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GRADUATE COURSES IN FRENCH
FALL 2001
**Course information subject to change**
**Cross-reference with Department Roster**
Fren 512 History of Literary Theory
Copeland
T 1-4
UNDERGRADUATES NEED PERMISSION
CROSSLISTED: COML501 ENGL571
This course on literary theory will have a strong historical component.
We will be tracing out the transformation of certain key problems in
ancient, post-classical, early modern, and modern foundational texts,
including works by Plato and Aristotle, Longinus, Augustine, Dante and
Boccaccio, Sidney, Kant, Nietzche, and Freud (authors represented on
the Comparative Literature Theory exam list). Our readings in contemporary
literary and cultural criticism will, to a large extent, be focused
around the disciplinary and institutional transformation of literary
studies in the last few decades. We will look at the historical production
and revision of such issues as language and signification, mimesis and
representation, affect and the body, ownership and authority, canonicity,
tradition, and dissent, and ideologies of the aesthetic.
Course requirements: two short papers (7-10 pages, to be used also towards
discussion) and one longer research paper. No final exam.
Fren 582 Fantastic Literature--19/20th Century
Met
T 4-6
This course will explore fantasy and the fantastic in short tales of
19th- and 20th-century French literature. A variety
of approaches -thematic, psychoanalytic, cultural, narratological -
will be used in an attempt to test their viability and define the subversive
force of a literary mode that contributes to shedding light on the dark
side of the human psyche by interrogating the "real," 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 will be considered.
Fren 630 Intro to Medieval Literature
K. Brownlee
M 2-4
CROSS LISTED: COML630
A close reading of the two dominant works of the 17th-century France:
The Queste del Saint Graal and the Roman de la Rose.
The seminar will focus on a series of interrelated problems raised by
these two texts and by their juxtaposition, including mimesis, allegory,
continuation, and closure. Particular attention will be given
to how these texts represent the object of desire (grail vs. rose) and
to the function of the chivalric vs. the erotic quest. In addition,
there will be a special focus on how the two texts thematize reading,
interpretation, and the production of textual meaning.
Fren 650 Studies in the 17th Century
The Royal Machine: Louis XIV and the Versailles Era
DeJean
R 4-6
CROSS LISTED: COML 651
We will examine certain key texts of what is known as the Golden Age
of French literature in tandem with a number of recent theoretical texts
that could be described as historical. Our goal will be to explore the
basis of "the new historicism," a term that is designed to cover a variety
of critical systems that try to account for the historical specificity
and referentiality of literary texts. We will read sections from Michel
Foucault's Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique
and Surveiller et punir (Foucault is the major influence on the
group of American theoreticians associated with the journal Representations;
we will look at the introduction to S. Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning).
We will also read sections of Louis Marin's Le Portrait du roi
and Michel Serres' Le Parasite. We will suggest readings of 17th-century
texts more or less closely inspired by these critics. Thus, for example,
we will read Le Tartuffe and certain of La Fontaine's fables,
as Serres proposes, as fictions of the parasite. We will propose Britannicus
as a literary illustration of Foucault's Panopticon. We will read several
of Perrault's Contes according to Marin's model for the lesson
they offer on the royal fiction. And we will test out these various
models on the ultimate royal fictions, Louis XIV's Mémoires
and his Manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles.
Fren 670 19th-Century Studies
Roulin
T 2-4
CROSS LISTED: COML669
"Si Figaro a tué la noblesse, Charles IX tuera la royauté."
For Danton, Beaumarchais' Le Mariage de Figaro and Chénier's
Charles IX played a crucial part in the revolutionary process.
Questioning Danton's statement, this seminar will focus on the representation
of society in some of the major plays written just before and after
the Revolution, and, to draw a comparison, one play of the 20th century,
La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu. Some of these plays
rewrite an important event in French history to interpret contemporary
politics (Saint-Barthélémy as frame for the French Revolution
in Marie-Joseph Chénier's Charles IX, for example).
Some others express a critique of modern society through contemporary
situations (like Vigny's Chatterton). We will read these
plays in a socio-critical perspective, exploring themes such as:
staging political discourse, the voice of the woman and her role in
historical represntations, embodying the Revolution, etc.
Texts:
Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro, Garnier-Flammarion.
M.-J. Chénier, Charles IX, ou l'Ecole des rois.
(Photocopies)
Alexandre Dumas, Henri III et sa cour. (Photocopies)
Giradoux, La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu, Le Livre de Poche.
Hugo, Angelo, Tyran de Padoue, Garnier-Flammarion.
Musset, Lorenzaccio, Le Livre de Poche.
Vigny, Chatterton, Garnier-Flammarion.
Fren 680 Studies in the 20th Century
Prince
W 4-6
A study of the poetics of the 20th-century French novel from the "Nouveau
Roman" to the "Nouvelle Ecole de Minuit."
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