French and Francophone StudiesFrench 582: Studies in the Fantastic
Prof. Met
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The aim of the course will be to confront a number of key texts (mostly French-language short tales and novellas of 19th and 20th century) pertaining to the “fantastique” with films which for the most part are not explicit screen adaptations of the literary texts under scrutiny. A variety of approaches – thematic, psychoanalytic, cultural, narratological, intermedial – will be deployed in an attempt to test their viability and define the subversive force of a genre that generally contributes to shedding light on the dark side of the human psyche by interrogating the “real” as well as the “letter”, making visible the unseen and articulating the unsaid. Such broad categories as distortions of space and time, reason and madness, order and disorder, sexual transgressions, self and other, human and posthuman, mind and body, literalness and allegoricity will be examined.
French 601: Language Teaching and Learning
Prof. McMahon
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This is a year-long course required of all first-year Teaching Assistants in French and Italian. It is designed to provide new instructors with the necessary practical support to carry out their teaching responsibilities effectively. It will also introduce students to various approaches to foreign language teaching as well as to current issues in second language acquisition.
French 605: Modern Literary Theory and Criticism
Prof. Platt
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This course will provide an overview of major European thinkers in critical theory of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will pay particular attention to critical currents that originated in Eastern European avant-garde and early socialist contexts and their legacies and successors. Topics covered will include: Russian Formalism and its successors in Structuralism and Deconstruction (Shklovsky, Levi-Strauss, Jakobson, Derrida); Bakhtin and his circle, dialogism and its later western reception; debates over aesthetics and politics of the 1930s (Lukacs, Brecht, Adorno, Benjamin, Radek, Clement Greenberg); the October group; Marxism, new Left criticism, and later lefts (Althusser, Williams, Eagleton, Jameson, Zizek).
French 640: Cannibals, Monsters, and Ottomans: Alterity in Sixteenth-Century France
Prof. Francis
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The sixteenth century in France is characterized by an increasing exposure to the Other in various forms: Amerindians encountered through conquest and colonization and described in travel literature, monstrous beings or humans suffering from deformities seen as signs of divine wrath or examined by increasingly observational medical practitioners, and Ottomans, who figured increasingly in the French national consciousness after Francis I’s “impious alliance” with Suleiman the Magnificent in 1536. This course will examine how these Others were represented and received, and will attempt to determine how they were absorbed into religious, political, and philosophical discourses, as well as ways in which their alterity was respected.
We will begin by looking to the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Édouard Glissant to provide us with a theoretical framework for discussing alterity and opacity in the sixteenth century, and by examining a play and several short stories by Marguerite de Navarre see how the philosophy and theology of the period reflects a deep concern with alterity and opacity in the context of religious sectarianism and civil unrest. The first unit, “Cannibals,” will look at French accounts of the inhabitants of modern-day Canada and Brazil, accounts often cited as the first examples of French ethnography, but which are heavily influenced by political and religious preoccupations; authors studied will include Jacques Cartier, André Thévet, Jean de Léry, and Michel de Montaigne. The second unit, “Monsters,” will focus on how monsters (an umbrella term for beings deemed prodigious or against nature) are represented and understood in François Rabelais’s Quart Livre, Montaigne’s Essais, and the treatise Des monstres et prodiges of Ambroise Paré, a barber-surgeon often considered one of the fathers of modern surgery. In the third unit, “Ottomans,” we will consider the favorable account of the Ottoman Empire given by the French naturalist and diplomat Pierre Belon, as well as the role played by Turks in the sensationalistic tragic stories of Boaistuau and Belleforest. We will conclude with Gabriel Bounin’s La Soltane (1561), the first French play in which Ottomans appear onstage.
Discussions will be in English. Readings will be in the original French, but English translations will also be provided if available. Primary texts will be accompanied by secondary readings to help contextualize the works and familiarize students with critical discourse on them, and one class session will take place in Van Pelt and will revolve around an introduction to and examination of original editions. Papers may be written in English or in French.
French 684: The French Novel of the 20th Century
Prof. Prince
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A narratologically oriented study of the poetics of the modern French novel from Proust and Gide to surrealist "fiction" (Breton), existential and existentialist narratives (Malraux, Céline, Sartre, Camus), and the foreshadowings of the New Novel (Queneau).