GRADUATE COURSES IN FRENCH

SPRING 2006

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

French 582
Studies in Fantastic Literature
Prof. Met
R 5:00-7:00

This course will explore fantasy and the fantastic in short tales of 19th and 20th century French literature, from Mérimée, Gautier and Maupassant to M. Renard, Ghelderode, J. Ray, Breton et al. Non-French authors will also be considered and usually include Sheridan Le Fanu, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, H. H. Ewers, H. G. Wells, J. L. Borges. A variety of approaches – thematic, psychoanalytic, cultural, narratological – will be used in an attempt to test their viability and define the subversive force of a literary mode that contributes to shedding light on the dark side of the human psyche by interrogating the “real” as well as the “letter”, making visible the unseen and articulating the unsaid. Such broad categories as distorsions of space and time, reason and madness, order and disorder, sexual transgressions, self and other, literalness and allegoricity, translation and mystification will be examined. The course will be conducted in English. Readings will be in French or in English.

French 630
Introduction to Medieval French Literature - The Romance of the Rose and the French Vernacular Canon
Prof. Brownlee
M 2:00-4:00

The course will be centered on a reading of the 13th-century Roman de la Rose--the single most widely read and influential literary work of the French Middle Ages. We will study the ways in which the Rose redefines the status of the French vernacular as a “canonical” literary language, while establishing itself as the new foundational work in the French canon. Special attention will be given to how the Rose deploys conflicting discourses of desire and knowledge.

We will begin by situating the Rose within the preceding French literary tradition, both lyric and narrative, focusing on the privileged examples of the grand chant courtois of the trouvères and on Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot. We will conclude with Christine de Pizan’s polemical rewritings of the Rose in the early 15 th century.

French 654
Novelties and the Novel (1680-1730)
Profs. DeJean and Wiggin
T 2:00-4:00

At the turn of the eighteenth century, the novel established itself throughout Europe as the pre-eminent literary genre. It was seen above all as a radically new literary form, a novelty. At the same time as the novel was becoming prominent, many other kinds of novelties such as coffee and chocolate first became part of the European landscape. At the same moment the fashion industry was born when high fashion was first marketed to a broad public. And perhaps the ultimate novelty in this story was the novel’s gender bias: it was the only form in literary history to have been produced massively by women.

This seminar will explore the ways in which histories of the novel and of contemporary novelties such as coffee and high fashion were intertwined. We will pay particular attention to another contemporary genre, the newspaper, whose rise in the early modern period was essential to the marketing of novelties. We will also focus on the process of translation by means of which the novel spread rapidly through England, France, and Germany.

Among the novels we will discuss: Robinson Crusoe and The Princesse de Clèves, the two “founding” texts of the modern novel. Other texts may include: fairy tales, d’Aulnoy’s travel novels, Manon Lescaut, Thousand and One Nights. Among the subjects to be considered: fashion prints, advertising and broadsheets, journals and book reviews, treatises on coffee, travel narratives, musical novelties (such as vaudevilles and early opera), letter-writing guides, and dictionaries and language manuals.

All works to be discussed will be available in English, French, and German, in the original text and in translations from the early modern period.

We will also maintain a focus on research methods. The seminar will be held on the 6 th floor of Van Pelt so that we can have access every week to materials from Penn’s rare book collection.

French 670
Realism and Naturalism
Prof. Samuels
W 2:00-4:00

This seminar interrogates the nineteenth-century French Realist and Naturalist novel in light of various efforts to define its practice. How does theory constitute Realism as a category or object? How does Realism articulate the aims of theory? And how did nineteenth-century Realist and Naturalist textual practices intersect with other discourses besides the literary? In addition to several works by Balzac, novels to be studied include Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir; Sand’s Indiana; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; and Zola’s Nana. Theorists to be studied include Auerbach, Barthes, Brooks, Cohen, Felman, Girard, Lukács, Matlock, Miller, and Schor. Some attention also paid to Realist painting.

French 609
France and its Others: The Ethnographic Imperative in French Modernism
Prof. Richman
T 2-4

In this course we explore the French specificity of a critical perspective resulting from the ethnographic detour into other cultures. Variously referred to as “anthropological thinking,”the “sociological revolution, “or the “ethnological imagination,” this mode of self-reflection traces its antecedents to the Renaissance discovery of the New World, just as it projects its influence into the period of de-colonization. The results figure among the most important social, political, literary, and artistic productions of French intellectual and cultural history. Following a brief examination of the formation and development of this “hoary tradition” from the 16 th to the 18 th centuries, we focus on its revival at the turn of the nineteenth century in the visual arts and literature on one side and sociology on the other. The bulk of our readings, however, will concentrate on its contribution to the socio-anthropological strand of modernism, from the interwar dynamism among the “dissident” surrealists, to their legacy in structuralism and post-structuralism. By qualifying this virtually unique approach as the result of nothing less than an imperative, our goal will be to answer why it provides an outlet for issues resistant to existing paradigms, forms, or discourses. Indeed, our concluding session will discuss Bourdieu’s statement that its disappearance from sociology would be “fatal,” just as we must consider the polemical critiques it has elicited.

Primary authors are Léry, Montaigne, Segalen, Durkheim, Mauss, Artaud, Bataille, Leiris, Caillois, Lévi-Strauss, Tournier. Commentaries by: Elias, Derrida, Kristeva, Bourdieu, Clifford, Todorov, Bois/ Krauss, Kurosawa. A screening of Jean Rouch’s “Les Maitres Fous” will also be included.