
Literary works will include: Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal; Senghor’s Chants d’ombre (selections); Kourouma’s Les soleils des indépendances; Labou Tansi’s La parenthèse de sang; Tremblay’s Albertine, en cinq temps; Ben Jelloun’s L’enfant de sable; Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove; Schwarz-Bart’s Ton beau capitaine; Chamoiseau’s L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse; Chen’s Le mangeur. A sampling of the texts that will facilitate our study come from Barthes’ S/Z, de Certeau’s L’écriture de l’histoire, Blanchot’s L’espace littéraire, Glissant’s Le discours antillais, Cixous’ La venue à l’écriture.
This course will be taught in French. Students will be responsible for 2 presentations, 4-6 response papers, a final paper of 12-15 pages with abstract, and of course regular participation in discussion.
FR 527 Francophone Literature/Post Colonial (3)
Littératures francophones est une notion confuse que nous allons essayer de théoriser a travers la lecture de romans et d'écrits “francophones.” Est ce qu’il est plus approprié d’utiliser un critère linguistique pour determiner le corpus de textes francophones ou un critère historique lié a la domination coloniale (qui excluerait les littératures belges et suisses traditionnellement admises au sein des littératures francophones)? Comment utiliser le concept sans aboutir à un “ailleurs périphérique aux contours mal identifiés”? Quelles sont les conséquences du récent mariage théorique entre le postcolonialisme et la notion de francophonie? Est-ce que les littératures postcoloniales d’expression française devraient être étudiées séparément ou plutôt, comme Moura l’a suggéré (1999), à travers un rapprochement avec les littératures africaines anglophones ou lusophones? Est-ce que ce rapprochement ne mènerait pas à une nouvelle forme d’impérialisme intellectuelle comme dans le cas de Frantz Fanon, traité comme figure fondatrice de “postcolonial studies,” une discipline complètement anglicisée aujourd’hui et qui omet en grande partie toute discussion de l’origine Martiniquaise ou francophone de ce père fondateur?
Nous allons nous pencher sur ces questions et en générer des nouvelles à travers la lecture de romans et d’essais de Maryse Condé ( Histoire de la Femme Cannibale) , Assia Djebar ( Le Blanc d’Algérie , L’Amour, La Fantasia ), Edouard Glissant ( Discours Antillais ), Dany Laferrière ( Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer ), Frantz Fanon (extraits de Peau noire, masques blancs et Les Damnés de la Terre ), Alain Mabanckou ( African Psycho ), Boualem Sansal ( Le Village de l’Allemand ), Yasmina Khadra ( Les Sirènes de Baghdad ), Abdelkebir Khatibi ( L’Amour Bilingue ), Réda Bensmaïa, Chris Bongie, Anne Donadey, Adlai Murdoch, Mireille Rosello, and Jacques Derrida.
FR 530 18th Century Literature Studies (3)
We will first examine aspects of the works and philosophy of Sade (particularly Eugénie de Franval in Les Crimes de l'amour) and determine for what reasons Sade became an emblematic figure in the 20th Century (notably with Bataille, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Klossowski and Barthes). Assessing the virtues and limitations of the Englightenment (Montesquieu, Voltaire and the Encyclopedists), we will then study the evolution of the novel as it reflects the philosophical, moral and aesthetic changes of the era. We will focus particularly on Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Diderot's La religieuse, Rousseau's La nouvelle Héloïse and Laclos' Les liaisons dangereuses. The seminar will be taught in French. Students will be expected to do at least one oral presentation and to write a term paper (students in comparative literature may write their paper in English.)
