Course Offerings (GSAS Bulletin)The courses listed below are among those offered from spring 2000 to spring 2005. The 1000-level courses give students a general background, the 2000-level courses prepare advanced students for a specialization in the field of their choice, and the 3000-level courses are advanced seminars intended primarily for doctoral candidates. With few exceptions, courses in the Department of French are conducted in French.
MIDDLE AGES
Introduction to Medieval French Literature: Using Technologies Old and New
G45.1211 Vitz. 4 points.
In addition to the study of major texts of French medieval literature, the course introduces students to the methodologies of paleography and codicology, as well as the modern technologies of film, slides, CDs and CD-ROMs, digital scriptoria, and online resources. The ongoing themes and issues of the course are the performance of works; relations between image and text; variations among different manuscripts of the same work.
Medieval Theatre
G45.2221 Regalado. 4 points.
Survey of medieval drama. Addresses questions fundamental to all of medieval literature: the emergence of written texts from traditions of oral performance (leading to popular printed editions for readers by the end of the 15th century); the spiritual representations of human life and history in moralités and mystères; the symbolic political transformation of court and urban space by processional theatre; the elaboration of dramas around political and religious issues as well as around language play and character types.
French Medieval Romance
G45.2232 Vitz. 4 points.
Course with three-fold purpose: First, studies in some detail a number of major works of medieval romance. Second, interested in the traditions of medieval romance, as they are carried on in lesser-known works and in the later medieval period. Third, takes up the cultural context in which these works were produced. Looks at some illuminated manuscripts and considers the impact of the French romance tradition on other European literatures (English, Italian, Spanish, German).
RENAISSANCE
Prose Writers of the 16th Century
G45.1331 Zezula. 4 points.
After a brief examination of various prose genres of the late Middle Ages, the course focuses on the development of French prose from the introduction of printing (1470 in Paris) to the end of the reign of Henry IV (1610). Among the topics discussed are fictional narrative; prose tales; nouvelles; prose translations and adaptations; the realistic, satiric, comic, and sentimental novel; utopias; travelogues; memoirs.
La Pléiade
G45.1342 Beaujour. 4 points.
Examination of the works and aesthetics of the Pléiade. Much time is devoted to close readings of texts and questions of poetics.
Montaigne
G45.2372 Beaujour. 4 points.
Close reading of the Essays. Humanism and its treatment of classical literature. Rhetoric, self-portrayal, the relationships between the Essays and philosophy.
Rabelais
G45.2374 Beaujour. 4 points.
How does one read the Rabelaisian corpus today? What are the limitations of this corpus, and what are those of the fictitious universe that it proposes? What is at stake in historical, philosophical, political, etc. readings of Rabelais? How many distinct, or even contradictory, meanings can a work provide? Must we decipher “Rabelais”? According to what procedures do we do so?
Studies in 16th-Century Literature
G45.2390
A selected topic is described below.
Baroque and Preclassical Literature
Zezula. 4 points.
Traces two concepts central to literary-historical notions of 16th-century art: preclassicism (which stems from the Renaissance readings of Aristotle and the systems of poetics, rhetoric, and logic) and the baroque (which transcends the rational in its figurations of mysticism, ecstasy, illusion, hallucination, dream, and nightmare). To what degree are these concepts applicable to the authors ranging from du Bellay to Corneille?
17TH CENTURY
Molière and Women
G45.2472 Doubrovsky. 4 points.
The particular emphasis is twofold. First, and foremost, a historical approach (general and literary history) to classical texts, which cannot be taken altogether out of context without being gravely misunderstood. Second, a contemporary reappraisal in terms of modern critical theory (psychoanalytic, structuralist, and other).
Corneille
G45.2473 Doubrovsky. 4 points.
Corneille’s work in its historical context (general history, history of literature, and, in particular, history of theatre) and from the contemporary viewpoints of philosophical and psychoanalytical analysis.
Studies in 17th-Century Literature
G45.2490
A selected topic is described below.
Women Writing Women in Early Modern France
Goldwyn. 4 points.
This seminar examines both the changing sociohistorical context of French women writers and the common problems and themes that constitute a female literary tradition, from the 12th to the 18th centuries. What was it like to write as a woman in a particular century? How did the author situate herself in relationship to the literary traditions? Who was her public? Do women write differently in form and/or in content, and can we talk about a specific female aesthetic and a female selfhood?
18TH CENTURY
18th-Century Theatre
G45.1521 Deneys-Tunney. 4 points.
