An introduction to issues of authority, truth, genre and language in literary works composed between the late eleventh and mid-thirteenth centuries.  Readings: representative texts from hagiography, chanson de geste, romance and lyric.  Assignments include an oral presentation and a final research paper of 15-20 pages.

3:30-6:00 W     Ms. Ogden

An M.A.-level course on the Francophone literature of the New World (Canada, Haiti and the Antilles Françaises), 571 will introduce the student to the history, aesthetics, and problematics of the region's cultures in the twentieth century.  Students working toward the Ph.D. can prepare a research paper of appropriate complexity and length while participating regularly in the course.  An anthology covering the region will be supplemented by individual texts of particular merit and significance.  M.A. students will take a midterm and a final exam; Ph.D. students will be exempted from the examinations.

1400-1450 MWF     Mr. Arnold

An introduction to pedagogical approaches currently practiced in second-language courses at the university level.  Students will examine critically the theories behind various methodologies, and the relation of these theories to their own teaching experience. Assignments include readings and exercises on the teaching of language; development and critique of pedagogical materials; peer observation and analysis; and a final teaching portfolio project.

13:00-13:50  W     Ms. Krueger

We will attempt to define cultural studies; how and why it has evolved within an Anglo-American university context, and what its implications have been, and will be, for the way we study French literature, history and culture. What is the range of intellectual and methodological issues at stake?  How have identity politics in the United States challenged disciplinary boundaries within our universities? Despite its nebulous quality, why has the term "cultural studies" become such an operative one? Or, to the contrary, has it now become inoperative, having been reduced to a chaotic intermingling of disciplines? Does it constitute a "field"? What does it mean to say that one "does" cultural studies?  Finally, how do these debates affect French Studies?

Conducted in English, this course will draw upon interdisciplinary readings from cultural history, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, gender studies, and studies of race.
The first part of the course will be devoted to theoretical and methodological issues; the second part to authors who have defined their work, at least in part, as belonging to French cultural studies.

15:30-18:00 R     Ms. Horne

Description not available at this time.

TBA      Mr. Philippe Roger*

*Mr. Roger is the Research Program Director at CNRS, professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and editor of the prestigious French literary and philosophical review Critique.  His many books include studies of Sade, Barthes, Chateaubriand, and human rights.

Why has vampirism, a legend of time immemorial, become a myth for our time?  How have vampirism and modernism evolved together over the course of the past two hundred years?  What are the aesthetic and political uses of the modern vampire?  And where are the limits of its corpus?  Lurking in the shadows of Western culture since its early nineteenth-century entrée into European romantic literature, the vampire took on a prominent and lasting iconic form--ironically, as the ever-metamorphosing Dracula--in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel.  But the vampire began its sweep through French literature well before its fin de siècle apotheosis in Britain.  We find elements that prefigure or amplify Stoker's more renowned version of the vampire myth throughout Baudelaire's poetry and in fiction by Nodier ("Smarra"), Gautier ("La Morte amoureuse"), Mérimée ("La Guzla"), Maupassant  (Le Horla ), and Rachilde ( Le Grand Seigneur).

In this seminar we will juxtapose the comparatively underread French corpus of vampirism with the better-known English-language interpretations of the myth.  Similarly, we will move between nineteenth and twentieth-century variants, cinematic and literary versions, high literary and popular forms, aesthetic and political uses--in so doing, miming the vampire myth, which came of age with literary modernism and shares with it an identity in displacement, fragmentation, and fluidity.  We will also consider the vampire's place in the rhetoric of disease and contamination, looking at representations of syphilis and AIDS.  In addition to the listed literary texts, we will read media accounts of the recent "affaire du sang contaminé" and a varied group of theorists including Jean Borie on myths of heredity and blood, Julia Kristeva and Mary Douglas on purity and contamination, Susan Sontag and Sander Gilman on illness and metaphor.

Requirements include active class participation, frequent exposés, and a seminar paper.

14:00-16:30 T     Ms. Beizer

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