FR 556 Comparative Romance Linguistics (3)
The similarities and differences between the three major Romance languages will be examined from several standpoints, including their linguistic development from Latin and the historic or social factors that encouraged (and inhibited) their development. The course will take up issues such as "natural" vs. "directed" language change, the construction of national linguistic norms, and the effects of institutions such as education and the media. "Sister" languages, such as Catalan and Occitan will also be presented. An introduction to the resources available in the library will prepare students to do their own brief comparisons of selected lexical items in the three languages. This course will be taught in English. LEC
FR 560 The Novel in France (3)
The purpose of the seminar is to study the depiction of desire (in connection to power, sensuality and knowledge) in a number of 19th and 20th century French novels and short-stories. The focus on individual "figures of desire" will inevitably raise the issue of the modes of crystallization, the limitations, failures and perversities of desire. An explanation of the "framing" of desire in certain types of social order will require the reference to some of the principal theories of desire from Plato, to Freud and Lacan via Augustine, Descartes and Sade (photo-copied excerpts will be provided). The works to be closely read are: Balzac's La peau de chagrin, Baudelaire's La fanfarlo, Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les diaboliques, Ducasse's Maldoror, Genet's Miracle de la rose, Camus' La chute. The seminar will be taught in French. Students in Comparative Literature will have the option of writing their final paper in English. SEM
FR 578 Introduction to Romance Languages and Literatures (3)
This course is now numbered under RLL 501
The aim of this required course for all incoming RLL graduate students is two-fold. First, to provide an overview of current work in the combined fields of literary, linguistic, and cultural studies in French, Italian, Spanish, and Luso-Brazilian, by way of a weekly colloquium featuring the work of one of the faculty of RLL; second, to provide a forum for the development of the skills necessary to excel in graduate research. The colloquium, to which all students and faculty of RLL are welcome and encouraged to attend and participate in, will take up the first session of the weekly seminar, and will be structured around a given faculty member's presentation. Students will have prepared for this preparation by reading materials chosen specifically for that presentation, and will be expected to participate actively in the following discussion. The second part of each seminar will be devoted to research methodologies and to creating a workshop environment for the development of a graduate quality research paper. LEC
FR 628 Special Topics: Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau: Writing Early Modern Subjectivity (3)
The Early Modern period is rich with the first attempts by French writers to seize subjectivity through the writing project. Michel de Montaigne, the creator of the genre of the essay, used his collection to paint a verbal portrait of his constantly changing self. We will examine the successive editions of Montaigne’s masterwork in order to probe the formation of the moi and the soi in the late sixteenth century. In addition, we shall consider the background of Montaigne to elucidate his text, first as a parliamentary lawyer and mayor of Bordeaux, and second as a philosopher who navigates the classical tradition of Stoïcism, Pyrronism and Epicurianism. In his Pensées, Blaise Pascal sets himself principally against two authors: his predecessor Montaigne, whom he believed guilty of self-absorbed inquiry into his nature, and his contemporary René Descartes, whose cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”, irritated Pascal’s religious sensibilities. We will examine what kind of place Pascal—a philosopher, mathematician, and Christian apologist—carves out for the subject who seeks his place in the world. Lastly, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the enfant sauvage of the Enlightenment, set himself squarely and ferociously against the project of St. Augustine and the essays of Montaigne when he penned his Confessions. Full of surprising anecdotes designed to provide a guarantee of frankness and vacillating between patent self-indulgence and righteous indignation, Rousseau’s Confessions usher in a new style of writing that hinges on the establishment a type of intimacy that makes the writer an exhibitionist and his reader a voyeur. At the end of the semester, students will have gained a solid sense of the epistemological changes in the perception and portrayal of subjectivity between the 16th and 18th centuries and will be conversant with both the theory and textual practice of portrayals of selfhood.
FR 665 Literature & Philosophy: 19th Century Prose & Poetry (3)
The purpose of the seminar is to explore aspects of French literature from the dawn of Symbolism to the end of the 19th Century. Centered on the question of finitude in modern philosophy, our philosophical approach will refer to Françoise Dastur's brief treatise: Essai sur la finitude (Hatier, 1994), the Chapter 5 (<>) of M. L. Shaw's French Poetry (Cambridge, 2003) and excerpts from Betrand Marchal's La religion de Mallarmé, Corti, 1988. The corpus of literary texts to be studied will include a mix of poems and short texts in prose by Baudelaire, (particularly drawn from his prose poems in Le spleen de Paris), Villiers de I'Isle-Adam (two short-stories), Barbey d'Aurevilly (several short-stories from Diaboliques), Maupassant, (one short-story) and a selection of poems and prose poems by Mallarmé. The seminar will be taught in French. SEM
FR680 Freaks and Normality
This seminar proposes a study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary works that depict the varied socio-cultural operations which produce monstres de la culture. We will explore the agents of such operations (family members, surgeons, entrepreneurs), the agents’ sources of justification (religion, medicine, economics, nationalism), and the freak protagonist’s relationship to and refusal of excising norms for identity (race, gender, ability, language, and somatic form). In the end, we will work to understand more fully constructions of normality, corporeal mutilation, and the motivations to represent such phenomena. We will pull from a variety of theoretical works as well as historical and anthropological studies, such as Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, Butler’s Gender Trouble, Chebel’s Le corps en Islam, Davis’ Bending Over Backwards, Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, and Foucault’s Surveiller et punir. The primary texts under study will include: Balzac’s “Sarrasine,” Hugo’s L’homme qui rit, Maupassant’s “La mère aux monstres,” Godbout’s Les têtes à Papineau, Ben Jelloun’s L’enfant de sable, and Condé’s Moi, Tituba sorcière… Noire de Salem.