The new theatrical aesthetic in relation to major Enlightenment themes and changes in sensibilité. Transformation of classical dramaturgy. Rise of new forms: the comédie larmoyante, the drame. Women dramatists.
The Age of Enlightenment
G45.2561 Deneys-Tunney. 4 points.
Do the Lumières constitute a dividing line between a “before” (classicism) and an “after” (romanticism, modernity)? The rewriting of history, the search for origins, and various metaphors of light are examined in the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, and in the Encyclopédie.
Voltaire and His Time
G45.2571 Roger. 4 points.
Aims to treat this body of work in its variety and to bring the author back to life in his complexity. Students study all of the Voltairian writing styles.
Diderot
G45.2573 Deneys-Tunney. 4 points.
Focuses on several of the major works of Diderot, in fields as different as the theatre, the novel, science, and philosophy. In each instance, the aim is to recreate the context in order to better read its modernity and, consequently, to better understand its past.
19TH CENTURY
Baudelaire
G45.2671 Sieburth. 4 points.
Focuses on the biographical and autobiographical perspectives in Baudelaire; his theorizations of dandyism and modernity; poetics of the city; literary and art criticism; “the condition of music”; and a reading of Les Fleurs du mal from a variety of perspectives—stylistic, structuralist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic.
Zola and Naturalism
G45.2673 Bernard. 4 points.
Focuses on four novels taken from the Rougon-Macquart, Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire. Students concentrate both on a genetic and genealogical approach (“histoire naturelle d’une famille”) as well as on the development of the chronicle (“histoire sociale sous le Second Empire”) in their articulation within a “story,” the novel of the Rougons and the Macquarts.
Flaubert
G45.2676 Bernard. 4 points.
Analysis of the narratological and ideological functioning of the following works in their historical and literary context: Madame Bovary, Salammbô, l’Education sentimentale, “Un coeur simple” (Trois contes), and Bouvard et Pécuchet.
Studies in 19th-Century Literature
G45.2690
Selected topics are described below.
1848: Literature and History Berenson and Sieburth. 4 points.
This course explores, among other things, just what it might mean to call a revolution either a form of repetition or a mode of radical inception. To answer this question, the course looks at the role various contemporary histories of the 1789 Revolution might have played in preparing the “text” enacted by 1848. In addition, it looks at various writings of the 1830s and 1840s on “le peuple” and on broader issues involving socialism and feminism, colonialism and abolitionism, in order to see how they informed the political and ideological climate of 1848.
Exoticism Sieburth. 4 points.
Exploration of the various ways in which French literary texts of the late 18th and 19th centuries deploy fictions of the exotic “other.”
The Notion of the Family in the 19th Century Bernard. 4 points.
Study of the structures, functions, and evolution of the family and perception of the family in the works of patriarchal, utopian, reformist, and romantic thinkers and novelists from the 1820s to the 1870s.
20TH CENTURY
Cinema Culture of France
G45.1066 4 points.
Introduces the student to some of the major issues that define the cinema culture of France, from the beginning of talking films through the New Wave. Discusses, among others, general questions of narrative, spectatorship, auteurship, and cinema in the French critical canon. Introduces the critical and technical vocabularies necessary for cinematic analysis.
Popular Front
G45.1067 Hollier. 4 points.
Seminar exploring the Popular Front, within its international and national context, as a political program in connection to which, during the 1930s, practically all the actors of the French political and cultural stages defined their position.
Contemporary French Theatre
G45.1721 Bishop, Miller. 4 points.
The development of French theatre since the beginning of the 20th century, from early reactions to outmoded conventions of realism to the “flight from naturalism” that has marked it since. Approaches: thematics; dramatic technique; conventions; language; metaphors of the human condition; audience-stage relationship. Apollinaire, Cocteau, Claudel, Anouilh, Montherlant, Camus, Sartre, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, Sarraute, Duras, le Théâtre du Soleil, recent authors.
Contemporary French Novel
G45.1731 Nicole. 4 points.
Fiction of the second half of the 20th century. The literature of commitment, reflections on the absurd, the “new novel,” and the role of the reader. Principal authors: Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Perec, Sarraute.
The “New Novel”
G45.2731 Bishop. 4 points.
Deals with the principal writers of the “new novel”: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Robert Pinget, and Marguerite Duras. Among the pertinent themes: the situation of the French novel in 1950; the “new novel” of the 1950s; subject and subjectivity; the evolution of the “new novel” starting in the 1960s; order and disorder in the narrative; self-reflexiveness of the novel; theory of generators of meaning; the “new novel” since the 1970s; autobiography and the novel.
Contemporary Poetry
G45.2741 Nicole. 4 points.
