The goal of this seminar is to provide first-year graduate students with a formal introduction to the Department's curriculum and requirements, through practical training in the various methods of research and scholarly activities and productions. It also familiarizes students with fundamental theoretical texts and approaches to a variety of critical fields pertaining to French studies. Finally, it offers concrete outlooks on their professional future by showcasing ways of optimizing their career prospects in the realm of academia, but also in other domains.

Through a comparative focus on the concepts of dialectic and difference, we read some of the formative theoretical, critical and philosophical works which continue to inform interdisciplinary critical theory today. Works by Lukács, Adorno, Jameson, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl, Derrida, Arendt, de Man and Benjamin are included among the texts we read.

What do novels teach? And can novels be taught? The age of the novel is also the age of education, with the gradual advent of mass literacy, universal education, and democratic citizenship. How does the novel track, chart, reinforce, subvert, and perform the pedagogy of the modern citizen? From Rousseau's Émile to the Nouvelle Éducation (20C), via Guizot, the 1848 Republic, the Commune, and the Ferry laws, reformers of various stripes pinned their hopes for a new society on education. Reading novels and pedagogical texts side by side, we look at the tangled (hi)stories of education and citizenship and ask what role literature has played.

This trans-historical course looks into three moments (antiquity, 16th c., and 19th-20th c.) to explore the connections between lyricism and same sex desire. With Sappho and her reception as a starting point, the readings and discussions focus on the poetry of the Pleiade and then modernist poetry from Baudelaire and after. Together with the cultural context regarding gender and sexuality, the course approaches lyricism's expression of the self in relation to an exploration and questioning of one's gender and sexuality, but also the lyric as the privileged genre for expressing socially non-normative desires and positions.

This course examines the four great forces haunting the literatures of the Americas: the Amerindian genocide and the slave trade; the slave plantation; the sudden growth of cities; globalization. It explores the processes of creation as well as the literary and theoretical works to which they have given rise, and includes consideration of works from the plastic arts, photography, and film. Among the many topics to be broached: the nature and effects of historical trauma; creolization; the folktale and its teller; the Caribbean archipelago; contemporary migration; the view of the landscape.

A survey of historical, social and regional variation in written and spoken French, with particular attention to vocabulary, syntax, phonology and prosody.

A seminar on the nature, varieties and powers of signs as defined and evoked in the philosophy, theology, and poetry of the Middle Ages. Subjects to be discussed include typologies of natural and artificial signs, theories of imposition, analogy and equivocation, self-signification, and "efficacious" meaning. Case studies are furnished by the sacraments, romance obscenities and euphemisms, proper names, Tristan and Yseut's "potion," Lancelot's cart, and the dates of Villon's Testament.

Designed to provide future teaching assistants with the knowledge and conceptual tools needed to reflect critically on pedagogical practices in the second language classroom. Examines issues related to teaching language and culture in a university setting, highlighting the relationship between theory in Second Language Acquisition and language pedagogy and helping students understand the practical implications of theoretical frameworks in the field.

This seminar explores le secret as a defining feature of Renaissance French literature. Studying major works of poetry and prose, we ask how literature emerges during the 16th century as a privileged space of secrecy. Examining the secret as a phenomenon at once aesthetic and political, sacred and erotic, we situate it in relation to a wide range of shifting notions and categories in Renaissance France including: privacy, visibility, the body, gender, power, sincerity, belief, desire, censorship, and freedom. Renaissance texts are put in dialogue with modern theoretical works (Freud, Foucault, Irigaray, Derrida, Butler).

The seminar explores a variety of texts and genres written about and in the midst of revolutions, including the French Revolutions (1789, 1848, 1871, May `68), the Haitian and Guadeloupean revolutions (1804, 1802), and the Algerian Revolution. We read widely in letters, speeches, novels, journalism, poetry, films, and other genres, from authors including Toussaint Louverture, Robespierre, Olympe de Gouges, Baron de Vastey, Flaubert, Rimbaud, CLR James, Frantz Fanon, Marx, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Guy Debord, and JL Godard. We also read political theory from authors such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière.

