French
82–90 Wall Street, 3d floor, 432.4900
www.yale.edu/french/
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Chair
Thomas Kavanagh
Director of Graduate Studies
Maurice Samuels [F] (82-90 Wall St., Rm 325, 432.4912)
Christopher L. Miller [Sp] (82-90 Wall St., Rm 322, 432.4906)
Professors
Ora Avni, Howard Bloch, Edwin Duval, Marie-Hélène Girard (Visiting), Thomas Kavanagh, Christopher L. Miller
Associate Professors
Catherine Labio, Farid Laroussi, Donia Mounsef, Jean-Jacques Poucel
Assistant Professor
Julia Prest
Fields of Study
Fields include French literature, criticism, theory, and culture from the early Middle Ages to the present, and the French-language literatures of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Maghreb.
Special Admissions Requirements
A thorough command of French is expected, as well as a good preparation in all fields of French literature. A strong background in at least one other foreign language is also expected. Applicants should submit a twenty-page writing sample in French.
Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
(1) Candidates must demonstrate a reading knowledge of Latin and a second language by passing department-administered examinations, Yale undergraduate courses, or Yale Summer Language Institute courses with at least a B or High Pass grade. Students must fulfill the Latin requirement before the beginning of their third term of study. The other language requirement must be satisfied before the beginning of the fifth term, and before the oral qualifying examination. (2) During the first two years of study, students normally take sixteen term courses. These must include Old French and at least two graduate-level term courses outside the department. They may include one term of a language course (Latin or other) taken as a means of fulfilling one of the language requirements, and as many as four graduate-level term courses outside the department. A grade of Honors must be obtained in at least four of the sixteen courses, two or more of which must be in courses offered by the department. (3) A qualifying oral examination takes place during the sixth term. The examination is designed to demonstrate students’ mastery of the French language, their knowledge and command of selected topics in literature, and their capacity to present and discuss texts and issues. (4) After having successfully passed the qualifying oral examination, students are required to submit a dissertation prospectus for approval, normally no later than the end of the term following the oral examination.
In order to be admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D., students must complete all predissertation requirements, including the prospectus. Students must be admitted to candidacy by the end of the seventh term.
Teaching is considered an integral part of the preparation for the Ph.D. degree and all students are required to teach for at least one year. Opportunities to teach undergraduate courses normally become available to candidates in their third year, after consideration of the needs of the department and of the students’ capacity both to teach and to fulfill their final requirements. Prior to teaching, students take a language-teaching methodology course.
Combined Ph.D. Program
The French department also offers two combined Ph.D.s: one in French and African American Studies (in conjunction with the program in African American Studies), and one in French and Film Studies (in conjunction with the program in Film Studies). Students in both of these combined degree programs are subject to all the requirements for a Ph.D. in French. In addition, they must fulfill certain requirements particular to the conjoined program.
The combined Ph.D. in French and African American Studies is most appropriate for students who intend to concentrate in and write a dissertation on the literature of the francophone Caribbean. Students must complete two core courses in African American Studies and a third-year colloquium. For this degree, the French department’s requirement for a language in addition to Latin will normally be filled by demonstrating reading competence in a Creole language of the Caribbean or in Spanish. The students’ oral examinations normally include two topics of African American content. The dissertation prospectus must be approved by the director of graduate studies both in the French department and in African American Studies, and final approval of the dissertation must come from both departments. For further details see African American Studies.
For students in the combined Ph.D. program in French and Film Studies, the oral examination will normally include one topic on film theory and one on French film. Both the dissertation prospectus and the final dissertation must be approved by the French department and the program in Film Studies. In addition, Film Studies requires a dissertation defense. For further details see Film Studies.
Master’s Degrees
M.Phil. See Degree Requirements. Additionally, students in French are eligible to pursue a supplemental M.Phil. degree in Medieval Studies. For further details, see Medieval Studies.
M.A. (en route to the PH.D.). Students enrolled in the Ph.D. program may petition for the M.A. degree after a minimum of one year of study in residence, upon completion of the Latin requirement, and of eight courses, of which at least six are in French. Two grades of Honors in French graduate courses are required.