The crucial works of contemporary poetry challenge language and poetry itself. In search of its own identity, contemporary poetry is the site of a rigorous confrontation between “saying” and “living.” The study of the works enable us to evaluate the importance of the critical inquiry (about poetry or art in general) that penetrates or accompanies them. This course attempts to understand how language links the poet’s relationship to himself, to others, and to objects. Readings include works by Breton, Michaux, Reverdy, Jaccottet, Du Bouchet, Bonnefoy, Césaire, Char, Ponge.
Beckett: The Poetics of Silence
G45.2774 Bishop. 4 points.
Beckett’s work as one of the quintessential contemporary expressions of the human condition and as a fundamental calling into question of language itself. The powerful images of Beckett’s fiction and drama are viewed as grim metaphors of existence, but the tenacity of the Beckettian narrator to speak/write despite all odds may be considered as a possible positive affirmation.
Sartre
G45.2777 Hollier. 4 points.
Overview of Sartre, with a concentration on the novels and the theory of narration. Special emphasis is on the concept of littérature engagée, its archaeology and its implications. For, if Sartre is credited for the concept, there always was and there remains today a great confusion concerning the corpus of works (Sartre’s as well as others) and of genres to which a label that might be more prescriptive than descriptive applies.
Camus
G45.2778 Bishop. 4 points.
Using a thematic approach, the course not only contextualizes Camus, the “moralist” and existential thinker (though not philosopher), in his own time but also relates him to our own. The course also approaches his books, plays, short stories, and essays stylistically and structurally, as literary works and especially as fiction and drama that inscribes itself in the major trends of the 20th century. A reading of most of his major works follows the evolution in Camus’s political, social, and artistic concerns. Some books (e.g., L’Etranger, La Chute) are studied as highly original literary landmarks.
Studies in Contemporary Literature
G45.2790
Selected topics are described below.
Autofiction Doubrovsky. 4 points.
Naturally, like all things that are labeled as “new,” this innovation has its illustrious predecessors. Autofiction did not wait until the end of the 1970s to appear. This course tries to grasp important milestones in autofiction since the beginning of the 20th century.
Surrealism, Ethnography, Autobiography, Poem: Michel Leiris Hollier. 4 points.
This seminar covers the ensemble of the work of Michel Leiris, a major figure of French literature of the 20th century who was associated with practically all of its important movements, from cubism to structuralism.
Around 1968: Literature, Philosophy, Society
G45.2791 Beaujour. 4 points.
Exploration of this intellectual nexus, mainly through the close readings (in French) of major works published between 1965 and 1975.
Studies in Literary Theory
G45.2890
A selected topic is described below.
The Deleuzian Century: Theory, Art, and Politics in and Through the Work of Gilles Deleuze Apter. 4 points.
The seminar draws on the major works of Deleuze to examine problems in aesthetics, politics, and cultural production. Topics include Deleuze on literature; “shizo-analysis”; the group subject and the multitude; the “minor literature” debate; fold, rhizomes, and diagrams in art, music, and architecture; feminist Deleuze; chaosmosis and the technological aesthetic; Deleuzian science and philosophy.
FRANCOPHONE LITERATURE
Topics in Francophone Literature
G45.1990
Selected topics are described below.
Exoticism, Ethnography, Errancy: The Postcolonial Moment in Francophone Caribbean Literature Dash. 4 points.
This course looks at a unique series of encounters that took place in the Caribbean during and after World War II between French writers escaping war-torn Europe and writers in Martinique and Haiti. The experience of war and exile on the surrealists traveling in the Caribbean led them to look at France for the first time from the outside and to question the nature of the French colonial project as well as ideas of cultural difference.
The Space of Memory: Narrating the Nation in the Francophone Caribbean Dash. 4 points.
This course examines novels written in the wake of negritude’s romanticizing of a mythical elsewhere and Fanon’s ideal of erasure through a radicalized individual consciousness. The narratives set out to explore, rethink, and problematize the possibility of a roman du nous. They range from foundational fictions with their nostalgic longing for a homogeneous, grounded community, to more postmodern renderings of the nation as heterogeneous and space as indeterminate. These fictions are treated in the light of theoretical texts that deal with history, memory, and location. Roumain, Chamoiseau, Ollivier, Schwarz-Bart, Condé, Glissant.
Neither Nomads nor Nationalists: Identity Redefined in Recent Francophone Writings Dash. 4 points.
