French and Francophone StudiesTransalpine Tensions: Franco-Italian Rivalries in the Renaissance
FREN 541-401
Prof. Scott Francis and Prof. Eva Del Soldato
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In the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, France and the Italian States were bound together by linguistic, economic, political, and religious ties, and intellectual developments never flowed unilaterally from one country to the other. On the contrary, they were transnational phenomena, and French and Italian thinkers and writers conceived of themselves and their work both in relation to and in opposition to one another. This course will consider the most fundamental aspects of Franco-Italian cultural exchange in the medieval and early modern period, with an emphasis on humanism, philosophical and religious debates, political struggles, and the rise of vernacular languages in literary and learned discourse. Authors to be studied include Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola Castiglione, Bembo, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Du Bellay, Machiavelli, and Montaigne. In addition to learning the material covered in the course, students will gain expertise in producing professional presentations and research papers, and will also have the opportunity to consult original material from the Kislak Center. This course is open to undergraduates with permission of the instructors. It counts toward the undergraduate minor in Global Medieval Studies and the graduate certificate in Global and Medieval Renaissance Studies.
Foreign Teaching and Learning
FREN 601-401
Prof. Kathryn McMahon
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This course is required of all Teaching Assistants in French and Italian in the second semester of their first year of teaching. It is designed to provide instructors with the necessary practical support to carry out their teaching responsibilities effectively, and builds on the practicum meetings held during the first semester. The course will also introduce students to various approaches to foreign language teaching as well as to current issues in second language acquisition. Students who have already had a similar course at another institution may be exempted upon consultation with the instructor.
Global France: The Ethnographic Detour of French Moderism
FREN 609-301
Prof. Michèle Richman
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Thinking beyond the boundaries of the hexagone has been a salient feature of French intellectual life since the Renaissance. A comparative cultural perspective sparked the self-reflexive essays of Michel de Montaigne and culminated in the revolutionary discourse of the Enlightenment. The purpose of this course is to examine the fate of that hoary tradition in the post-revolutionary modern period. It argues that subsequent practitioners of the ethnographic detour were animated by the same critical impetus as their famous forebears. Aggressive challenges to Western assumptions regarding colonialism, language and culture, religion, sexuality, social relations, economics and political organization, inform the twentieth century works of Victor Segalen, dissident surrealists Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, filmmakers Jean Rouch and Chris Marker, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the critical theorist Jacques Derrida and the novelist Michel Tournier. An examination of their ideological edge as well as daring formal innovations will be complemented by recent scholarship regarding the viability of anthropological thinking in the work of Deleuze and Guattari.
Advanced reading knowledge of French, mid-term essay and final paper are required. Conducted in English.
French Film Noir
FREN 612-401
Prof. Philippe Met
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If the term film noir was originally coined by French critics and cinephiles in the immediate postwar era to describe what was perceived as a predominantly American genre (Hollywood adaptations of hard-boiled detective fiction), France is also the only country outside the US to have built up a large, consistent and ongoing body of crime films (or “polars”) which frequently garner critical recognition while generating popular appeal. In addition to providing students with the proper analytical and technical tools for studying and teaching film, the main purpose of the course is to explore the evolution and scope of French crime cinema, emphasizing key historical phases and subgenres:
- silent era serials
- colonial proto-noir in the 30s
- post-WW2 psychological thrillers
- iconic gangster flicks in the 50s
- the Nouvelle Vague’s infatuation with and redefinition of the genre in the early 60s
- the stylized, male-dominated microcosm of Melville and the social commentaries of C. Chabrol’s films in the 70s
- postmodern neo-noir in the 80s-90s
- documentary-infused “polar” that paved the way for a popular trend in TV crime series
- recent developments or current avatars.
An effort will be made to isolate and define a possible set of specificities in noir à la française, but more generally we will discuss issues of ethics, ideology, gender, sexuality, violence, or spectatorship, through a variety of critical lenses (psychoanalysis, socio-historical and cultural context, aesthetics, politics, gender…). Filmmakers considered should include Feuillade, Duvivier, Clouzot, Becker, Dassin, Godard, Truffaut, Melville, Chabrol, Corneau, Beineix, Miller, Tavernier, Nicloux, Audiard.
Poe's French Legacies
FREN 675-401
Prof. Andrea Goulet
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Edgar Allan Poe was considered a vulgar hack by many of his fellow Americans, but in 19th-century France, he was touted as an ill-fated poetic genius, the original poète maudit. Through the translations and biographical essays of Charles Baudelaire, who found in Poe a kindred spirit in the “goût de l’infini,” French intellectuals came to know the American writer as a model of compositional lucidity and morbid mastery. From his inklings of an urban modernity in "The Man in the Crowd" to the nevrotic perversity of "Berenice," Poe's aesthetics have cast an influential shadow on French culture. Beginning with Baudelaire, we will explore in this course the many literary and artistic movements in France that were directly inspired by Poe's uncanny mix of the macabre and the methodical: Symbolist poetry (Valéry, Mallarmé), the Scientific Fantastic (Maupassant, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam), fin-de-siècle Decadence (Huysmanns, Odilon Redon), Science Fiction (Verne), the detective novel (Gaboriau), and 20th-century Surrealism (Breton, Max Ernst).