French & Italian

FRE 510
Cosmology and Melancholy
Sarah Kay

The medieval world view related individual physiology to cosmology via the theory of the humors. One of these, melancholy or black bile, was especially associated with philosophical and poetic creativity, as well as sorrow (such as from disappointed love). Medieval poetry thus often associates science, philosophy, and love, most famously in the Roman de la rose. This course will examine this nexus of themes from the Rose to the late Middle Ages, in the works of Machaut, Froissart, Christine de Pizan, and others, in the light of antique and modern writings on cosmology and melancholy such as Aristotle, Boethius, and Kristeva.

The seminar will examine the rich collaboration between painters, musicians, writers, and critics in the third quarter of 19^th-century France. Examining autonomous devices such as textual blanks, forbidding noirs, independence of line and color from pictorial description, we will read seminal texts by Rimbaud, Redon, Gauguin, Mallarmé, Huysmans, and Maeterlinck among others.

Through a chorus of major works by Francophone authors from around the Mediterranean, we will explore questions of identity and displacement, hybridity and hospitality. The polyphony of fiction, the dialogues between the main texts, accompanied by other readings from scholars and poets (echoes of Homer and Virgil), will suggest how France and the Mediterranean (from North Africa to Corfu to Israel) have relentlessly influenced each other's images - and how the experiences of exile and refuge transcend their borders and the margins of their texts.

A study of 20^th-century writing in European languages relying to some degree on the principle of constraint or 'strict form'. Queneau, Calvino, Mathews, Perec, Roubaud and other members of Oulipo will constitute the central focus, but depending on students' linguistic competences works by e.g., Harig, Kharms, Nabokov, Cortazar may be included. Attention will be focussed on underlying principles as well as on practice and product.

Critical reading of theoretical texts by Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas focusing especially on esthetic and ethical issues.

SPRING 2008 

A practical investigation of the issues affecting translation between English and French. Weekly exercises will offer experience of literary, technical, journalistic and other registers of language. Discussion will focus on the linguistic, cultural and intellectual lessons of translation seen as a practical discipline in its own right.

Practical and theoretical preparation for teachers of French. Sessions may be held in common with other language programs.

A study of the relationship between magic and poetry, prophetic dreams and fiction, occult philosophy and humanist wisdom in 16^th-century France.

FRE 519
Philosophy of the Enlightenment
Marie-Hélène Huet

In this seminar, we will consider how the French Enlightenment integrated and challenged the philosophical tradition represented by Leibniz, Locke, and Spinoza. We will explore theories about nature, language and knowledge, ethics and politics through the works of Voltaire, Diderot, Condillac, and Rousseau. Finally, we will examine how 20^th-century philosophers and critics such as Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida contributed to our current understanding of the question: What is Enlightenment? (in English)

What is the people? Much of 19^th-century literature is an effort to confront this urgent political question after the Revolution, and to give shape and voice to this amorphous new sovereign. At once ubiquitous and intangible, the people is an unsettling power that modern writing seeks to name, express, silence, or shape. This course examines some landmark novels (by Hugo, les Goncourt, Sue, and Zola) and social analysis (by reformers, hygienists, and intellectuals) at the crossroads between politics and aesthetics. Critical texts by Marx, Chevalier, Rancière, Foucault, T.J. Clark, Lefort, and Rosanvallon.

FALL 2008

The seminar will focus on the "downside" of the Renaissance's mythology of success. How was the scenario of the "fallible life" (as a Fortune-driven exercise in vanity) altered to allow the qualified promotion of personal (and, in particular, literary) glory? What limits and pitfalls, both technical and ethical, did such a process encounter? How did different literary genres - fiction, poetry, essai - cope with these problems, and to what extent where they shaped by them? Such are some of the questions we will ask while reading works by Lemaire, Rabelais, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Jodelle, and Montaigne.

From the Querelle du Cid to the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, the French 17th century was marked by crucial controversies which led to, and beyond, what would later be called "classicism." This seminar will focus on quarrels concerning the theater, whose public nature made it the cultural battlefield par excellence. Readings will include both the works in dispute and a variety of related critical, polemical and satirical texts. Among the issues to be explored: the uses and "morality" of dramatic fictions; the relation between writers, critics, and the public; imitation, originality, and progress; language, authority, and gender.

