GRADUATE COURSES IN FRENCH

FALL 2002

(Course information subject to change)
(Cross-reference with Department Roster)

French 512
History of Literary Theory
Prof. Weber
T 1:00-4:00

In this course, we will explore texts from a wide array of influential modern literary-critical methodologies. The readings have been divided into four sections, each designed to focus our thinking on a set of specific topics, including but not restricted to questions of signification, authorship, subjectivity, ideology, cultural authority, difference, and dissent. Necessarily broad in scope, the class is designed to provide students with some basic fluency in a number of important theoretical discourses, and in the case of Comp Lit graduate students to assist in preparation for the M.A. exam. Course requirements are: a short paper (6-8pp.) that "impersonates" a particular critical approach or style, a longer paper (15-20pp.) that critiques one or more of the assigned readings, and one substantial oral presentation (20-30 minutes) in which the student "teaches" a given text to the seminar as a whole. No final examination. Classroom activity may include impromptu group presentations and debates (e.g., Marxism faces off against Deconstruction; Hélène Cixous meets Luce Irigaray, etc.). Participation in these exercises and in general discussion is extremely important. Undergraduates and auditors by permission of the instructor.

French 593
Recent African Fiction
Prof. Moudileno
M 2:00-4:00

The field of Francophone literature has evolved considerably since 1980. Much more so than the production of the previous decades, recent African fiction is marked by a tremedous diversity : Diversity of national origins, with new authors coming from traditionally less represented countries like Djibouti or Chad; diversity of voices, with women writers occupying a more and more visible place on the African and French literary scenes, and male and female authors starting to define a "literature of migration" comparable to the Beur phenomenon; and diversity of genres, with the detective novel, for example, making its way into big publishing houses in Paris. How does that diversity force us to redefine the field of francophonie, and the idea of an "African" subject so vehemently claimed by the previous generations? To what extent can this new generation of writers be said to justify, or refute, the idea of African literature as a specific sub-field of Francophonie? What, to put it simply, is characteristic of the fiction produced by African authors in the 1990s? This course is designed to first introduce students to very recent novels published between 1990 and 2001. Secondly, it means to examine them not only individually, but also in relation to issues which have preoccupied Francophone criticism since the 1950s, such as race, difference, hybridity, alienation and migration. In order to define a guiding principle to our discovery of the texts, we will specifically center our discussion of these issues on the representation of the body and its function in the representation of postcolonial subjectivities today.

Primary works :

Bessora. 53 cm.
Daniel Biyaoula. L'impasse.
Sami Tchak. Place des fêtes.
Ken Bugul. Riwan ou le chemin de sable.
Abdourhamane Waberi. Moisson de crânes.
Alain Mabanckou. Bleu blanc rouge.

French 595
Travel Literature
Prof. Met
R 4:00-6:00

Within the context of the ill-defined, heterogeneous genre of the travelogue and of today's age of globalization, CNN, and the internet, this seminar will examine the POETICS of travel writing based largely, albeit not exclusively, on travel notebooks, or journaux/carnets de voyage, spanning the twentieth century from beginning to end. One of the principal specificities of the texts studied is that they all evince to a lesser or greater degree a paradoxical resistance both to the very idea of travel(ing) as such and to the mimetic rhetoric of traditional travel narratives. We will therefore look at how these modern or postmodern texts question, revisit, subvert or reject such key notions of travel literature as exoticism, nostalgia, exile, nomadism, otherness or foreigness vs. selfhood.
Authors considered will include Segalen, Morand, Michaux, Leiris, Lévi-Strauss, Butor, Le Clézio, Baudrillard, Bouvier, Jouanard, Leuwers.

French 600
Old French
Prof. McMahon
TBA

The course will include an introduction to the phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon of Old French as well as intensive practice in reading Old French texts with emphasis on 12th- and 13th-century texts. By the end of the semester students should be able to read works in Old French with the aid of a dictionary. Attention will be paid to the chronological differences between earlier and later Old French as well as to the major dialectal differences. Students will also be familiarized with the major research tools, dictionaries, and grammars for working on Old French.

French 660
What Was the Enlightenment?
Prof. DeJean
R 2:00-4:00

We will read works by several philosophers without whom the Enlightenment would not have been possible: Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu. Guided by a central question--What Was the Enlightenment?--we will focus our discussions around two questions: 1) We will ask ourselves why these writers so often chose to express their revolutionary social and political ideas in fictional form. We will ask in particular why the novel played such a key role in the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas. To this end, we will read certain of the best known novels of the 18th century, for example, Laclos's Liaisons dangereuses and Montesquieu's Lettres persanes. 2) We will explore the issue of why so much of Enlightenment thought was based on the discovery of the foreign other. We will read works such as Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne, in which the arrival of a foreign heroine on French soil makes possible a wide-ranging critique of French society, even a meditation on what it means to be French.

French 670
Literature and Culture of the Fin-de-Siècle
Prof. Samuels
W 4:00-6:00

The last decades of the nineteenth century were a time of both social turmoil and artistic exuberance in France. This course examines major literary and artistic movements (Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, etc...) in their cultural context. Why was this productive period obsessed with its own doom? Weekly reading assignments pair literary texts (by Barbey, Barrès, the Goncourts, Huysmans, Mallarmé, Maupassant, Rachilde, and Zola) with contemporary discourse on such topics as disease, crime, sex, poverty, race, nationalism, and technology. Theorists to be considered include Bergson, Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Le Bon, Nordau, Renan, Simmel, and Spencer. Some attention will also be paid to the visual arts and to fin-de-siècles in other times and places (particularly Austria, Germany, and England).