GRADUATE COURSES IN FRENCH

SPRING 2002

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

French 620 (History 620)
Reading History in Literature/Reading Literature in History
Profs. DeJean and Chartier
T 4-7

This course will address two sets of issues: the presence of history in literary texts from various periods and the blurring of the disciplinary boundary between history and literature so often evident today. We will read Spanish, French, English, and German novels and plays from the 17th to the 20th centuries. (All foreign works will be read in translation.) We will also read examples of social history, the history of sexuality, and the history of print culture. We will focus our discussions on such questions as the particular affinity often evident between the novel and history, literature's function in helping create societal memory, textual mobility, and the nature of proof in history.

French 635 (English 715)
Anglo-French Texts in European Contexts
Profs. Brownlee and Wallace
M 12-3, Smith Room, 6th floor Van Pelt Library

In this course we explore a range of French, English, and Anglo-French texts from a period (c. 1360-1450) of particularly close trans-Channel cultural interaction, a period fully enclosed by the episodic but highly destructive campaigns of the Hundred Years' War. Our aim will be to concentrate upon movements between literary and regional cultures, resisting the usual practice of reading within purely national parameters. For even when at war (or on opposite sides of a papal schism), English and French chivalric and religious cultures worked within common frameworks of reference. The English soldiery that persecuted Joan of Arc also harried Margery Kempe; poets fighting on opposite sides of the war (Chaucer, Deschamps, Oton de Granson) cheerfully exchanged verses with one another; key French figures like historiographer and romancer Jean Froissart had important patrons on both sides of the Channel.

We begin with two key fourteenth-century texts (one French, one English) deriving from the Roman de la Rose: Machaut's Voir Dit and Chaucer's Book of the Duchess. Expanding the context to include the Italian corpus so essential to late medieval French and English, we then turn to Boccaccio's Filostrato and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Next, we consider Henryson's short Testament of Cresseid in the context of the Franco-Scottish axis of the auld alliance. The cultural, political, and historiographic dimensions of the Hundred Years' War are considered through selected readings in Jean Froissart's Chroniques, as well as from the vast poetic corpus of Eustache Deschamps and from Christine de Pizan's Diti de Jehanne d'Arc. We conclude with the remarkable bilingual poetry of Charles d'Orlans, written both in France and during his long captivity in England, and with Mandeville's Voyages.

Texts will be read in French, Italian, or Middle English; translations will be provided.

French 640
Renaissance and Counter-Renaissance
Prof. Donaldson-Evans
R 2-4

The sixteenth-century in France began in an optimistic mode as artists, writers, and scholars embraced with enthusiasm the new/old ideas of Renaissance humanism and evangelism. The mood of the century became progressively darker as France descended into one of the bloodiest periods of her history: the religious wars. The works of the three greatest prose writers of the century--Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and Michel de Montaigne--bear eloquent testimony to this trajectory. Readings will include the first four books of Rabelais's comic "roman," the "Heptameron," and the "Essays".

French 670
Literature and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century France
Prof. Samuels
W 2-4

"What is a spectacle?" asks the lawyer's clerk in Balzac's Le Colonel Chabert (1832). This seminar responds by exploring the connection between new modes of vision in nineteenth-century France and new forms of literature. Anticipating by nearly a century and a half Guy Debord's La Societe du Spectacle (1967), Balzac's text, like the other literary works we will explore in this course, theorizes the spectacular culture of its era. Reading Realist/Naturalist novels, as well as poetry, in the light of contemporary forms of popular entertainment, technologies of looking, and strategies of display, we will ask whether Debord's analysis of the hegemony of the image in late capitalist culture can be backdated to the nineteenth century, and whether the new forms of literature are implicated in the spectacular regime they expose. Nineteenth-century authors to be studied include Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Zola. Twentieth-century theorists of vision to be studied include Benjamin, Crary, Debord, and Foucault. The question of spectacle will also be examined in relation to nineteenth-century French painting.