Undergraduate course descriptions
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Writing the Expatriation: American Write
Antoine Guibal
FREN UN3605
T 6:10pm-8:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall
This seminar offers a dive into the richness of the Parisian cultural landscape in the 1920s, particularly through the lens of the American expatriate writers who lived there and produced some of their most important works at that time.
Asylum/ Asile: Theory and Practice of Asylum Law Through Francophone African Asylum Claims in New York
Emmanuelle Saada and Andrew C Heinrich
FREN UN3725
MW 4:10pm-5:25pm Location:407 Hamilton Hall
Asylum/Asile is an experiential learning class conducted in collaboration with Project Rousseau, a holistic non-profit organization that helps young people in communities with the greatest need.
Theory of Literature I
Aubrey Gabel
GU4000
(taught in English and French)
R 2:10pm-4:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall
This course explores theoretical approaches to literature with emphasis on French and Francophone contributions. During the first few weeks of the semester, we examine foundational ideas about literature, authorship and criticism. We also review key critical concepts and theories relating to semiotics, rhetoric, narrative and genre. The course will include a brief overview of the rules of versification in French poetry, and we’ll practice techniques of close reading. As the semester progresses, we examine theories about literature’s relationship to empire and to the environment, to the expression of gender, the act of bearing witness and to multilinguality and translation. The units resonate with and build on each other, illustrating the recurrence of some key questions and debates - What is the relation of literary language to other language? Is the literary work a creation, a structure, a symptom? What does it mean to historicize literature? How do canons form and how do they change over time?
How to Love: Medieval French and Arabic
Yasmine Seale and Eliza Zingesser
GU4022
(taught in English)
W 10:10am-12:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall
How did people conceive of and talk about love on either side of the Pyrenees? This course will explore the many faces of desire in medieval French, Occitan, Arabic, Hebrew and Romance (proto-Spanish) literature to ask a broader question: what would be our understanding of lyric poetry, often taken to originate with the troubadours, if we incorporated the poems and songs of Al-Andalus? After anchoring ourselves in history, we will survey the major events and trends that attended the emergence of new poetic and musical forms both in Andalusia and in France between the 8th and the 14th centuries. We will study how these works were composed, read, performed, and transmitted. Weekly readings will combine scholarship with primary texts exploring the many facets of erotic experience: from sexual contact to love from afar, love as madness, love mediated by birds, rejection of marriage, gender fluidity and queerness. We will also think about the literary forms in which these themes are expressed, including dawn songs, bilingual love poems, treatises on achieving female orgasm, conduct manuals, and hybrid texts combining prose and verse. (Translations will be provided for most material, but reading knowledge of modern French is required.)
French Film Aesthetics
Tadas Bugvenecius
GU4028
(taught in English)
W 6:00pm-9:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall
R 12:10pm-2:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall
The seminar examines a particular branch of French-language film theory and criticism that deals with medium specificity, at the expense of reception and apparatus theories. We follow its history from the silent-era writings of Dulac and Epstein to the most recent inquiries into the notions of montage, découpage, and mise en scène. Along the way, we discuss the privileging of aesthetics in the Cahiers du cinéma criticism as well as its intersection with French theory in the work of Barthes, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Rancière. Obligatory weekly films by filmmakers such as Akerman, Delsol, Dulac, Duras, Hou, Ruiz, Sissako, Tati, and Triet will accompany and put pressure on theory.
Alice Diop: French Cinema and Postcolonial Universalism
Mame-Fatou Niang
GU4325
(taught in English)
T 2:10pm-4:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall
This seminar is the first comprehensive course on Alice Diop's cinema, from her confidential beginnings in 2005 (Clichy pour l’exemple) to her international success in 2022 (Saint Omer). Alice Diop is a young Black woman of Muslim culture, born in the banlieues to an immigrant family of modest means. Each of these six identities alone make her an outsider in a traditionally Parisian, white, bourgeois, and heavily male French cinema environment. Taken together, these characteristics form the main thread of this seminar: the aesthetics, intersectional identities, and universalist aspirations in Alice Diop’s that interrogate contemporary France. This class will present foundational themes of Diop's work, themes that are intimately weaved throughout the life of the filmmaker. Through these themes, we will analyze the theories of consciousness that are transforming French society at the beginning of the 21st century.