This course examines recent Francophone writing, especially experimental prose fiction from the Francophone Caribbean. In many ways, this writing emerges in the wake of the postmodern insistence on the nontranscendental and the particular as well as on the absence of grand narratives for contemporary writing. However, these novels also represent a reaction against the ideological binarisms of the postmodern by exploring a pluralistic universalism and a transnational cosmopolitanism.
Francophone Theatre Miller. 4 points.
This course delves into French-language theatre texts and performances from four major Francophone areas: West Africa, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Québec. Focusing primarily on West Africa and the Caribbean, students study the emergence of French-language theatre in light of a particular colonial education and the fight to break free of that education. The class then considers the emergence of forms of theatre that combine elements of traditional African and Afro-Caribbean expressive forms with elements that cause us to define Western theatre as “theatre.” Studying three key works from Québec, students discuss an intriguing development of Québeçois theatre from fierce nationalism to internationalism.
Topics in Francophone Civilization
G45.1991
Selected topics are described below.
Women Writing, South of the Mediterranean Djebar. 4 points.
Examines the works of Marie Cardinal, Hélène Cixous, Fadhma Amrouche, Assia Djebar, and Andrée Chedid. How do the places of birth, childhood, and youth take their place in the fiction and nonfiction of these exiled writers: through their presence or, on the contrary, through their absence, which may be experienced as painful rupture? Can a feminine, sometimes postcolonial “Francophonie” define some of these women authors rather than others?
The Two Faces of Algerian “Francophonie” Djebar. 4 points.
For texts stemming from the Franco-Algerian nexus, it now seems appropriate to deemphasize their sense of belonging to a community (as in a collective history) in favor of a problematic that gives full stress to the absence or the addition of other languages (most often oral) in so many novelists, poets, and dramatists. Thus, following the example of the duo Camus/Kateb, this course studies Dib, Ferraoun, Boudjedra, and Belamri on the one hand but paired with or opposed to Senac, Pelegri, and Millecam. Does the multilingual ability of the former accentuate the conflicts, the violence, the wounds of their writing?
Studies in Literary Theory
G45.2890
A selected recent topic is described below.
Theorizing Francophonie Apter. 4 points.
The course seeks to critique the category of “Francophonie” in postcolonial studies while surveying some of the canonical literary and critical texts that have defined the field. Seminars involve contrapuntal readings of continental philosophy and postcolonial theory in an effort to illuminate productive tensions between “theory” and “cultural studies.” Drawing on the writings of Aimé Césaire, Octave Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, Assia Djebar, Edouard Glissant, and Jacques Lacan (among others), the course focuses on a range of problematics, including decolonization and psychoanalysis, race and colonial desire, revolutionary violence and humanist universalism, the poetics of singularity and the relation, and the politics of translation in new definitions of postcolonial comparatism. Class discussions in English. Readings in English when translations are available.
GENERAL LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LINGUISTICS
Advanced Workshop in Contemporary French
G45.1004 Bernard. 4 points.
After a brief language history and a review of the phonetic system, students study morphology, syntax, and certain aspects of French stylistics, through theoretical readings, practical exercises, and compositions.
Textual Analysis
G45.1101 Required for M.A. degree in French literature. Beaujour, Bernard, Regalado. 4 points.
The place of close reading in broader critical studies. Enhancement of fluency in oral and written expression. Introduction of concepts and tools of critical methodology.
Studies in Genres and Modes: Theatre and Drama
G45.1121 Bishop, Miller. 4 points.
The conventions of theatre. Theatre as performance. Theatre as text. Critical approaches (semiology, viewer response, narratology). The language of the theatre (stylized and realistic modes, nonverbal theatre, the uses of silence, the theatre of cruelty). The concept of the avant-garde.
Studies in Genres and Modes: Poetry
G45.1122 Beaujour, Nicole. 4 points.
The technique of versification and its linguistic bases. The special prosodic and rhythmic characteristics of French verse. Fixed forms. The modernist challenge to poetic conventions and conceptions (free verse, the prose poem, new patterns of typographic disposition, punctuation, syntax). This course aims at enabling students to perform sophisticated readings and close analyses of the poetic text through systematic exposure to linguistic and literary concepts relevant to this practice.
Studies in Genres and Modes: Prose Fiction
G45.1123 Deneys-Tunney. 4 points.
Narrative theory. The Russian formalists. New criticism. Reader-response criticism. Theories of fiction. Repre-sentation and ideology. Dialogism. Gender. Narrative and time.
Studies in Literary History
G45.2860
Selected recent topics are described below.
The Renaissance Zezula. 4 points.
