GRADUATE COURSES IN FRENCH

Spring 2009

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

French 500
Proseminar
Staff
(See Roster for time(s))

French 580
Poetics of the Notebook
Prof. Met
(See Roster for time(s))

 La véritable poésie n'a rien à voir avec ce qu'on trouve actuellement dans les collections poétiques. Elle est ce qui ne se donne pas pour poésie. Elle est dans les brouillons acharnés de quelques maniaques de la nouvelle étreinte. 
(Francis Ponge)

“Journaux”, “cahiers”, “carnets”, “agendas”, “notes” : modern and contemporary poetic practices are being radically renewed or displaced by what might be termed the “poetic notebook”, an unstable category concerned with a “poetic” use of language but subverting the prose/verse divide, and cutting across diary-writing and écriture du fragment, gnomic and metapoetic formats, aesthetic and ethical thrusts. If the first signs might be traced all the way back to Valéry’s Cahiers and Reverdy’s Livre de mon bord (or even Baudelaire’s Fusées and Mon cœur mis à nu), it is only in the second half of the 20 th century that the poetic notebook has gained a new status as it is now increasingly perceived not so much as raw materials, as an entity separate from the actual œuvre, or evidence of the latter’s genesis (drafts, pre-texts, variants…), but rather as a poetic production in and of itself.

Works by Char, Ponge, Jaccottet, Du Bouchet, Perros, Gaspar, Jourdan as well as by contemporary poets (Macher, Jouanard, Charnet) will be submitted to close formal and textual inquiries, and will provide various points of entry to the analysis of specific theoretical issues and/or original practices (self-writing and/of death, writing and painting, writing and traveling, resistance of/to writing, processual textuality, etc).

French 591
Reading Gilles Deleuze
Prof. Beckman
(See Roster for time(s))

French 640
Essaying and Assaying the Essais of Montaigne
Prof. Donaldson-Evans
(See Roster for time(s))

Montaigne’s Essais are one of the seminal works of French and world literature. Montaigne’s book is, by his own admission, unique, a curious hybrid of autobiography, of philosophy, of literary, political and social commentary. This course will briefly examine its antecedents (even a unique work has antecedents!) and then embark on a detailed reading of the principal essays, a reading which will tease out the various threads which make up its complex tapestry,| while examining the philosophical and literary underpinnings which give cohesion to this “marqueterie mal jointe” (as Montaigne describes it).

Principal text: Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, (sous la direction de Jean Céard) Edition Pochothèque, Livre de poche, Paris 2001.

French 690
Foreign Language Teaching Methodologies
Prof. McMahon
(See Roster for time(s))

French 690 is a course required of all Teaching Assistants in Spanish, French, and Italian in the second semester of their first year of teaching. It is designed to provide instructors with the necessary practical support to carry out their teaching responsibilities effectively and builds on the practicum meetings held during the first semester. The course will also introduce students to various approaches to foreign language teaching as well as to current issues in second language acquisition. Students who have already had a similar course at another institution may be exempted upon consultation with the instructor.

Fren 696-301
Introduction to Francophone Studies
" Africa looks at Europe"
Prof. Moudileno
(See Roster for time(s))

In this seminar we will examine representations of Europe and the Western world in Francophone African fiction from the 1950s to more recent productions. Although Africans have been in close contact with the Euopean “other” in their own countries, the discovery of Western realities outside the colonial space constitutes a significant reappraisal of mentalities and cultures. What happens when an imaginary space (framed by imperial self-representation) conflicts, in the minds of African students, immigrant workers or travelers, with the evidence of personal experience? How does this new perspective on a different “white world” transform both the relationship with the white “other” and the positionality of the (post)colonial subject? For example, how does travel to the metropolis affect one’s national, cultural and racial assumptions? We will investigate these questions by looking at broad variety of novels ranging from travel accounts, autobiographies to parody, realist fiction and migrant narratives in order to demonstrate how and to what extent Europe (and especially Paris) as a physical space and as imperial center has also been subjected to a sort of reversed ethnographical gaze by (former) colonized subjects. In the process we will not only discuss some of the most important figures in sub-Saharan Francophone African literatures, but also systematically reflect on the formation and on the evolution of the field in the last fifty years.