Spring 2022
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FRE 500 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. |
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FRE 518 "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. |
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FRE 526 / COM 525 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). |
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FRE 530 / COM 511 / HUM 530 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. |
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FRE 532 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. |
Fall 2021
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FRE 530 / COM 511 / HUM 530 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. |
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FRE 560 / PHI 504 / COM 557 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). |
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FRE 583 / COM 583 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. |
Spring 2021
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FRE 500 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. |
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FRE 513 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. |
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FRE 524 / HUM 524 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. |
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FRE 526 / COM 525 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. |
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FRE 527 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. |
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FRE 587 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. |
Fall 2020
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FRE 516 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. |
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FRE 524 / HUM 524 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. |
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FRE 526 / COM 525 The great innovation of literary fiction in the nineteenth century is to tell stories about money - how it is made, handled, invested and lost, how it weighs on the lives of rich people, poor people, women in search of husbands and young men in search of a position. These new themes arise just as writers themselves become able to earn money from their work. This course studies the money-plots of a selection of major European novels written between 1830 and 1890 alongside the changing economic status of the writers of novels in the same period. The primary focus is on France and England, with additional material from Russia. |
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FRE 534 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. |
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FRE 587 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. |
Spring 2020
| COM 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. |
| COM 525 / FRE 526 19th and 20th-Century French Literature: Writing the People in 19th Century France Göran Blix 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. |
| COM 533 / FRE 533 / HUM 533 The Contemporary Christy Wampole 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). |
| FRE 571 Political Writing in Eighteenth-Century France Flora Champy 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. |
Fall 2019
| COM 543/ FRE 543 Topics in Medieval Literature: Reading the Roman de la Rose Daniel Heller-Roazen 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. |
| ENG 567 / FRE 567 Special Studies in Modernism: Paris, Modern Joshua I. Kotin Efthymia Rentzou 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. |
| GER 517 / MOD 535 / FRE 554 Modernism and Modernity: Modernization and Modernism in France and Germany, 1848-1914 Michael W. Jennings 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. |
| FRE 538 / COM 538 / MOD 579 Le Monde par la bande André Benhaïm 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. |
| FRE 513 Seminar in French Literature of the Renaissance: Language Technologies Katie Chenoweth 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. |
Spring 2019
| FRE 500 Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy Christine M. 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 515 The Classical Tradition - Academic Quarrels Volker Schröder 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. |
| FRE-525 20th-Century French Poetry or Theater – 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 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) |
| FRE 538 / COM 538 / MOD 579 Le Monde par la bande André Benhaïm 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. |
| FRE 541 Formal and Conceptual Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment Flora Champy 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. |
Fall 2018
| FRE 504 Reading Capital Nick Nesbitt 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? |
| FRE 521 Romanticism - Ecocriticism and French Nature-Writing Göran Magnus 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 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 583/COM 583 Seminar in Romance Linguistics and/or Literary Theory - Literary Theory from Phenomenology to Post-Structuralism Thomas Trezise 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. |
| ART 561 / ENG 549 / FRE 561 Painting and Literature in Nineteenth-Century France and England Bridget A. Alsdorf and Deborah E. Nord 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. |
Spring 2018
| FRE 500 Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy Christine M. 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 516 Seminar 17th-Century French Literature: Satire Volker Schröder 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. |
| FRE 518 The Literature of Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau Joanna Stalnaker (Columbia) 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. |
