GRADUATE COURSES IN FRENCH

SPRING 2001

French-593  Studies in Francophone Literature

Caribbean Fiction
R 2-4      Moudileno

Introduction to literature from the French-speaking Caribbean.  The course will focus on major works (poetry, novel and drama) by writers from Martinique, Guadeloupe and Haiti, ranging from the Negritude movement of the 1930's to more recent Caribbean novels.  In parallel, we will read a selection of essays exploring issues such as: the plantation system and other island topographies; national and racial consciousness; memory and migration; creole identity and language; the status of the (post) colonial writer.

Primary readings will include: Aime Cesaire, Leon G. Damas, Jacques Roumain, Rene Depestre, Marie Chauvet, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Conde, Raphael Confiant, Patrick Chamoiseau.

French-609  FRANCE AND ITS OTHERS

LITERATURE AND ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE XXTH CENTURY
W 2-4      Richman
Cross Listed with Comp Lit 604

The purpose of this course is to examine interactions between  between anthropology and literature in the history of French modernism. Our guiding premise will be that  the turn toward other cultures has functioned as a revitalizing force in the production of culture while  providing an alternative vantage point from which to examine the development of French culture and society.  The radical innovations of  "ethnographic surrealism" in the twenties and thirties by  Artaud,  Bataille,  and Leiris furnished central concepts of  postwar critical thought  while inspiring a renewal of "anthropology as cultural critique" in the United States.  Key  texts by Durkheim, Mauss and Lévi-Strauss  will be considered  on their own  terms as well as in regard to their influence upon the figures studied here.   The institutional fate of these intellectual cross-overs and their correlative disciplinary conflicts will also be considered.  The overarching  frame for the course spans Gauguin's turn of the century "primitivism"  and Segalen's  exotisme,  interwar surrealism and its dissenters, and postwar representations of colonialism in Rouch's film Les Maîtres Fous and Genêt's Les nègres.

Conducted primarily in French according to students' needs.

French-660  Studies in the 18th

M 2-4       Weber

What is Enlightenment?  Through an examination of several of the eighteenth-century's pre-eminent philosophes - notably Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Sade - this course will examine the complex and often contradictory meanings of "Enlightenment".  Emphasis will be placed primarily on these authors' literary works.  Secondary readings from Kant and the Encyclopedie, as well as from Freud, Adorno, Horkheimer and Lacan.

French-670  19th Century Studies

Samuels
R 4-6

Unlike Romanticism and Naturalism, Realism did not give rise to a self-defined literary movement or school in nineteenth-century France.  Yet it has played a central role in the formulation of a variety of twentieth-century critical movements - from Marxism to Feminism to Cultural Studies.  This seminar interrogates the 19th century French Realist novel in light of various efforts to define its practice.  How does theory constitute Realism as a category or object?  And how does Realism articulate the aims of theory?  Novels to be studied include Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir; Balzac's Le Pere Goriot and La Fille aux yeux d'or; Sand's Indiana; Flaubert's Madame Bovary; and Zola's Nana.  Theorists to be studied include Auerbach, Barthes, Brooks, Cohen, Felman, Girard, Lukacs, Matlock, Miller and Schor.  Some attention also paid to Realist painting.