GRADUATE COURSES IN FRENCH

FALL 2006

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

ROML 512
History of Literary Theory
T 12:00-3:00
Profs. Copeland and Platt
Undergrads Need Permission from Instructor

This course on literary theory will have a strong historical component. We will be tracing out the transformation of key problems in foundational texts ranging from antiquity to the post-modern age, including works by Plato and Aristotle, Longinus, Augustine, Dante, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida (authors represented on the Comparative Literature Theory exam list), leading to our most contemporary concerns with postcoloniality, race, and gender. Our readings will help us to understand the disciplinary and institutional transformation of literary studies in the last few decades. We will look at the production and revision of such issues as text and culture, language and signification, representation, affect and the body, ownership and authority, canonicity, power and ideology, history and nation, and the constitution of the subject. Course requirements: three short papers (7 pages), and one oral report (accompanied by bibliography) as a final project.

French 660
The History of the Novel
Prof. DeJean
T 3:00-5:00

Is the novel somehow inherently trans-national? How did the novel escape the confines of the national borders within which it began its modern existence? Why did the quintessential genre of the here and now become cosmopolitan?

This course will move between theory of the novel and literary history. On the theory of the novel side, we will consider recent works, in particular the studies by Margaret Doody and Michael McKeon, that suggest in different ways that the romance-novel divide, long held to be absolute, is perhaps a false problem. (We will also look at more “nationalistic” studies, Ian Watt’s for example, that respect the romance-novel divide.) On the literary history side, we’ll consider what may have been the most significant factor in the regeneration of prose fiction that is known as the birth of the modern novel: the rediscovery, in 17 th-century England and France, of the so-called Greek novel. We’ll read at least two of the Greek novels that captivated 17 th-century readers and altered the course of European prose fiction.

The tie that binds these two ways of approaching prose fiction is the question of geography. We’ll use the insights found in Franco Moretti’s wonderful Atlas of the European Novel to contrast the two dominant geographical models between which the novel alternates: big-world roaming and small-world claustrophobia.

Some of the questions that we’ll ask include: why is it that some novelists such as Jane Austen systematically construct constricted and constricting universes, worlds in which characters never see the wide world? Why do others—Voltaire, Mary Shelley—-move their characters all over the globe, or at least all across Europe? And why do still other novelists (Lafayette) alternate between cosmopolitan fictions and claustrophobic ones? Finally, in what ways does the big world outside always invade even the most confined fictional universes?

The course will be taught in English. All reading will be available in English. French titles will also be available in French. Students wishing to take the course for French credit will do the reading and at least some of the writing in French.

A note on books: I’ll order some copies of Moretti, but students might want to pick one up on Amazon. Ditto for Reardon’s anthology of Greek novels. It’s a bit dear, but used copies are easily found online. And you can always xerox the novels we’ll read from the copy on reserve.

French 681
Modern French Poetry
Prof. Met
R 5:00-7:00

The overall purpose of this seminar is to introduce students to nineteenth and twentieth century French poetry. Close reading of key texts that significantly contributed to the formation of 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, including Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nerval, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Ponge, Michaux etc.

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 …).

French 684
Studies in the 20th Century
Prof. Prince
M 2:00-4:00

A narratologically oriented study of the poetics of the modern French novel from Proust and Gide to surrealist "fiction" (Nadja), existential and existentialist narratives (Malraux, Céline, Sartre, Camus), and the foreshadowings of the New Novel (Queneau).