FRE 500
Second Language Acquisition Research and Language Teaching Methodology
Christine Sagnier

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.

FRE 518
The Literature of Enlightenment: Marivaux' tongue
Flora Champy

"Weighing flies' eggs in cobweb scales": Voltaire's venomous characterization still sticks to Marivaux's oeuvre today. In opposition to that view, this course takes a deeper look into the seeming glibness and shallow sophistication of the marivaudage, to consider it as an exploration of the potentialities and perils of language. Do words help us to express ourselves, or are they a hindrance? Is language itself a disguise? Is disguise the most authentic way to be? Is the quest for authenticity a futile one? We examine how Marivaux's exploration of these questions let him innovate in multiple genres, from plays to novels and journalism.

FRE 526 / COM 525
Seminar in 19th- and 20th-Century French Literature: Readings of Proust
André Benhaïm

A study of Marcel Proust's works and "imaginaire", some of his most remarkable readings, along with readings of/by some of his most remarkable readers (writers, philosophers, critics, artists, and film makers).

FRE 527
Seminar in French Civilization: The Heroism of Modern Life
Göran Magnus Blix

How can modern bourgeois life still claim to be, as Baudelaire suggested, worthy of heroic treatment, despite the rise of democratic values? While many post-revolutionary thinkers opposed heroism on political grounds, or judged it historically impossible, some fashioned new democratic heroes reconciling exemplarity and typicality. Meanwhile, reactionary thinkers revitalized an older heroic code to justify hierarchy and order. We will examine the nineteenth-century crisis of heroism in a wide range of authors such as Balzac, Stendhal, Marx, Nietzsche, Carlyle, Emerson, Baudelaire, Comte, Michelet, Hugo, the Goncourts, Barrès, and Bergson.

FRE 532 / COM 576
Charles Baudelaire
Efthymia Rentzou

This course discusses Charles Baudelaire's poetry, prose, art and literary criticism, autobiographical texts, and translations, and their pivotal role for perceptions of modernity. Baudelaire's oeuvre is approached through different perspectives, ranging from poetics, aesthetics, literary history, the political and social context of his time, sexuality and gender, popular culture, reception history, trauma studies, etc. We take into consideration influential readings of Baudelaire's work, while particular emphasis is given to Baudelaire's relevance for the 21st century and specifically in contemporary literature and art.

FRE 530 / COM 511 / HUM 530
Essayism: Trajectory of a Genre
Christy Wampole

This course explores the thematically capacious genre of the essay, a compact prose form where science and poetry meet. Students learn the essay's history, explore various theories of the essay, and encounter prominent examples of essayistic writing from across the centuries. The essay, itself a hybrid form, seems always to reach beyond text toward other media: essay-film, photo-essay, desktop essay. The class invites students to analyze these new essayistic experiments and consider the implications the essay form might have for their own scholarly writing.

FRE 560 / PHI 504 / COM 557
Medieval Speech Acts
Daniel Heller-Roazen

A seminar on medieval practices and theories of performative speech, from lies to oaths, promises, blessings, curses, deeds and sacraments. Readings are drawn from Old and Middle French poetry as well as earlier and later medieval grammar, logic and theology, where doctrines of "efficacious" signification and the force of words play major roles. To bring into focus the medieval treatments of speech acts, we also consider selected twentieth-century philosophical, linguistic and sociological accounts of performative speech (particularly by Austin, Benveniste and Goffman).

FRE 583 / COM 583
Seminar in Romance Linguistics and/or Literary Theory: Levinas
Thomas Trezise

The seminar focuses on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas from its origins in Husserlian phenomenology and Heidggerian ontology to the major articulations of Levinasian ethnics. It examines encounters between Levinas and such thinkers as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, and considers the implications of Levinas's thought for aesthetics, gender, and politics.

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.

Seminar explores the 'margin' as a defining textual and cultural space during the 16th century. We consider how the margin functions as a space of exclusion (ethnically, religiously, linguistically, politically, geographically, typographically, etc.) while also opening new possibilities of resistance, invention, and radical alterity. Readings include primary works (Marot, Labé, Léry, Montaigne, La Boétie, Paré) as well as theoretical & secondary works in book history, feminism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, ecocriticism, & social history that will provide us with methodological guides as we ask how to read in, and from, the margins.