Program materials are available upon request to the Administrative Assistant to the Director of Graduate Studies, French Department, Yale University, PO Box 208251, New Haven CT 06520-8251.
Courses
All classes are taught in French unless otherwise noted.
FREN 610a, Old French. Howard Bloch.
W 3.30–5.20
An introduction to the historical grammar of Old French through reading, translation, and discussion of some of its major literary forms in prose and verse, including epic, romance, lai, and fabliau. We start with easier later prose work and move back in time to earlier verse. Weekly text readings and chapter study in our grammar book, in-class translation, discussion; final examination with a familiar passage, a sight passage, and a take-home essay. The course is conducted in French, though students who are not from the French department may translate into and speak English in class and on the final exam.
FREN 682b, Stylistic and Rhetoric. Ora Avni.
Th 1.30–3.20
Practice of oral and written presentation of ideas for all occasions: prospectus, proposals (for papers, articles, fellowships, etc.), abstracts, typical twenty-minute talks, first class meetings, lectures, job interviews. We also practice presenting the same idea in a one-liner, one minute, and up to five minutes (useful for job interviews and for answering the vexing “So what are you working on these days?”). Daily written assignments and a few class presentations. Some phonetics.
FREN 747a, Literal Lyric: Meaning and Figuration in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Jean-Jacques Poucel.
W 9.25–11.15
A general introduction to modern French poetry particularly focusing on questions of figural meaning, lyrical voice, and concrete forms. In addition to considering a sequence of difficult poems, artist books, and performance pieces, readings include selections of art criticism, philosophy of language, and critical theory. Poems by Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Desnos, Cendrars, Ponge, du Bouchet, Bonnefoy, Roche, Roubaud, Heidsieck, Hocquard, and Alferi.
FREN 753b, French Film: History, Theory, Pedagogy. Thomas Kavanagh.
M 9.25–11.15
This seminar focuses on three related topics: the history of French cinema, how film theory conceptualizes and inflects that history, and the role of film studies in a French Studies curriculum. Neither strictly historical nor strictly theoretical, this course approaches the films we study through groupings of secondary texts (criticism, theory, literary works) that raise issues concerning the use of film in the broader study of French culture. We look at films by such directors as Lumière, Méliès, Vigo, Buñuel, Léger, Carné, Duvivier, Renoir, Resnais, Godard, Truffaut, Marker, Varda, Tavernier, Leconte, and Teno as well as at critical and theoretical positions taken by Arnheim, Bazin, Andrew, Burch, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, Metz, Lacan, Kavanagh, Rodowick, Baudry, Deleuze, Ukadike, and Thackway. Also CPLT 931b, FILM 621b.
FREN 762b, Literature and Economics in the Eighteenth Century. Catherine Labio.
T 1.30–3.20
The role played by literature in the formation of a new economic and moral subject as well as the key role played by modern economic thought and new economic realities in the emergence of modern literary forms and of literature as an academic discipline. Works by such authors as Defoe, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, and Adam Smith. Taught in English. Also CPLT 761b, ENGL 739b.
FREN 763a, Readings in Critical Theory. Catherine Labio.
T 1.30–3.20
Key contributions to late twentieth-century French/francophone thought. Topics include the role of art and literature in the post-World War II era; aesthetics and ideology; economics and the post-modern subject. Taught in French. Also CPLT 858a.
FREN 812b, The Old French Fabliaux. Howard Bloch.
W 3.30–5.20
A study of the 170 comic tales in verse that not only make us laugh out loud, but whose veins of satire, parody, comedy of language, situation, and character as well as farce, are at the root of the European comic tradition. We read the irreverent fabliaux within the context of ancient and medieval as well as contemporary writings on laughter as well as against the background of twelfth- and thirteenth-century social, religious, and literary culture. Texts contained in a bilingual (OF/English) reader of translations by Ned Dubin. Taught in English.
FREN 826b, Rabelais. Edwin Duval.