This course focuses on the way literature, film, but also cultural events and spaces (circus, zoo, museum) present animals as objects of admiration and subjects of performance. We consider the fascination that animals inspire in humans, which might lead to question the distinction between "us" and "them". What is at stake, what are the consequences, for us and for them, when animals are seen or shown as an elusive Other who still beckons a closer encounter? How does the poetic power of language, or the evocative nature of images, affect their agency and our empathy, and eventually our mutual relationship?

This course investigates Modernist poetics in France from mid-19th to mid-20th c. and seeks to re-evaluate Modernism in French literary history. Course treats the topic at a variety of interrelated levels by exploring French poetry as part of the broad historical phenomenon of Modernism, while examining the specific ways it materialized in France as formal innovation and as response to modernity. Poets such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Cendrars, are discussed as well as specific movements. Readings are organized around 1913 as the pivotal year for Modernism in France with a special focus on poetry in relation with other arts.

This course explores the connection between the development of new literary forms and the burgeoning of philosophical notions in eighteenth century France. As they questioned the political, social and ethical norms of their time, the "philosophes" also started a major overhaul of the literary rules and conceptual framework they inherited from the "Grand siècle". Through a significant selection of non-classifiable tests, we study how this bubbling laboratory of ideas remain relevant for today's understanding of literature.

This course explores the Enlightenment concept of Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, which emerged in Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries, spreading widely in Europe and resonating still today. With a focus on mainly French sources, the course will explore questions such as: What is the nature of this spirit (or ghost) that haunts an age? How does the popular understanding of the term differ from its original meaning? When does a particular Zeitgeist begin and end? How can literature (fiction, poetry, theater, non-fiction) and other cultural artifacts (journalistic writing, visual culture, objects) capture it?

Frantz Fanon is among the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century whose writings are critical in rethinking our world. In this course we will read all of Fanon's major writings: Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, Toward the African Revolution, and The Wretched of the Earth, as well as essays in Alienation and Freedom. Students must acquire and read David Macey's biography, Frantz Fanon: A Life, before the seminar begins.

The goal of this seminar is to provide first-year graduate students with a formal introduction to the Department's curriculum and requirements, through practical training in the various methods of research and scholarly activities and productions. It also familiarizes students with fundamental theoretical texts and approaches to a variety of critical fields pertaining to French studies. Finally, it offers concrete outlooks on their professional future by showcasing ways of optimizing their career prospects in the realm of academia, but also in other domains.

Designed to provide future teaching assistants with the knowledge and conceptual tools needed to reflect critically on pedagogical practices in the second language classroom. Examines issues related to teaching language and culture in a university setting, highlighting the relationship between theory in Second Language Acquisition and language pedagogy and helping students understand the practical implications of theoretical frameworks in the field.

This seminar aims to provide an introduction to the literature and culture of seventeenth-century France through the medium of the letter. We explore the various personal, social, and literary uses of letterwriting, examine some (authentic or fictional) correspondences, and study the beginnings of the epistolary novel. Readings also include verse epistles as well as non-epistolary works in which letters play a crucial role.

This course examines the development of surrealism from its birth in Dada-infused Paris to its life after the Second World War. Materials considered include literary and theoretical texts, visual works, magazines, and exhibitions. The course treats the topic at a variety of inter-related levels, exploring surrealism as a part of the broad historical phenomenon of the avant-garde, examining its specific ways of (re)conceiving literature and art, and investigating the epistemological ramifications of surrealism's aesthetic, political, and moral positions. Gender representation and sexual politics are the focus of the course this year.

Georges Perec (1936-1982) was among the most innovative writers of the twentieth century, whose work encompasses fiction, poetry, radio drama, essays and many unclassifiable texts more or less related to the idea of constrained or formal writing. Relatively obscure for most of his lifetime, Perec has emerged as a post-modern master over the last thirty years and his never pretentious and occasionally humorous work is now published in the prestigious Pléiade collection. This course aims to read through the entire œuvre in a single semester and to assess its aesthetic, human and historical importance.