We examine the works and figure of Albert Camus - to redefine them. Through the study of his most acclaimed narratives, plays, essays, but also his more obscure juvenilia, notebooks, and up to his last, unfinished novel, we see what confirms the canonical (sometimes sanctified) dimension of Camus, and what challenges it. Looking at his critical reception and his own assessments, we assess his greatest accomplishments, his shortcomings and even (self-proclaimed) failures. Always in between, eternally moving, we reconsider Camus as concerned as much by politics as he was by poetics.

A study of the circulation of money in French fiction alongside the economic history of publishing and the financial position of writers in the period 1820-1880. The central figure is Balzac, but comparisons are also made with English and Russian fiction of the period. Students are asked to pursue individual research tasks within the field. The aim is to elucidate what has become obscured by changes in society, language, culture and the economy, and to restore some degree of clarity to the drama and romance of the money plots of many major works of 19C literature.

A study of the 'animal question' in French literature and philosophy from Montaigne to Derrida and beyond. Lévi-Strauss noted, famously, that animals were good to 'think with,' and we try to do so here -looking at fables, novels, poems, and philosophical texts - while avoiding their reification into mere things or symbols in the 'anthropological machine' (Agamben). But we can also try to 'think (along) with 'non-human animals, as J.-C. Bailly suggests, and, more urgently, interrogate their enigmatic presence anew against the backdrop of the sixth extinction. Topics: fables, language, mind, rights, conservation, companionship, extinction.

The focus of this course is the representation of race across media (literature, film, visual arts, multimedia) and in various discourses (scientific, political, philosophical) in France, particularly from the 19th century to today. The first weeks of the course provide an earlier history of racial theorization and representation in France. Then we discuss themes such as scientific and bureaucratic racism, exoticism, intercultural influence, and the ways in which colonialism, immigration, and globalization have changed depictions of race in French cultural production.

This seminar explores the presence of the marvelous in French literature of the "classical age" (1650-1700). What is the role of the extraordinary, the supernatural, and the fabulous in a strictly ordered and increasingly rational and sceptical world? How can literature and art astonish, enchant, and transport while following the rules of reason and verisimilitude? Readings range from mythological dramas to fairy tales, considered with relation to critical debates about the merveilleux and the sublime, the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, and the discourse of absolute monarchy.

This course explores the narrative articulation of conflict and loss in a selection of works from different historical contexts, including slavery, the Holocaust, and the postcolonial world. Emphasis is placed on voice both from a narratological perspective and as a mode of thematization pertaining to such issues as class, gender, and race. Subjects to be discussed also include history, memory, and memorialization; the features of posttraumatic life; and the question of créolité.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is one of the most influential and controversial figures of Early modern political philosophy. Prosecuted by the authorities in his native demo-theocratic Geneva as well as in the French absolutist kingdom, Rousseau analyzed politics as a moralist reflecting on collective habits, as a severe critic of social inequality, as a philosopher attempting to lay down the "principles of political right" while addressing government practices, and as an innovative writer. This course explores Rousseau's multi-faceted political thought, reflecting on the methodologies adequate to apprehend such a complex work.

Course provides an introduction to key French thinkers via the reception of Spinoza's philosophy in French Theory. Philosophers to include Deleuze, Althusser, Macherey, Balibar, Negri, and Badiou. Course also develops readings of the main Spinozist texts through the various lenses of this reception.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the most important cultural developments of 17th-century France was the establishment of royal academies of arts and sciences. This seminar aims to provide an introduction to these institutions by examining several crucial controversies which took place in or around the academies, from the Querelle du Cid and the Querelle du coloris to the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Course materials include a variety of literary, theoretical, and polemical texts as well as visual resources and rare books preserved in Firestone and Marquand libraries.

This course examines the development of surrealism from its birth in Dada-infused Paris through its years of exile in New York to its decline after the Second World War. Materials considered include literary and theoretical texts, visual works (including film), and magazines. 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. (In English)

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.

In this course, we explore the connection between the development of new literary forms and the burgeoning of original philosophical notions in the eighteenth century. As they questioned the political, social and ethical norms of their time, the philosophes also started a global rethinking of the literary rules they inherited from the "Grand siècle". Through a significant selection of non-classifiable works, we study how the bubbling laboratory of ideas changed the conception of literature, opening the path to multiple definitions that are still familiar to us today.

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.

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.

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 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 elicited, 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 is the question of how his view of nature, as expressed in the Discourse on Inequality, is linked to his triptych of autobiographical works. Critical readings include Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, de Man, Starobinski, Foucault, Wittig, Darnton and Goodman.