F 9.25–11.15
A detailed, chronological study of the four authentic books of Pantagruel—Pantagruel (1532), Gargantua (1534), Le Tiers Livre (1546), Le Quart Livre (1552)—read in their various literary and cultural contexts. Principal points of interest include the relationship between popular and humanist culture, characteristic features of humanist writing (paradox, parody, irony, intertextuality, etc.), the interdependence of form and meaning in Renaissance narrative and satire, and the problem of interpretation as it is posed both in and by Rabelais’s books.
FREN 876a, Libertins et philosophes. Thomas Kavanagh.
M 9.25–11.15
This seminar focuses on two major currents within eighteenth-century French literature and culture: libertinage and philosophie. Our concern is with examining how the intersection of these different options—one focusing on the body, the other on the mind; one frivolous, the other serious—represent distinct yet complementary attempts to recast the premises of the cultural and social order. Works by Crébillon, Voltaire, Boyer d’Argens, Rousseau, Diderot, La Molière, La Mettrie, Palissot, Laclos, Beaumarchais, Sade as well as paintings by Boucher, Fragonard, and David.
FREN 896b, Comedy and Comic Theory from Corneille to Beaumarchais. Julia Prest.
M 1.30–3.20
An examination of 150 years of French comedy (from the rehabilitation of the theater in the 1630s to the eve of the Revolution) in the context of theater history and comic theory. We focus on plays by Corneille, Molière, Marivaux, and Beaumarchais alongside theoretical writings by Aristotle, Corneille, Molière, Diderot, Rousseau, and Bergson. Questions to be discussed include the ubiquity of the marriage plot; the notion of the “happy end”; farce versus high comedy; comedy as a bourgeois genre; comedy as a subversive or a normative genre; the workings of satire; sources of laughter and the comic actor’s relation to his/her role.
FREN 899a, Modernity. Maurice Samuels.
W 1.30–3.20
This seminar studies literature and art from nineteenth-century France alongside theoretical and historical reflections to explore the significance of modernity. How did historical forces shape cultural trends? How did literature and art define what it means to be modern? Writers include Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola. Theorists include Benjamin, Durkheim, Foucault, Marx, Simmel, and Weber. We also examine the painting of Manet and his followers.
FREN 915b, Writing and Independence in the Maghreb. Farid Laroussi.
W 9.25–11.15
This seminar explores some works of what is deemed the first generation of Maghrebi writers in French, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Special focus on how literature became individualized as opposed to the Métropole cultural references. We examine the hardcore ideological content of some novels and autobiographies with respect to historical mutations (nationalism) and intellectual imports (Marxism, existentialism). The course approaches postcolonial issues located between the fear of exoticism and alienation from native identities. Readings from Amrouche, Chraïbi, Dib, Fanon, Kateb, Mammeri, Memmi, and Sartre.
FREN 943b, Creole Identities and Fictions. Christopher L. Miller.
Th 9.25–11.15
Focusing on the French and English Caribbean, this course analyzes the quintessential but ambiguous American condition: that of the “Creole.” Encompassing all non-native cultures, this term is inseparable from issues of race and slavery. Readings of historical and literary texts: Moreau de Saint-Méry, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Madame de Staël, Charlotte Brontë (and reinventions of Wuthering Heights by Jean Rhys and Maryse Condé), the Créolistes of Martinique. Attention to Louisiana and to the Haitian Revolution. Reading knowledge of French required. Also AFAM 851b, CPLT 989b.
FREN 946a, Postcolonial Theory and Its Literature. Christopher L. Miller.
Th 9.25–11.15
A survey of theories relevant to colonial and postcolonial literature and culture. The course focuses on theoretical models (Orientalism, hybridity, métissage, créolité, “minor literature”), but also gives attention to the literary texts from which they are derived (francophone and anglophone). Readings from Said, Bhabha, Spivak, Mbembe, Amselle, Glissant, Deleuze, Guattari. Taught in English. Also AFAM 846a, AFST 746a, CPLT 725au.
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