What do novels teach? And can novels be taught? The age of the novel is also the age of education, with the gradual advent of mass literacy, universal education, and democratic citizenship. How does the novel track, chart, reinforce, subvert, and perform the pedagogy of the modern citizen? From Rousseau's Émile to the Nouvelle Éducation (20C), via Guizot, the 1848 Republic, the Commune, and the Ferry laws, reformers of various stripes pinned their hopes for a new society on education. Reading novels and pedagogical texts side by side, we will look at the tangled (hi)stories of education and citizenship and ask what role literature has played.

The course will examine the place of plantation slavery in the development of capitalist modernity. We will focus on two classic texts: Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery, and CLR James' history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins. We will also discuss in this context Marx's critique of capitalist slavery in Capital, and its importance for the tradition of Caribbean critique. Also to be considered are the writings of Toussaint Louverture, Henry Christophe, and Aimé and Suzanne Césaire as they develop original critiques of slavery, colonialism, and Antillean capitalism.

This seminar investigates Montaigne's library. We study the Essais with attention the way Montaigne reads, quotes, and borrows from other books, exploring the complex stakes (literary, historical, philosophical, ethical, erotic) of citationality. We place Montaigne's reading practices within the context of Renaissance humanism and analyze the way he appropriates, dismembers, and deforms other authors (Plutarch, Lucretius, Virgil, La Boétie, etc.). We explore the legendary tower librairie as both physical space and imaginary scene, relating it to personal libraries past and present, and tracking its afterlife in contemporary media.

This course offers the opportunity for a close examination of certain French or francophone novels that are widely considered to be among the most important of the twentieth century, all from the post-WWII period and all to be read in conjunction with pertinent critical texts. It is neither an historical survey of the twentieth-century novel nor a systematic introduction to narratology nor an overview of contemporary critical perspectives. Instead, our ambition is to articulate and discuss literary and related issues that arise from the close reading of these novels and the inflection imparted to such issues by secondary texts.

After the Revolution, France embraced the role of a universal beacon for refugees. Yet, many modern laws and debates have challenged this altruism. After revisiting ancient Greek and biblical traditions, we journey through France and the Mediterranean to reflect on ethical and aesthetical, individual and collective models of hospitality. Using literature and philosophy, linguistics and the visual arts, from canonical to popular culture, we ponder the notions of cosmopolitanism and borders, address issues such as colonization, immigration and citizenship, wondering what is at stake in the welcoming of a stranger.

Investigation of the concepts of excess and surplus across several domains: political economy, psychoanalysis, theories of reproduction, environment, literary and artistic representation. In relation to value, affect, energy, material wealth, waste, population, what is an excess? Is more synonymous with "too much"? What are the conditions and uses of surplus? What are its metrics? What are the languages of surplus? In theoretical and literary readings, we consider the parameters and complexities of surplus and excess: the concepts' internal divisions and their capacity to cross discursive thresholds. There may, of course, be too much reading.

This course studies the proliferation of technologies that allow language (the French language in particular) to be codified, mechanized, reproduced, disseminated, and appropriated during the sixteenth century. Technologies studied include: the printing press, grammar, the dictionary, imitatio, poetic form, accents, orthography, and translation. We also reconsider canonical literary texts of the French Renaissance (Rabelais, Du Bellay, Montaigne) through a technological lens. Course includes intensive study of sixteenth-century editions and frequent visits to Rare Books and Special Collections in Firestone Library.

This course explores representations of the World and History in major bandes dessinées (or graphic novels) published in French from the 1930s to the present, and produced by authors of various backgrounds (French, Belgian, Italian, Jewish, Iranian). Informed by theoretical readings, discussions will address key aesthetical, political, and ethical issues, including Exoticism, Orientalism, (Post)colonialism, national and individual identity, as well as the theory of reception, to critically assess the fluctuations of these visions between fantasy and testimony.