This course investigates Modernist poetics in France from mid-19th to mid-20th c. and seeks to re-evaluate Modernism in French literary history. The 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 a 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.

Through theories of realism and examples of realist fiction, this course poses the following questions: What happens to realism in the post-truth era? Do we really suffer from what David Shields has called 'reality hunger' or some other literary affliction? What has happened to realism since the 19th century? Other topics include: naturalism, socialist and capitalist realism, the role of journalism and the social sciences in changing the texture of realism, the seepage between life and literature.

A study of Marcel Proust's works and "imaginaire", some of his most remarkable readings, along with readings of/by some of his most remarkable readers (writers, philosophers, critics, artists, and film makers).

Classic theories of Imperialism (Marx, Lenin, Hobson, Arendt, Fanon), and the relation of the critique of imperialism to decolonization. Focus on the francophone Caribbean and Africa. Attention as well to contemporary critiques of Imperialism that draw on this legacy. Readings and discussion in English.

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.

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

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.

How to understand the writings of two authors whose works spring from marginality: Christine de Pizan as a woman, François Villon as a rascal? What is ideologically and stylistically a scandalous writing?

Montaigne begins his Essais (1580) by announcing to the reader that "je suis moy-mesmes la matiere de mon livre" (I am myself the matter of my book). Taking this as a point of departure, this seminar on the Essais approaches Montaigne as a seminal theorist - and active practitioner - of textual materiality and technological mediation. Secondary works studied include readings in book history, media theory, ancient materialist philosophy, and "new materialisms".

This course examines the development of surrealism from its birth in Dada-infused Paris through its years of exile in New York to its decline after the Second World War. Materials considered include literary and theoretical texts, visual works (including film), and magazines. The course treats the topic at a variety of inter-related levels, exploring surrealism as 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. (In English)

This seminar explores the intricate relations of poetry to history and memory in the troubled 20th century. Individual poets are closely studied for their intrinsic interest but also for their (known and still to be discovered) connections with each other. The poets are Eugenio Montale, César Vallejo, René Char, Paul Celan, Adrienne Rich and Anne Carson, but other writers are called on from time to time. Questions of war and resistance are important, and above all the course attends to what one might think of as the fate of language under pressure.(In English)

A study of major French or Francophone novels of the twentieth century in conjunction with critical texts on narrative.

How can modern bourgeois life still claim to be, as Baudelaire suggested, worthy of heroic treatment, despite the rise of democratic values? While many post-revolutionary thinkers opposed heroism on political grounds, or judged it historically impossible, some fashioned new democratic heroes reconciling exemplarity and typicality. Meanwhile, reactionary thinkers revitalized an older heroic code to justify  hierarchy and order. We will examine the nineteenth-century crisis of heroism in a wide range of authors such as Balzac, Stendhal, Marx, Nietzsche, Carlyle, Emerson, Baudelaire, Comte, Michelet, Hugo, the Goncourts, Barrès, and Bergson.

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. (In English)

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 course investigates Modernist poetics in France from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century and seeks to re-evaluate Modernism in French literary history. The course will treat 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 will be discussed as well as specific movements. Readings and theoretical questions will also address the complex relationship between avant-garde and Modernism. (In English)

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, Sue, 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.

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 aesthetics for which they are respectively well known.

One of the most important cultural developments of 17th-century France was the establishment of royal academies of arts and sciences. This seminar will focus on the multifaceted academic activities and publications during the reign of Louis XIV, ranging from art criticism and botany to historiography and lexicography. We will examine closely several complex book projects in which the leading artists and intellectuals of the time collaborated more or less successfully and harmoniously. Throughout the semester, the class will make intensive use of original editions and other materials in Firestone and Marquand libraries.

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.

How French was Italo Calvino? The prolific Italian writer spent 15 years in Paris at the height of the post-68 proliferation of new approaches to literature. As both a literary critic and practitioner, Calvino redefined the relationship between science and literature and low and high culture. This course explores French theory of the period and situates Calvino within a specific genealogy of French thought and writing, showing his indebtedness to Enlightenment philosophy, the socialist utopianism of Fourier, the aesthetic practices of Roland Barthes, the experimental biology of Jean Rostand, and the rigorously playful spirit of the Oulipo.