A study of Marcel Proust's work and imaginaire along with readings of some of his most remarkable readers (artists, literary critics, philosophers, and writers).

A study of the work of Samuel Beckett encompassing several genres but with emphasis on the middle and late prose and in conjunction with noteworthy criticism devoted to his work.

FRE 583
Michel Foucault
Marie-Hélène Huet

The seminar will be dedicated to a detailed analysis of Michel Foucault's influential work. We will focus on four specific texts: Madness and Civilization, The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, and The Care of the Self. We will read both Foucault and the previously marginalized documents that played a large role in some of his texts. Additional readings will include Gilles Deleuze's essay on Foucault, Jacques Derrida's response to Madness and Civilization, and Jürgen Habermas's criticism of Foucault. In English.

SPRING 2009

This course is designed to provide future teaching assistants with the knowledge and conceptual tools needed to reflect critically on pedagogical practices in the second language classroom. It will examine issues related to teaching language and culture in a university setting, highlighting the relationship between theory in Second Language Acquisition and language pedagogy and helping students understand the practical implications of theoretical frameworks in the field.

Medieval books were copied by hand onto parchment, made from skin. The modern self, bounded by a social or psychic skin, it is widely held, did not yet exist in the Middle Ages. So is the medieval self a surface comparable to the writing surface of its books? What effect does this have on medieval texts and medieval subjects? Literary texts are studied in light of theories of the self (e.g. Klein) and of the cultural significance of skin (e.g. Anzieu), addressing such themes as flaying, wounding, beauty and cosmetics, armor, clothing, and fashion. The course includes first-hand study of manuscripts.

The course will examine the role of political thought in literature, philosophy, and art from the end of the 18^th to the beginning of the 19^th century. We will pay particular attention to the representations of the conflict between the individual and the state, and the legacy of the Revolution in redefining the writer as political thinker.

This course examines the development of surrealism from its birth in Dada-infused Paris through its years of exile in New York to its decline after the Second World War. Materials considered will include literary and theoretical texts, visual works (including film), and magazines. The course will treat the topic at a variety of inter-related levels, exploring surrealism as part of the broad historical phenomenon of the avant-garde, examining its specific ways of (re)conceiving literature and art, and investigating the epistemological ramifications of surrealism's aesthetic, political, and moral positions. (In English.)

This course will consider novels, plays, philosophical essays, and films written primarily in French that reflect and explore different contexts and aspects of contemporary transnationality. We will also consider the challenges that these border crossings pose to interpretative frameworks that categorize cultural productions with regard to national origins.

FALL 2009

An interdisciplinary investigation of the crisis of subjectivity in the modern period: the questioning of traditional notions of identity, reconceptualizations of intimacy, the role of art and psychoanalysis as normativizing or de-normativizing agents in theories of the human subject. (In English.)

A practical investigation of the issues affecting translation between English and French. Weekly exercises will offer experience of literary, technical, journalistic and other registers of language. Discussion will focus on the linguistic, cultural and intellectual lessons of translation seen as a practical discipline in its own right.

Conception and artistic realization of lyric poetry in France from the late medieval to the baroque.

Major works written by 17^th-century femmes de lettres, focusing on narrative fiction and epistolary texts. Among the issues to be discussed: préciosité and galanterie, conversation and sociability, love and marriage, female education, anonymity and authorship, and the relation between history and fiction.

This course examines the rise of 19^th-century historicism in light of the concrete modern uses to which the past was put. How was the new historical discourse mobilized to address and influence current political, religious, and ideological debates? The main topics will be the question of national self-definition, the use of genealogical narratives, the birth of the museum, the invention of patrimony, and the modern concerns over cultural transmission, religion, and prehistory. We will read works by Burke, Chateaubriand, Michelet, Marx, Tocqueville, Flaubert, Zola, and Durkheim, coupled with theoretical texts by Freud, Nietzsche, De Certeau.

Through a chorus of major works by Francophone authors from around the Mediterranean, we will explore questions of identity and displacement, hybridity and hospitality. The polyphony of fiction, the dialogues between the main texts, accompanied by other readings from scholars and poets (echoes of Homer and Virgil), will suggest how France and the Mediterranean (from North Africa to Corfu to Israel) have relentlessly influenced each other's images - and how the experiences of exile and refuge transcend their borders and the margins of their texts.