French

82-90 Wall Street, 3rd floor, 432.4900
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Chair
Edwin Duval

Director of Graduate Studies
Naomi Schor (Acting [F]) (82-90 Wall Street, Rm 320, 432.4902, naomi.schor@yale.edu)
Ora Avni [Sp] (82-90 Wall Street, Rm 322, 432.4902, ora.avni@yale.edu)

Professors
Ora Avni, Howard Bloch, Peter Brooks, Edwin Duval, Shoshana Felman, Christopher L. Miller, Naomi Schor

Associate Professors
Catherine Cusset, Françoise Jaouën, Susan Weiner

Assistant Professors
Mark Burde, Catherine Labio, Farid Laroussi, Donia Mounsef, Jean-Jacques Poucel

Fields of Study
Fields include French literature, criticism, and theory 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 will have to 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 normally takes place during the fifth term or, in some special cases, no later than the end of 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, in conjunction with the program in African American Studies, a combined Ph.D. in French and African American Studies. The program is most appropriate for students who intend to concentrate in and write a dissertation on the literature of the francophone Caribbean.

Students in the combined degree program are subject to all the requirements for a Ph.D. in French. In addition, they 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 the program and the department. For further details see African American Studies.

Master's Degrees
M.Phil. See Graduate School requirements. Alternatively, the Department of French offers, in conjunction with the Medieval Studies program, a joint M.Phil. degree. 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
FREN 610a, Old French. Howard Bloch. Wednesday 10.30-12.20
An introduction to the historical grammar of Old French through reading, translation, and discussion of some of its major literary forms, including epic, romance, allegory, lai, and fabliau.

FREN 711b, The Theatrical Body. Donia Mounsef. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
Textual and stage representations of the body in French theater from Romanticism to the present. Questions of gestic history, eroticization, fetishization, transgression, and the abject body are investigated in works of Hugo, Dumas, Apollinaire, Cocteau, Duras, Genet, Cixous, and Koltès. Theoretical readings in Barthes, Artaud, Kristeva, Butler, and Grosz.

FREN 731b, Writing History in France. Ora Avni. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
An examination of the practice and function of history in post-Revolutionary France, with . special attention to both the epistemological value of history and the construction of a national imaginaire. Reading may include Michelet, Thierry, Monod, Langlois, Maurras, Bloch, Ricoeur, Girardet, Amalvi, Nora, Veyne, and de Certeau.

[FREN 784b, Literature and Psychoanalysis.]

[FREN 787a, Literature, Testimony, and Justice.]

FREN 789a, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Shoshana Felman. Wednesday 3.30-5.20
Elie Wiesel has said that our age has invented a new genre, that of testimony. The course looks at various instances of testimony (literary, historical, legal, poetical, political, and psychoanalytic) as part of a general investigation of memory and trauma through narratives of individual and collective limit-experiences. In analyzing art's relation both to death and to survival, the course probes (in texts and films) the limits of what can be said and the limits of representation in the face of events whose reality unsettles common sense, defies imagination, and resists assimilation. Topics include the tension between violence and speech, truth and denial, judgment and forgiveness, and the concrete interrelations between language, silence, mourning, injury, identity, and cross-cultural exchanges. In English. Also CPLT 789a.

FREN 835a, Les Essais de Montaigne. Edwin Duval. Thursday 10.30-12.20
Les Essais studied in the light of (1) Montaigne's project as it is represented within the book itself, (2) the problems posed by particular aspects of Montaigne's writing (self-portraiture, self-contradiction, textual accretion, open form, quotation, intertextuality), and especially (3) close readings of individual chapters taken on their own terms.

FREN 854a, Tragic Drama: Corneille, Molière, Racine. Françoise Jaouën. Monday 1.30-3.20
Various forms of tragic drama studied in their historical context: Horace, Cinna, Polyeucte, Dom Juan, Le Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, Andromaque, Iphigénie, Phèdre. Topics include: dramatic theory, history of theater, history, and influence on other genres.

FREN 886b, Medieval Romance. Mark Burde. Thursday 1.30-3.20
Readings from representative works of medieval French romance, including several works from each of the following categories: roman antique (Thebes, Troie, Eneas, Alexandre), roman breton (Chevalier au lion, Chevalier de la charrette, Tristan et Iseut), roman idyllique (Flore et Blanchefleur, Galeran de Bretagne, Aucassin et Nicolette).

FREN 905a, Flaubert and Maupassant: Literary Fathers and Fictional Sons. Naomi Schor. Monday 3.30-5.20
Readings of major works by Flaubert and Maupassant.

FREN 919a, Proust Scriptum. Farid Laroussi. Tuesday 1.30-3.20
A close reading of (several volumes of) la Recherche. Points of study include the concept of writing oneself, a reflection on emotions (how the narrator feels through others), and on the representation and transgression of social order (classes, sexuality, arts). We also examine the Barthesian theme of initiation: literary, erotic, and autobiographical. Critical readings focus on the canon of the canon, with essays by Barthes, Bataille, Beckett, Deleuze, Doubrovsky, and Lévinas.

FREN 923a, Sartre. Susan Weiner. Tuesday 10.30-12.20
The literary and philosophical works of Jean-Paul Sartre, along with authors with whom he entered into critical dialogue (Flaubert, Mallarmé, Genet) and the debates surrounding existentialism. Works include La Nausée, Les Mots, La Putain respectueuse, Questions de Méthode, L'Etre et le néant, Réflexions sur la question juive, and Qu'est-ce que la littérature?

FREN 938b, L'Extrème contemporain: Late Twentieth-Century Poets. Jean-Jacques Poucel. Monday 3.30-5.20
A close study of Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Deguy, Denis Roche, and Jacques Roubaud, based on poetry and theoretical writings. Emphasis on comparing changes in their textual strategies. This initiation to contemporary poetics is followed by a sampling of younger poets.

FREN 939b, The French Atlantic Triangle and the Literature of the Slave Trade. Christopher L. Miller. Thursday 10.30-12.20
An analysis of the Atlantic world that was created by the slave trade, in its French version, as seen through history, philosophy, and literature from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Readings from Voltaire, the journal of a slave-trading sailor, Rousseau, Madame de Duras, Baron Roger, Mérimée, Sue, Césaire, Sembene, T. Mandeleau. In English. Also AFAM 854b, AFST 739b, CPLT 723b .

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