Graduate Course Offerings - Spring 2010

University of Virginia

Department of French Language & Literature

FREN 5150/8510 - Medieval Identities: Gender, Class, Culture, and the Self

What are the limits and boundaries of the human? What categories do we call on to shape human experience? How is belongingness and exclusion determined? How do modern concerns of “race,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “sexuality,” and “individuality” figure into the construction of medieval identities? These questions will guide our study of Francophone literature of the 13th – 15th centuries, a period marked by innovative inquiries into the shaping of self in fiction, philosophy, law, and medicine. The literature to be explored will include tales of monstrous men and women; gender-benders; saints and sinners; failed heroes, excluded lovers, and ostracized writers. Drawing on theoretical writings from medieval and postmodern perspectives (especially gender, disability, and cultural studies), we will investigate both the distinctiveness of medieval identity formation and the ties binding the premodern and the posthuman.

FREN 5400/8540 – The Enlightenment

 As one of the most important movements in Western intellectual history, the Enlightenment laid the foundations for our current conceptions of democratic government, religious toleration, freedom of speech, and the scientific method, among other things. Its proponents defied the king and the church in order to bring their countries into a new era and, inadvertently, to spark the French and American Revolutions.

 This course has two goals: first, to serve as an introduction to the principal ideas of the Enlightenment, and secondly, to explore the international exchanges that fomented these ideas, including the ideals of cosmopolitanism, of cultural relativism, and the problems of global commerce.

 Readings will include French texts by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Emilie du Châtelet, Raynal, and especially the Encyclopédie, while readings from other parts of the world will include texts by John Locke, Cesare Beccaria, Benito Feijoó, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson. Primary readings will be supplemented by modern critical reactions to the Enlightenment by thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Habermas.  The course will be taught in English, and the readings may be done in the original or in translation.

FREN 5530 Littérature française du XVIIe siècle : la Culture galante

Depuis une dizaine d’années les phénomènes littéraires et culturels entrelacés de la galanterie, de la préciosité, et de l’honnêteté attirent de plus en plus l’attention critique et érudite.  La « galanterie » émerge comme phénomène littéraire et social important et dynamique dès les années 1650, surtout dans le cercle de Madeleine de Scudéry et de Paul Pellisson, mais cette éclosion est annoncée par d’illustres précurseurs comme Guez de Balzac. C’est après la Fronde que ce phénomène—un style, un air ou un complexe de valeurs—s’impose comme marque quasi-officielle de la jeune monarchie de Louis XIV.  Notre séminaire, qui sera guidé par les importants travaux historiques et critiques de Delphine Denis, d’Emmanuel Bury, de Myriam Maître, et d’Alain Viala, consistera en la lecture attentive d’un certain nombre des principaux textes « galants ».  Parmi les auteurs lus pourront figurer Scudéry, Pellisson, Balzac, Lafayette, Voiture, Sarrasin, Villedieu, Méré, et Racine.

FREN 5580/8580 - "Modern French Poetry: The Everyday and The Spiritual"

We will explore how modern French poetry attends to the spiritual in everyday life by attending to the real. Simone Weil writes that attention in its highest form, as pure seeing that is not attachment, is prayer; poets, she says, create beauty through steadfast attention to the real. We will proceed through close readings of poems and look into poetry's mode of attention. How do poetic gaze and language open to receive the world? Authors may include Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Claudel, Ponge, Char, Jaccottet, Bonnefoy. Meditations on poetic language by Blanchot, Paulhan, Deguy among others may accompany us as necessary as the seminar unfolds. Students will do presentation(s) and write a mid-semester essay and a final essay.

FRTR 7588/4559 French Caribbean: Cultural and Intellectual Currents

Interdisciplinary co-taught course combining historical, anthropological, and literary approaches to the study of the French Caribbean islands.

Analysis of important periods in the history of French territorial expansion (including colonialism, slavery, decolonization, and the transformation of empire), of intellectual and cultural currents (Negritude, Antillanité, Creolité, and the Tout-Monde) shaping the French postcolonial world.

Courses from Affiliated Faculty:

RELG 7450 Phenomenology and Theology
Wednesday 15.30-18.00
Schedule # 905SZ
Professor Kevin Hart (B-003 Halsey Hall)
Phone: 434-924 1097
Email: kevinhart@virginia.edu

Course Description:

This seminar examines the work of two eminent proponents of the “new phenomenology”: Jean-Yves Lacoste and Jean-Luc Marion. After introductory work on the differences between classical phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger) and the new phenomenology, we shall devote ourselves to a close reading of major texts by Lacoste and Marion. Particular attention will be given to how the new phenomenology resets and refigures questions in systematic theology. Reference will be made to Michel Henry, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Dominique Janicaud, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida. Students will write a substantial essay on a topic chosen in conjunction with Professor Hart.