GRADUATE COURSES IN FRENCH

Spring 2010

(Course information subject to change)
(Cross-reference with Course Timetable)

French 500
Proseminar
Prof. Moudileno
(See Course Timetable for time)

French 573
Auteurism: Theories and Practices
Prof. Corrigan
(See Course Timetable for time)

French 662
Love Letters: 1650-1789
Prof. DeJean
(See Course Timetable for time)

In many ways, love letters are in a class by themselves. To begin with, more than any other form, they force us to confront the question of authenticity. For centuries, readers have been faced with the same dilemma: how do we know that a love letter is real? In fact, the status of many famous love letters has never been determined, and we will consider such notable examples as the Lettres portugaises, considered by many a novel, by others a collection of authentic letters. We will also look at an unidentified manuscript in the collections of Van Pelt library: it’s in epistolary form, but are the letters it contains real or fictional?

In addition, the love letter has been gendered in a more pronounced way than any other form. All during the period we will consider, commentators contended that women wrote the best love letters – in fact, that love letters were both fundamentally feminine and the essence of female style. With this received idea in mind, we will consider some of the most famous love letters by writers both female and male: Sévigné and Julie de Lespinasse, Diderot and Laclos.

The love letter also played a paradoxical role as the (sentimental) foundation on which the quintessential Enlightenment genre, the epistolary novel, was built. We will read the novels generally considered the masterpieces of that form, Rousseau’s Julie and Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses. And we will juxtapose these male fictions of female desire with the visions proposed by women writers: Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne, Riccoboni’s Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd.

Finally, we will consider the material conditions in which love letters were produced, sent, and kept hidden from prying eyes – from the postal system to the desks on which they were written, from the pockets in which they were carried to the purses and drawers in which they could be locked away.

 
French 670
Fin-de-siècle Fictions
Prof. Goulet
(See Course Timetable for time)

Futurist fantasy or deviant decay? The literary imagination of the French fin-de-siècle grappled with both positive and negative implications of its millenial culture. On the one hand, technological advances between 1870 and 1900 promised France entry into a new century of wonders, with the Eiffel Tower and new Métro system prominently displayed at Universal Exhibitions and Olympic Games. Scientific fictions imagined the technological conquest of worlds near and far. On the other hand, a crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian war contributed to a national sense of social decline and moral decay. The decadent movement in literature responded with obsessive themes of pathology, morbidity, degeneration, and perversion. In this seminar, we will nuance the optimism/pessimism opposition through the attentive reading of texts by Villiers, Verne, Huysmans, Rachilde, Maupassant, Claretie, and Zola in the context of fin-de-siècle theories about crime and gender, hypnosis and hysteria, science and disease.

French 680
Studies in the 20th Century
Prof. Prince
(See Course Timetable for time)

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).

French 696
Postcolonial Theory
Prof. Moudileno
(See Course Timetable for time)

This seminar will introduce students to keys texts and influencial figures coming from, focusing on, or relevant to Francophone postcolonial contexts. Following a brief review of Anglophone postcolonial criticism, readings for the course will fall under three categories:

1. Authors from the 1940s to present who have focused almost exclusively on (post)colonial issues pertaining to Africa and the Caribbean, such as : L.S. Senghor, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Assia Djebar, Valentin Mudimbe, Achille Mbembe.

2. Contemporary European, African and North American literary critics like Christopher Miller, Françoise Lionnet, Gayatri Spivak, Jean-Marc Moura, Charles Forsdick, H. Adlai Murdoch, Nick Nesbitt, Alec Hargreaves.

3. Humanities scholars whose work would not necessarily be labeled “postcolonial” but is nevertheless relevant to postcolonial criticism (Derrida, Ranciere, Balibar, Kristeva, Bancel, Blanchard).