Arguably the single most influential vernacular work of the European Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose presents itself as both an "art of love" and a "mirror of lovers," a prism that reflects the forms of medieval knowledge in unexpected ways. This seminar focuses on the two-part literary work in its literary, philosophical and theological contexts, as well as on its reception, with attention to the "quarrel of the Rose" to which it gave rise in fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

This seminar attempts to understand the rise of modernism in French and German literature, architecture, painting, and photography as part of the processes of modernization that dominated Europe in the era of commodity capitalism. Topics to be considered include Baudelaire and the transformation of Paris, aestheticism and symbolism as forms of retreat, aesthetic urbanism in turn-of-the century Berlin, and modern tensions between individual subjectivity and public life.

The seminar examines the literature and culture of Paris from 1905 to 1940. We pay particular attention to the connections (and lack of connections) among artists in the city: the avant-garde, French modernists, American and British expatriates, and Russian emigres, among others. Other concerns that frame seminar discussions include: the influence of Paris (as a city) on artistic production; the relation between modernist and avant-garde aesthetics; the relation between individual artists and artistic movements; periodicals and publishing houses; and the spaces of modernism: salons, cafés, bookshops.

Designed to provide future teaching assistants with the knowledge and conceptual tools needed to reflect critically on pedagogical practices in the second language classroom. Examines issues related to teaching language and culture in a university setting, highlighting the relationship between theory in Second Language Acquisition and language pedagogy and helping students understand the practical implications of theoretical frameworks in the field.

From the Querelle du Cid to the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, the French 17th century was marked by crucial controversies which led to, and beyond, what would later be called "classicism." This seminar focuses in particular on quarrels concerning the theater, whose public nature made it the cultural battlefield par excellence. Readings include both the works in dispute and related critical and polemical texts. Among the issues to be explored: the uses and "morality" of dramatic fictions; the relation between writers, critics, and the public; imitation, originality, and progress; language, authority, and gender.

What is the people? Much of nineteenth-century literature is an effort to confront this urgent political question after the Revolution, and to give shape and voice to this amorphous new sovereign. At once ubiquitous and intangible, the people is an unsettling power that modern writing seeks to name, express, silence, or shape. This course examines some landmark novels (by Hugo, les Goncourt, Sand, and Zola) and social analysis (by reformers, hygienists, and intellectuals) at the crossroads between politics and aesthetics. Critical texts by Marx, Chevalier, Rancière, Foucault, T.J. Clark, Lefort, and Rosanvallon.

What does it mean to be contemporary? How does one truly inhabit the present? Through theoretical texts and examples in literature and film, this course explores the ways in which thinkers, writers, and filmmakers have crafted themselves as agents of actualité. Topics covered include: presentism, littérature engagée, culture critique, the tug-of-war between history and the future, the phenomenology of the now, the personal and collective steering of the present toward a particular course, and the genres best suited to register the contemporary (novel, journalistic writing, documentary, essay, journal).

This course explores a series of questions. Who writes about politics in eighteenth-century France? And why? How can censorship, official and unofficial, make a political event of a book even when it does not directly address governmental issues? Used by Montesquieu in defense of his treatment of religion in the Spirit of the Laws, the phrase "political writer" can apply to a wide range of writers whose motivations, purposes, and publishing strategies vary in response to different urges. The course is based on the study of primary texts but also historical documents, such as official indictments of writers.

Course explores the dynamic interplay between painting, poetry, and fiction in 19th-century France and England. The focus is twofold: painters and paintings as protagonists in novels and short stories, and paintings inspired by literature. Themes include problems of narrative, translation, and illustration; changing theories of the relative strengths of painting and literature as artistic media; realism and the importance of descriptive detail; the representation of the artist as a social (or anti-social) actor; the representation of women as artists and models; and the artist's studio as a literary trope.

