French and Francophone StudiesForeign 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.
The Soul of Wit: Short Narrative Fiction in the French Middle Ages and Renaissance
FREN 608-401
Prof. Scott Francis
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This course will focus on prominent examples of the genres of tales and stories characteristic of the Middle Ages and Renaissance: lays, fabliaux, saints’ lives, and novellas, which are among the most influential and widely distributed genres both in France and elsewhere. The success of these tales is a function of their origin in oral culture, their brevity, their wit, and their propensity for titillating, obscene, or even shocking subject matter. At the same time, though, their distinct blend of high and low culture provides modern readers with a window into the literary, cultural, and intellectual history of the medieval and early modern periods.
The Underground Imaginary
FREN 675-401
Prof. Andrea Goulet
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From the vast quarries and catacombs under modern Paris to coalminer's tunnels in the North and coastal caves of the South, France's underground spaces have been associated through fiction with themes of political revolt, violent crime, symbolic purification, and scientific inquiry. The nineteenth century in particular saw the institutional and discursive rise of what William Whewell called the "palaetiological sciences", in which inquiry into the (geological) past reveals the patterns of the present. Combined with France's turbulent Revolutionary history, these fields marked the national consciousness with the recurring notion of cyclical cataclysm. As the century progressed, positivist thought inflected the underground imaginary through scientific fictions of discovery and naturalist fictions of patriotic recovery. But despite surface ideology, each narrative text contains its own stratified layers and schistic rifts, which we will study through close analysis of subterranean spaces in novels by Hugo (Les Misérables), Berthet (Les Catacombes de Paris), Verne (Voyage au centre de la terre), Leroux (La double vie de Théophraste Longuet), Sand (Laura: Voyage dans le cristal) and Zola (Germinal). The seminar will also include secondary readings by figures like Nadar and Dumas and scholars like Williams, Rudwick, Harkness, Prendergast, and Pike.
French Modern Poetry
FREN 681-301
Prof. Philippe Met
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How does one approach the modern poetic text which ever since the Mallarmean "crise de vers" appears to have cut loose from all referential anchoring and traditional markers (prosody, versification, etc.)? This course will present an array of possible methodological answers to this question, focusing on poetic forms and manifestations of brevity and fragmentation. In addition to being submitted to precise formal and textual inquiries, each text or work will be the point of departure for the analysis of a specific theoretical issue and/or an original practice - e.g., genetic criticism, translation theory, the poetic "diary", aphoristic modes of writing, quoting and rewriting practices, etc. Texts by key modern poets (Ponge, Chazal, Du Bouchet, Jourdan, Jabes, Michaux).