| FRE 525 20th-Century French Poetry or Theater: French Modernist Poetry Efthymia Rentzou 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. |
| FRE 526 / COM 525 Seminar in 19th & 20th-Century French Literature: Beckett Thomas A. Trezise A study of Samuel Beckett's major works in prose and theater with extensive reference to the body of criticism it has generated. |
Fall 2017
| FRE 524 / HUM 524 20th-Century French Narrative Prose - Realism and (Post-)Truth Christy N. Wampole 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. |
| FRE 526 Seminar in 19th- and 20th-Century French Literature - Reading 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 528 Francophone Literature and Culture Outside of France - Imperialism and Decolonization in the Francophone World F. Nick Nesbitt 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. |
Spring 2017
| FRE 500 Second Language Acquisition Research and Language Teaching Methodology Murielle M. Perrier 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 502 Language and Style David M. Bellos A survey of historical, social and regional variation written and spoken French, with particular attention to vocabulary, syntax, phonology and prosody. |
| FRE 504 Reading Capital F. Nick Nesbitt 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. |
| FRE 510 / MED 510 Seminar in Medieval French Literature - Writing Scandal Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet 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? |
| FRE 513 Seminar in French Literature of the Renaissance - The Matter of the Book: Montaigne's Essais Katie Chenoweth 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". |
| FRE 525 20th-Century French Poetry or Theater - 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 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) |
| FRE 565 / COM 565 / ENG 544 / GER 565 Studies in Forms of Poetry - Poetry, History and Memory Sandra L. Bermann Michael G. Wood 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) |
Fall 2016
| FRE 526 Readings in the 20th-Century Novel Thomas A. Trezise A study of major French or Francophone novels of the twentieth century in conjunction with critical texts on narrative. |
| 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 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 538 / COM 538 / MOD 579 Le Monde par la bande André Benhaïm 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) |
| HUM 596 / GER 596 / FRE 596 / COM 596 Humanistic Perspectives on Literature - Case Histories, Life Stories Peter P. Brooks / Brigid Doherty The seminar reflects on the role of exemplary stories - ones that seem to want to offer a lesson in the understanding of life and character, even of personhood as such - in fiction and non-fiction. What do authors intend when writing factual "case histories" or fictional variants on the genre? What are readers supposed to learn from such texts? What is at stake for the subjects of case histories? How do modalities of narration and literary figuration variously shape the presentation of life stories in autobiography, psychoanalysis, art criticism? |
Spring 2016
| FRE 401 Rousseau Christophe Litwin
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| FRE 500 Second Language Acquisition Research and Language Teaching Methodology Christine M. Sagnier
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| FRE 525 French Modernist Poetry Efthymia Rentzou
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| FRE 526 Writing the People in 19th-Century France Göran Blix
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| FRE 583 / COM 583 Levinas and Blanchot Thomas A. Trezise
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Fall 2015
| FRE 515 The Classical Tradition - Academic Publishing in the Age of Louis XIV Volker Schröder 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. |
| FRE 529 / COM 529/ HLS 528 After Odysseus: Hospitality, France, and the Mediterranean André Benhaïm
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| FRE 540 / ITA 540 / COM 541 Italo Calvino in France Christy N. Wampole
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Spring 2015
| FRE 500 Second Language Acquisition Research and Language Teaching Methodology Christine M. Sagnier
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| FRE 509 The Troubadours and the Occitan Tradition - Lyrics in a Manuscript Tradition Christopher J. Davis
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| FRE 514 / COM 518 Human, Animal, Machine Katie Chenoweth
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ENG 567 / FRE 567
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FRE 583 / COM 583
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| COM 565 / GER 565 / ENG 544 / FRE 565 Studies in Forms of Poetry - Poetry, History and Memory Sandra L. Bermann / Michael G. Wood 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, René Char, Paul Celan, and Anne Carson, but other writers will also be 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. |
Fall 2014
| FRE 406 / GER 406 Roots in 20th-Century France and Germany Christy N. Wampole
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ART 450 / FRE 408
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FRE 516
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FRE 518
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FRE 521 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. |
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FRE 528
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COM 563 / FRE 563 / ENG 577
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HUM 596 / COM 596 / ENG 529 / FRE 596
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Spring 2014
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FRE 510 / MED 510 |
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FRE 521 |
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FRE 525 |
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FRE 527 |
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FRE 583 |