GRADUATE COURSES IN FRENCH

FALL 2002

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

French 512
History of Literary Theory
Prof. Weissberg
T 2:00-5:00

Is there a future to theory? And what is its past? The course will consider a selection of texts from Aristotle to Derrida to explore questions posed in regard to literature and the arts, its genres and its language. At the same time, it will test the relevance of these ideas for our work today. Texts will be made available via course pack, and include a selection of required reading for the M.A. examination in Comparative Literature, as well as supplementary essays by Jean-Michel Rabate, Homi Bhaba, Gilles Deleuze, and others.

All reading and discussions will be in English.

French 590
Introduction to Francophone Literature: Postcolonial Theory in Francophone Contexts
Prof. Moudileno
F 2:00-4:00

The purpose of this seminar is to introduce students to key texts and influential figures coming from or focusing on Francophone contexts. Readings will fall under three categories:

a) Authors from the 1940s to the present who focus almost exclusively on (post)colonial issues pertaining to Africa and the Caribbean, such as: Léopold Sedar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon; Edouard Glissant; Patrick Chamoiseau et al., Assia Djebar, and J.G. Bidima.

b) Contemporary French, African and North American postcolonial theorists (JM Moura, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, A. Mbembe, Christopher Miller, Françoise Lionnet, Peter Hallward) .

c) Theorists who would not necessarily be labeled "postcolonial," but whose work is relevant to postcolonial criticism, such as, among others, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, and Julia Kristeva.

French 630
Genre and the Problem of Authority in Medieval French Literature
Prof. Brownlee
M 4:00-6:00

The course considers literary genre as process and textual authority as problem. Special attention is given to questions of authorial voice, gender representation, and historico-political context. We will study texts from the 11th to the 15th centuries, in which new generic forms are invented and transformed: chanson de geste, romance, lyric, theater, history, and autobiography.

French 652
Early Modern French Women Writers: Women Writers and the Origins of the Modern Novel in France
Prof. DeJean
W 2:00-4:00

We will read major works produced during the golden age of French women's writing, a 150-year period that began in 1660. We will constantly keep in mind the question of why the development of French women's writing and the development of the modern novel were so intimately related that it can be argued that one could not have taken place without the other. We will analyze Lafayette's Zayde and La Princesse de Clèves to see how the modern novel developed from the earlier romance form. We will then examine all the key genres of the early novel, since women writers played a formative role in each of them. For the epistolary novel, for example, we will read works such as Scudéry's Lettres amoureuses, Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne, and Charrière's Lettres de Lausanne. We will consider such memoir novels as Villedieu's Mémoires de la vie de Henriette-Sylvie de Molière and Duras's Ourika. We will try to find the time for at least a few of the fairy tales of d'Aulnoy and, perhaps, Lubert. Throughout, we will keep in mind the concept of a tradition of French women's writing.

French 680
Studies in the 20th Century: Representing the Social in Modern French Literature and Critical Thought from Proust to Tournier
Prof. Richman
R 4:00-6:00

The starting point for this course is the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's contention that "everything is social" despite its repression in philosophical accounts of taste and culture. He also argues that literature provides sociology with a crucial reference. Indeed, Proust's literary monument figures prominently in Bourdieu's main work on
distinction. To assess the validity of Bourdieu's position, we will focus on the representation of the social in two masterworks where it is explicitly as well as systematically addressed: Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Michel Tournier's Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique. Our goal will be to inventory representational strategies in approaching the paradoxes of the social as invisible yet ubiquitous, unconscious but determinant. In the process, we will trace the respective contributions of literature and sociology to the theory of the modern subject, the relation of esthetics to the social, the corporal embodiment of the social in the "civilizing process," the politics of "liberation" theories and the utopian dimension of texts.

Primary readings will be Marcel Proust [selections from A la recherche] and Michel Tournier, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique.

Secondary readings will be drawn from Bataille, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Elias.

Primary readings in French: students may acquire them in translation as needed.
Requirements: mid-term and final paper besides an oral presentation in class.

French 681
Modern French Poetry
Prof. Met
R 2:00-4:00

The overall purpose of this seminar is to introduce students to nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry. We will engage in close reading of key texts that significantly contributed to the formation of our poetic modernity from the post-Romantic generation of the 1870s that initiated the "poetic revolution" to the avant-garde and the Surrealists, and on to the post-Surrealist (or margins-of-surrealism) era. Most of the poets listed on the M.A. and Ph.D. exams will be covered: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nerval, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Leiris, Ponge, and Michaux.

One of our main concerns in the course will be to test an array of methodological strategies that might enable us to approach the modern poetic text, which more often than not appears to have cut loose from all referential anchoring and traditional markers (prosody, versification). 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.