While the traditional history of literature focuses primarily on describing, evaluating, and classifying literary phenomena in terms of their nature, significance, and order of appearance, historical poetics seeks to define the system in which these phenomena function and which, though coherent, is subject to historical and generic variabilities. As each of these approaches to literary history has its merits, the objective of this course is to examine literature of the French Renaissance from both perspectives—a panoramic view of French literature from the late Middle Ages through the early Baroque and an investigation of the correlation between literary discourse of the Renaissance era and literary discourse in general or, strictly speaking, between literature and literariness.
The Myth of the Golden Age: 16th-18th Centuries Hersant. 4 points.
In analyzing certain precise texts (of Ronsard, Honoré d’Urfé, Rousseau, Louis Sébastien Mercier), this course focuses on retracing the evolution of the theme of the Golden Age up until 1789, all the while dealing with a more theoretical perspective of an old question, which regained popularity through the works of Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel: What is a literary theme?
Autobiography as Novel: The Birth of a Genre Doubrovsky. 4 points.
Autobiography, long neglected by critical studies, has become a major trend in contemporary French writing. Most critical theorists contrast, as antithetical “genres,” autobiography, which strives to retrieve the true story of a man’s life as narrated by himself, and fiction, which invents a fanciful tale of imaginary characters. Yet, throughout the 20th century, many books appeared that erased the frontier between the two “genres” and moved freely from one to the other. This course studies autobiography as novel in some representative and challenging works.
Studies in Literary Theory
G45.2890
Selected recent topics are described below.
Thirty Years of Literary Theory: 1945-1975 Gaillard. 4 points.
Covers what is referred to as “the 30 glorious years of French thought,” in the field of literary studies and in the humanities.
Theories of the Reader from Diderot to Sartre and Beyond Hollier. 4 points.
This seminar examines the legitimacy of the question posed by Sartre in Qu’est-ce que la littérature: For whom does one write? Students read the texts of Diderot and Sartre as well as those of a certain number of theoreticians (Blanchot, Umberto Eco, Derrida, Michael Fried, Genette, Todorov, Philippe Lejeune, and Rousset).
Theory of the Novel and the Critique of Narrativity Hollier. 4 points.
This seminar explores various 20th-century forms of resistance to narrativity, from surrealism to structuralism, both in its theoretical and its fictional modes (literary and nonliterary). It focuses on the exploitation of descriptions, freeze frames, and other narrative devices meant to suspend the grip of diegesis. Students read texts by André Breton, Michel Leiris, Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, and Robbe-Grillet and by theoreticians from Bergson to Blanchot and Deleuze.
Rhetoric and Literature Beaujour. 4 points.
The first half of the course consists of a close study of two classical rhetorical textbooks, Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Cicero’s Ad Hereanium. The second half examines a few contemporary rhetorical approaches to literature, such as those of Kenneth Burke, Chaim Perelman, Paul DeMan, and Paul Ricoeur.
LANGUAGE AND CIVILIZATION
Applied Phonetics and Spoken Contemporary French
G45.1002 Nicole. 4 points.
Concepts of phonetic description; review of French phonetics (basic phonemes, syllabification, intonation, rhythm, pauses, etc.) with special emphasis on the specific problems encountered by English-speaking students. Study of expressiveness in the spoken language.
Translation
G45.1009 Beaujour. 4 points.
Theoretical consideration and practical analysis of the problems of literary translation, English-French and French-English.
French Cultural History
G45.1067 4 points.
Selected recent topics are described below.
French Representations of Germany Hollier. 4 points.
This seminar explores a series of patterns that have structured French representations of Germany. Germany, an intense and long-lasting object of French ambivalence, worked for a long time as what can be regarded in many ways as France’s ingrown cultural other. The seminar, though focused on the interwar years (1920-1940), deals with earlier (romantic), as well as more recent (post-World War II), periods. The field of representations explored includes fictions, travel accounts, theatrical debates, historical research, as well as philosophical and political essays.
Political Culture and the Making of Modern France, 1770-1890 Gerson. 4 points.
This course investigates the emergence of a modern political culture that imprinted the nascent French nation-state after 1770. Our broad definition of political culture—as interplay of political claims, doctrine, practices, and institutions—helps us map France’s changing cultural and political configuration. We pay particular attention to the relationship between the state and civil society, gender and citizenship, literature and politics, and new forms of sociability. Topics may include theatre, salons, spectacles and carnivals, commemorations, the press, popular literature, and schoolbooks.
Approaches to French Culture: Problems and Methods
G45.1070 Gerson. 4 points.
Analysis of approaches, methods, and presuppositions found in the articulation of notions about French culture and the French identity. |
