FREN 510/810 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE IN MODERN FRENCH I

In the middle of the twelfth century, the precursor of modern French (romans) quite suddenly took precedence over Latin as the written language of courtly culture, and thus French literature was born. Why did this shift occur then? What topics did authors consider appropriate for expression in the vernacular? How did they justify their endeavors? What patterns did they set for the French literary tradition? This course will investigate issues of authority, truth, genre and language in representative literary works (hagiography, chanson de geste, romance, drama and lyric) composed before the mid-thirteenth century. In the course of discussing secondary readings and of preparing the assignments (an oral presentation and a seminar paper), we will consider matters of professional development.

1400-1515 TR Ms. Ogden

  510L OLD FRENCH

Introduction to reading Old French, with consideration of its main dialects (Ile-de-France, Picard, Anglo-Norman). May be taken in conjunction with FREN 510 or independently. Weekly reading exercises and a final open-book exam. Prerequisite: good reading knowledge of modern French. Taught in English.

1300-1350 W Ms. Ogden

  FREN 540/840 LITERATURE OF THE 18TH CENTURY - Voltaire vs. Rousseau

Although the Enlightenment appears to many today as one unified system of thought, radical opposition between its main proponents was often at the very heart of the movement. In particular, two of the most well-known philosophes, Rousseau and Voltaire, exchanged many spiteful remarks and constantly clashed over ideological issues such as these: Is man better off alone or in society? Is the theater a danger or a means of moral improvement? Does civilization bring about progress or decadence? What is the place of women in society: the nursery or the theater? And should these ideas be transmitted through humor, reason, sincerity, or pathos?

The aim of this course is to provide an overview of the ideas of these two thinkers, based on texts such as Rousseau's Confessions, Discours sur l'Inegalité, and Emile, as well as Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, and other polemical works. The readings will also include reactions to Rousseau and Voltaire through the ages, from the 18th-century farce Les Philosophes to some interpretations by modern critics.

1400-1515 MW Ms. Tsien

  FREN 550 TOPICS IN 19th CENTURY LITERATURE - Realism and Reality

In theoretical formulations in the Western tradition from Plato and Aristotle on, literature has been assumed to reflect reality to some degree as one of its central aims. At the same time, literature and art in general were for centuries charged with an idealistic moral function. As a result, and because of political, social, and esthetic upheavals, the 19th century saw a lengthy and violent debate in France over the place of depictions of various aspects of everyday life in literature, an ongoing controversy which then gave way to a privileging of previously unacceptable matters in 20th-century literature in France and elsewhere. This course will trace the history of such representations and the debates around them, with particular attention to the ways in which 19th-century realism paved the way for 20th-century modernism. We will concentrate on novels by Stendhal (Le Rouge et le noir), Balzac (Le Père Goriot), Flaubert (L'Éducation sentimentale), Zola (L'Assommoir), and Maupassant (Pierre et Jean); alongside these we will read critical and theoretical texts addressing the problem of mimesis from various perspectives, from the classical tradition through late 20th-century approaches. The course will be taught in French and all texts will be read in French.

1530-1800 W Ms. Ladenson

  FREN 551/851 LITERATURE OF THE 19th CENTURY - Modern Poetry and Poetics

We will examine the French poetic theory of the 20th-century that takes as its object of analysis 19th-century poetry -- Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud in particular -- from the founding linguistic studies (Saussure, Jacobson, Chomsky) to subsequent theorizations by Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, Johnson, De Man, Kristéva, Nancy, Serres, Deleuze among others.

We will read side by side theoretical texts and the primary sources they analyze in order to gain appreciation of how poetry has been theorized and how poetry shapes thinking. We will explore the shifting relationship between theory and poetry.

Beyond the examination of particular "canonic" texts (whether of theory or poetry), however, the course is, more fundamentally, "une invitation des profondeurs," to borrow Blanchot's words, that encourages to ask for ourselves: "What is reading?" To read others, Bubjong sunim writes, is also "to hear/listen to my deep original voice." I invite you to plunge into the depths of the beautiful and brilliant words of others in order to experience losing and finding your own words and voice. I invite you to open aesthetics to ethics and to the joy of reading.

Students are expected to have read, or to read along the semester, on their own, not only the works of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud (which are the principal focus of the course) but also as much poetry as they can (from the MA reading list, for example).

1530-1800 T Ms. Lyu

  FREN 580/880 LITERATURE AND SOCIETY - Histoire et Mémoire

Dans ce cours, mais essentiellement séminaire, on se penchera sur les rapports entre souvenir, mémoire et histoire, afin d'élucider des locutions en vogue telles que « mémoire collective », « mémoire inconsciente » et « mémoire refoulée », « mémoire individuelle » et « lieux de mémoire. » Parallèlement, on se posera un certain nombre de questions : Pourquoi la fonction de la mémoire et le rôle du souvenir semblent-ils tant occuper les esprits en France ? Quelle place les Français entendent-ils accorder à l'histoire dans leur culture ? Les outils et techniques de l'historien sont-ils plus sûrs que les œuvres dites de « fiction historique ou autobiographique » dans la reconstitution de l'expérience vécue ? Afin de nourrir la réflexion critique, on travaillera sur un assez large éventail de textes représentatifs : historiques, théoriques, et romanesques.

1530-1800 R Mr. Simon

RELATED COURSES OF INTEREST:

  ENCR 580: QUEER THEORIES AND QUEER PRACTICES

This course will focus on classics of queer literature and theory, starting with Plato's Symposium and proceeding to major texts of same-sex love and eroticism from the 19th and 20th centuries. Readings may include works by Melville, Whitman, Gide, Mann, Forster, Colette, Hall, Proust, Genet, Mishima, and more recent fiction, as well as theoretical texts by Freud, Foucault, Sedgwick, Bersani, Halperin, Butler et al. While the main focus of the course will be literature, students from non-literary fields are welcome to introduce other disciplinary approaches (e.g. politics, anthropology, psychology, sociology).

1230-1345 TR Ms. Ladenson

  ARTH 957 SURREALISM

This graduate seminar will examine the origins and development of Surrealism from the 1920s to the 1940s. We will look into the work of a wide range of artists associated with the movement. We will consider the many types of Surrealist visual production: painting and sculpture, picture-poetry, photography and cinema, and the surrealist object. And we will pay close attention to the
history of surrealist ideas, as recorded in writings by critics most closely associated with the movement. While the emphasis will be on Surrealism in Paris, we will conclude by examining the Surrealists' emigration to the United States during World War II.

1000-1230 T Mr. Affron

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