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 course provides a comprehensive introduction to the poetry of the Occitan troubadours, their language, and the rich manuscript culture that developed around their works during the thirteenth century. Special emphasis will be placed on the role that these poems played in conceptualizing literary language and authorship in the vernacular and on the construction of a textual and grammatical tradition in opposition to the fundamentally oral and musical nature of the lyric. Students will acquire a reading knowledge of Old Occitan as well as familiarity with manuscript research. Discussion in English, but reading knowledge of French required.

This seminar examines the mechanical and animal heart of Renaissance humanism and the Renaissance "human." From Leonardo da Vinci's mechanistic anatomies and Erasmus's animal dialogues to Ambroise Paré's prosthetics, Montaigne's cat, and Descartes's bête-machine doctrine, we explore the ways in which the emergent category of the human is constituted through (and haunted by) a relation to nonhuman worlds. Special attention is paid to the technologization of the body in print, from anatomy to typography. Readings in posthumanism, animal studies, and the philosophy of technology.

FRE 583 / COM 583
Seminar in Romance Linguistics and/or Literary Theory - The Literary Fantastic
Thomas A. Trezise

A seminar on the fantastic in 19th- and 20th-century fiction and related theorectical texts. Issues to be discussed include the fantastic in relation to other genres, the cognitive challenges it poses, its major thematic preoccupations, the importance of reception, and critical approaches drawing on philosophy, pychoanalysis and literary theory.

FRE 516
Seminar in 17th-Century French Literature - Classical Quarrels
Volker Schröder

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.

FRE 518
The Literature of Enlightenment - Defining the Human
Natasha C. Lee

At the eve of the French Revolution, debates about identity and difference, diversity and equality, announced the stakes of the democracy to come. This course asks how political, scientific and religious discourses marked individuals as 'others' in the eighteenth century. What strategies of resistance did individuals, in turn, employ to define themselves? It considers 18th-century answers to contemporary questions surrounding sex, race and class in travel narratives, utopias and political essays. The Enlightenment's legacy, and the relation between colonial past and contemporary post-colonial struggles will also be explored.

FRE 521
Romanticism - Ecocriticism and French Nature-Writing
Göran Blix

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.

FRE 528
Francophone Literature and Culture Outside of France - The Francophone Caribbean
F. Nick Nesbitt

An examination of the literature and theory of the francophone Caribbean from the Haitian Revolution to the present. The course focuses on how literary creation, history and theoretical reflection united in this unique and compelling culture.

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.

FRE 510 / MED 510
Seminar in Medieval French Literature - Living Texts, Live Performances
Jeanette L. Patterson

We often treat medieval texts as dead artifacts by dead authors in a dead language, preserved in "best-text" print editions. This course aims to recover medieval experiences and practices of literature that depended on the living bodies that read, recited, performed, recopied and repurposed it. With attention to the fluidity of the French vernacular and the mediated nature of its early literature, this course covers a range of medieval texts and critical-theoretical approaches to their study, while also giving students hands-on experience with manuscripts and basic reading knowledge of Old/Middle French.

FRE 521
Romanticism - Mil Huit Cent Trente
David M. Bellos

An Interdisciplinary approach to the cultural production of France in a year of revolutionary change. The focus is on the many important works of fiction produced in that year, seen in relation to each other and to the theater, poetry, painting, music and politics of one of the most significant years in French history.

FRE 525
Surrealism
Efthymia Rentzou

This course examines the development of surrealism from its birth in Dada-infused Paris through its years of exile in New York to its decline after the Second World War. Materials considered will include literary and theoretical texts, visual works (including film), and magazines. The course will treat the topic at a variety of inter-related levels, exploring surrealism as 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. (In English)

FRE 527
The Heroism of Modern Life
Göran Blix

How can modern bourgeois life still claim to be, as Baudelaire suggested, worthy of heroic treatment, despite the rise of democratic values? While many post-revolutionary thinkers opposed heroism on political grounds, or judged it historically impossible, some fashioned new democratic heroes reconciling exemplarity and typicality. Meanwhile, reactionary thinkers revitalized an older heroic code to justify hierarchy and order. We examine the nineteenth-century crisis of heroism in a wide range of authors such as Balzac, Stendhal, Marx, Nietzsche, Carlyle, Emerson, Baudelaire, Comte, Michelet, Hugo, Rostand, Barrès, and Bergson.

FRE 583
Levinas and Blanchot
Thomas A. Trezise

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.