Classical French Moralists
Pierre Force
FR GU4441
(taught in French)
W 2:10pm-4:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall
A study of three seventeenth-century “examiners of the human soul” known for their virtuoso use of the short form and their attention to the puzzling nature of human behavior, with a focus on Pascal’s Pensées, La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, and La Bruyère’s Caractères.
Images of the French Revolution
Caroline Weber
ENFR4819
(taught in English)
M 6:10pm-8:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall
Since 1789, the French Revolution has been mythologized and analyzed in a host of polemical, historiographical, and literary writings as well as in the visual arts and cinema. This course focuses on Western European responses to the Revolution from the late 18th century to the present day. Authors studied include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Olympe de Gouges, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollestonecraft, the Marquis de Sade, Georg Büchner, Jules Michelet, Charles Dickens, Hegesippe Legitimus, and Chantal Thomas. A selection of 18th- and 19th-century caricatures and paintings and contemporary films will also be examined. (Reading knowledge of French required.)
French America, 1534-1804
Pierre Force
HIST GU4110
(taught in English)
A study of the French Atlantic World from the exploration of Canada to the Louisiana Purchase and Haitian Independence, with a focus on the relationship between war and trade, forms of intercultural negotiation, the economics of slavery, and the changing meaning of race.
Racial Histories of Europe
Emmanuelle Saada
FRHIST GU4XXX
(taught in English)
In this class, we will analyze how race and racism have shaped Europe’s history since the beginning of the sixteenth century. We will see how race has been used as a “regime of truth” to make sense of history, society, and cultures. We will investigate the relation between two modes of production of racial categories: the practices of differentiation and exclusion in social life and the many representations of races in and beyond science. We will explore the connections between the practices of racialization internal to Europe (with Roma, Sinti and Jews) and those which have been for a long time seen as taking place “outside” of Europe, as the product of slavery and colonization. We will explore how sex and the management of sexuality have impacted the government of races and how the formation of identities—not only “national” identities but the very idea of Europe-- has been shaped by race. Finally, we will reflect on the history of discourses about racism in Europe and make sense of the recurring theme of “color blindness” in Europe.
Rebel Literature: Politics and the Novel in the Francophone World, 1950-1980
Emmanuel Kattan
GU4XXX
(taught in French)
“Quand on refuse, on dit non” ("When one refuses, one says no"), said Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma towards the end of his life. Taking this stance as a starting point, this seminar will explore, through the lens of the novel, major political upheavals in the Francophone world during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. We will shed light on the history of decolonization, May 68, the feminist movement, and struggles against racism and injustice by delving into the imaginary worlds of six leading francophone novelists: Marguerite Duras, Ahmadou Kourouma, Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous, George Perec and Édouard Glissant.
Questioning Enlightenment Women
Joanna Stalnaker
FREN GU4XXX
(taught in French)
In this seminar, we will explore three different but interrelated questions. First, how did women shape the Enlightenment through the questions they posed? In addressing this question, we will look both at women writers and thinkers whose contribution to the Enlightenment has long been obscured, and at women as they appear in canonical works by men. Second, how has Enlightenment historiography sought to affirm or deny the importance of women to an intellectual movement many believe shaped the modern world? Here, debates about sociability and the institution of the salons will be central. Third, what questions do we want to put to Enlightenment women in confronting the persistent challenges of our own time? How might questioning Enlightenment women change our overall view of the Enlightenment and its legacy?
This seminar will be offered in French, with all readings and discussions in French. Advanced undergraduates may enroll with instructor permission.