French
82-90 Wall Street, 3rd floor, 432.4900
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Chair
Edwin Duval
Director of Graduate Studies
Ora Avni [F] (82–90 Wall Street, Rm 322, 432.4902, ora.avni@yale.edu)
Thomas Kavanagh [Sp] (thomas.kavanagh@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, Julia Prest
Lecturer
Achille Mbembe (Visiting, African American Studies)
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 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 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 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
All classes are taught in French unless otherwise
noted.
FREN 610a, Old French. Mark Burde. W 1.30–3.20
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, fabliau,
and drama.
FREN 714a, Gender, Desire, and the Modern Stage. Donia
Mounsef. W 5.30–7.20
This course examines the provocative relationship between
gender, sexuality, desire, and the modern stage. It looks
at the way desire is produced and consumed from the early
twentieth century to the way it is instituted, circulated,
and promoted as infinite accumulation in late capitalism.
The course considers the subject and object relationship delineated
by the theatrical gaze and provides an intersection between
sexual politics and politics of representation by looking
at the way texts are structured by desire, and theatricality
by difference. The following questions are also addressed:
What makes desire performative? What are the forces that script
the female body as emblems of desire and property? What effects
do censorship and obscenity laws have on playwriting and theater
production? Readings from Apollinaire, Cocteau, Sartre, Sarraute,
Genet, Duras, Cixous, Koltès. Theoretical readings
from: Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig, Foucault, Beauvoir, Cixous,
Clément, Derrida, Case, Butler.
FREN 741a, The Bayeux Tapestry. Howard Bloch.
M 3.30–5.20
A study of the Bayeux Tapestry in the context of the
Conquest and the Anglo-Norman world. Topics include origin,
formal description, fabrication, nordic and continental homologies;
relation of inscription to image, of borders to central panels,
of decoration to narration; representations of the protagonists,
of the events, of the everyday, of military, nautical, architectural,
social, political, religious, and natural worlds; mixing of
Viking, Celtic, Saxon, and Gallic cultures; literary and chronicle
accounts. Basic text, the Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition
CD, 2003. In English. Also HSAR 593a.
FREN 751bu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Thomas
Kavanagh. M 10.30–12.20
This seminar examines the relation between Rousseau the
writer and Rousseau the political philosopher—between
such works as La Nouvelle Héloïse, Les Confessions,
Les Rêveries on the one hand and the two Discours,
Emile, Du contrat social, and the Essai sur l’origine
des langues on the other. We look at various approaches
(psychoanalytic, historical, semiological) to resolving this
opposition while considering the major contemporary critical
assessments of Rousseau (Starobinski, Derrida, de Man, etc.).
FREN 789a, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History. Shoshana Felman. W 3.30–5.20
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 (texts
by Plato, Jacques Lacan, Emile Zola, Oscar Wilde, Virginia
Woolf, Hannah Arendt; syllabus to be posted on the Web in
August). Requirements: two short papers in the course of the
term; oral presentations and ongoing active participation.
Also CPLT 789a.
FREN 815b, The Medieval French Lyric. Howard
Bloch. M 1.30–3.20
A study of major lyric works from the twelfth-century
chanson de toile (women’s work songs), occasional
poetry (aube, pastourelle, débat), and grand
chant courtois through some of the fixed forms and great
poetic personalities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
(Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, Christine de Pizan, Charles
d’Orléans, Villon). In English.
FREN 839b, Events, Ideologies, and Literature in the
Renaissance. Edwin Duval. Th 10.30–12.20
A study of literary responses to various political and
religious crises of the Renaissance, with special emphasis
on the period of the Wars of Religion (1562–1598). The
seminar focuses on the literary means (form, parody, allusion,
metaphor, allegory) by which authors bestow meaning and value
on events and ideologies, while at the same time transforming
history and polemics into transcendent aesthetic experience.
Readings include Marot’s Enfer and Epîtres, Ronsard’s
Odes and Discours, selections from Rabelais’s
Quart Livre de Pantagruel, and d’Aubigné’s
Printemps and Tragiques.