Reading of Marx's classic critique of political economy, Capital, along with a selection of the principal philosophical readings of the mature Marx since the 1960s: Louis Althusser's Reading Capital, Michel Henry's Marx, and Moishe Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Emphasis is placed upon developing a categorial understanding of Marx's conceptual apparatus adequate to the contemporary context, in the wake of the collapse of actually-existing Socialism, industrialization, and the crisis of valorization in the Twenty-First century. The seminar this year focuses on Marx's epistemology: What is the object of analysis of Capital?

The purpose of this seminar is twofold: to provide a practical guide to the burgeoning field of ecocriticism through an overview of its critical canon; and to shed new light on the French Romantic tradition by reading it through an environmental lens. We look at landscape painting and poetry, nature writing, animal depictions, and orientalist works from Rousseau to Michelet, and, in the process, analyze nature's shifting status as mere background, hostile other, sublime landscape, vital milieu, intimate place, and full-fledged agent. Topics include biocentrism, ecofeminism, vitalism, postcolonialism, animals, and eco-cosmopolitanism.

The seminar examines major theoretical works representative of phenomenological, structuralist, and post-structuralist approaches to reading. Wherever possible, these works are paired with literary texts in order to see whether they facilitate or frustrate mutual translation. The ultimate ambition of the course is not only to familiarize students with important moments in twentieth-century intellectual history but to foster a practical capacity for the recognition and critique of theoretical frameworks.

Designed to provide future teaching assistants with the knowledge and conceptual tools needed to reflect critically on pedagogical practices in the second language classroom. Examines issues related to teaching language and culture in a university setting, highlighting the relationship between theory in Second Language Acquisition and language pedagogy and helping students understand the practical implications of theoretical frameworks in the field.

This class initiates a reading of Marx's classic critique of political economy, Capital, along with a selection of the principal philosophical readings of the mature Marx since the 1960s: Louis Althusser's Reading Capital, Michel Henry's Marx, and Moishe Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Emphasis is placed upon developing a categorial understanding of Marx's conceptual apparatus adequate to the contemporary context, in the wake of the collapse of actually-existing Socialism, industrialization, and the crisis of valorization in the Twenty-First century.

This seminar explores the transformations of satirical writing and its place in French culture between 1600 and 1715. Course materials include a variety of literary genres such as poetry, novel, and comedy, as well as graphic satire. These works are analyzed in relation both to the traditional models that they adapt and to the contemporary conflicts that they express and address. Among the topics to be discussed throughout the semester are: obscenity and civility, free speech and verbal violence, derision and defamation, authorship and censorship.

In this course we read Rousseau through the lens of the polarized critical reactions his writings have elicted, in an effort to understand why he has been viewed as an exemplar of both Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, as a defender of human liberty and a proto-totalitarian, as an inspiration to women writers and a misogynist. Central to our discussions are the question of how his view of nature, as expressed in the Discourse on Inequality, is linked to his tryptich of autobiographical works. Critical readings include Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, de Man, Starobinski, Foucault, Wittig, Darnton and Goodman.

The purpose of this seminar is twofold: to provide a practical guide to the burgeoning field of ecocriticism through an overview of its critical canon; and to shed new light on the French Romantic tradition by reading it through an environmental lens. We will look at landscape painting and poetry, nature writing, animal depictions, and orientalist works from Rousseau to Michelet, and, in the process, analyze nature's shifting status as mere background, hostile other, sublime landscape, vital milieu, intimate place, and full-fledged agent. Topics include biocentrism, ecofeminism, vitalism, postcolonialism, animals, and eco-cosmopolitanism.

This course investigates Modernist poetics in France from mid-19th to mid-20th c. and seeks to re-evaluate Modernism in French literary history. Course treats the topic at a variety of interrelated levels by exploring French poetry as part of the broad historical phenomenon of Modernism, while examining the specific ways it materialized in France as formal innovation and as response to modernity. Seminal poets such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Cendrars, are discussed as well as specific movements. Readings and theoretical questions also address the complex relationship between avant-garde and Modernism.

A study of Samuel Beckett's major works in prose and theater with extensive reference to the body of criticism it has generated.

A seminar on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, following the development, from a common origin in German phenomenology, of the ethics and the aethetics for which they are respectively well known.

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