FREN 856b, Theatrical Controversy in Seventeenth-Century
France. Julia Prest. W 1.30–3.20
Just as the seventeenth century gave rise to one of the
most productive periods of French drama, so it saw some of
the most vociferous debates regarding theater production.
For many anti-theatricalists, any form of theater was fundamentally
wrong, while for others, certain types of theater, produced
under certain circumstances, were deemed acceptable. Objections
were made on religious and moral grounds as well as aesthetic
and personal ones. Paying particular attention to the famous
querelles surrounding Le Cid and L’Ecole
des Femmes, we examine the diverse arguments put forward
against different forms of theater and those used in their
defense.
FREN 914b, French Perspective, Maghreban Landscape. Farid
Laroussi. T 1.30–3.20
An examination of French Orientalism, its presence and
function in literary works by twentieth-century French authors.
We try also to assess imagination and collective identity
set in colonial and postcolonial backgrounds. Other issues
at stake are representation of modernity versus the Other
(Muslim), and how the Maghreb (the Orient) is constructed
as a symbolic place to heal traumas of Western society. Readings
include: Belhad, Berque, Gide, Le Clézio, Massignon,
Montherlant, Tounier, and Van Cauwerlaert.
FREN 931b, The Archive of Popular Front France. Dudley
Andrew. T 1.30–3.20; screening
TBA
In 1930s Paris, novelists (Céline, Malraux), intellectuals
(Gide, Benjamin), and filmmakers (Renoir) found themselves
recruited by politics. Using cinema to bracket the Popular
Front (Surrealism on one side, Poetic Realism on the other),
this seminar examines publishing, the art scene, and radical
groups such as the Collège de Sociologie to track the
social changes visible in French culture at the end of the
Third Republic. In English. Also CPLT 934b, FILM 843b.
FREN 932a, Representations of the German Occupation
in Literature and Film. Ora Avni. T 1.30–3.20
An examination of the evolving representations of the
German Occupation for the last fifty years. The course has
a strong historical component (the years immediately preceding
the war, the shift in public opinion after the defeat, the
politics of the Vichy regime, the cleansing after the liberation,
etc.). Film and fictions are viewed for their intrinsic value
as well as for the ways in which they relate to national memory,
writing (and rewriting) history, carrying on cultural and
political legacies, and the relationship of the arts and the
realities they purport to depict.
FREN 950a, The Functions of “Appetite” in
Contemporary African Fiction. Achille Mbembe. T 10.30–12.20
Recent criticism has paid little attention to “appetite,”
despite its prominence in African contemporary fiction, imagery,
and archives. Our seminar attempts to fill this gap. We examine
the question of appetite in the general context of an African
written history of the five senses. We focus especially on
appetite, desire, lack, and envy; appetite and economy; and
finally, appetite and the death drive. This exploration leads
to a rethinking of the construction of the subject in times
of want and plenty, and of the politics that govern relations
between people and things in such circumstances.
FREN 957b, Experiments in Fiction. Ora Avni. Th 1.30–3.20
This course examines modern novels and short stories
that attempt to break away from traditional narratives. We
work simultaneously on two planes: (1) Broken narratives as
they reflect postwar disillusions, fear of loss of the “self,”
and the bewilderment of man cast in a world that is no longer
coherent. (2) Formal experiments with narratives that purport
to tell “stories” without the support of “heroes,”
“characters,” proper sequence, linear time, or
even events that can be attributed to a specific persona.
Under these conditions, what is left of stories and storytelling?
More importantly, to what extent do these experiments succeed
in breaking away from literary tradition?
FREN 964au, Après-Mai. Susan Weiner. Th 1.30–3.20
Fiction, film, and thought after the events of May 1968
up to the present day. The focus is on texts whose impact
was made primarily in French culture rather than in the American
university. Authors include Sollers, Finkielkraut, Houellebecq,
Echenoz, Lyotard, Furet, Fumaroli, Eustache, Carax.
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