Graduate Program
Graduate Seminars
Fall 2008
Spring 2009
Fall 2008
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 754a/CPLT 936a/FILM 756a, Real French Film: Renoir, Bazin, Rohmer.
Dudley Andrew
Th 9:25-11:15
Fifty years ago André Bazin died just as the New Wave began. This seminar examines his famous essays and discovers scores of his unknown articles. His ideas matured in dialogue with certain auteurs, chiefly Jean Renoir. We look at the Renoir Bazin grew up with (films of the 1930s) and the one he befriended (in the '50s) to trace a profoundly realist strain of French film aesthetics. Eric Rohmer co-edited Cahiers du Cinéma with Bazin and likewise championed Renoir. Rohmer's own filmmaking career took off just as Bazin died and Renoir ceased directing. These three figures maintained a singularly important conversation whose legacy can be felt in France right up to the film Rohmer completed last year. The words "real" and "French" raise a host of fertile problems to be explored in an international conference at Yale at the end of the term. Attendance at the conference, as well as at our weekly screenings, is obligatory. In English; reading knowledge of French required.
FREN 825a, Voix de Femme/Voix d'Homme.
Edwin Duval
F 1:30-3:20
A study of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poetry and prose in which speaking voices are strongly gendered feminine (or masculine). Primary emphasis is on "voice" as a rhetorical effect, considered independently of the sex of the author - that is, as a poetic or dramatic persona fashioned to represent a particular type or character, governed by principles of decorum and shaped by various traditions and conventions. But does the sex of the author have anything to do with the gender of the speaker? Works include Christine de Pizan, Cent ballades d'amant et de dame; Alain Chartier, La belle dame sans mercy; Hélisenne de Crenne, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'Amours; Jeanne Flore, Contes amoureux; Marguerite de Navarre, Le miroir de l'ame pecheresse and Les prisons; Bertrand de La Borderie, L'Amie de Court; Antoine Héroet, La Parfaicte Amye; Maurice Scève, Délie; Louise Labé, Oeuvres; as well as influential models like Ovid's Amores and Heroides; the Song of Songs, and a selection of medieval chansons.
FREN 862a, The Enlightenment and its Legacy.
Catherine Labio
W 1:30-3:20
An inquiry into the French Enlightenment, its global context, and its ongoing legacy. Particular attention will be paid to the organization of knowledge; the classification of people, periods, and places; consumption, trade, and finance; the French Revolution; and the Counter-Enlightenment. We shall also study the intellectual and political controversies that still obtain with respect to the Enlightenment. Works by Marivaux, Watteau, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Vernet, the physiocrats, Laclos, Kant, Gouges, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Horkheimer, Foucault, Lyotard, and Jonathan Israel. (Also CPLT 762a)
FREN 898a/CPLT 898a, Fin-de-siècle France.
Maurice Samuels
W 9:25-11:15
This course examines major French literary and artistic movements of the last decades of the nineteenth century (Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism) in their cultural context. Weekly reading assignments pair literary texts with contemporary theoretical/medical/political discourse on such topics as disease, crime, sex, poverty, colonialism, nationalism, and technology. Literary authors include Barbey, Mallarmé, Maupassant, Rachilde, Villiers, and Zola. Theorists include Bergson, Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Le Bon, Nordau, Renan, and Simmel. Some attention also paid to the visual arts
All classes are taught in French unless otherwise noted.
FREN 896b, Comedy and Comic Theory from Corneille to Beaumarchais .
Julia Prest
M 1:30-3:20
An examination of French comedy (from the rehabilitation of the theatre in the 1630s to the eve of the Revolution) in the context of theatre history and comic theory. We will focus on plays by Corneille, Molière, Marivaux and Beaumarchais alongside theoretical writings by Aristotle, Corneille, Molière, Diderot, Rousseau and Bergson. Questions to be discussed will 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 910b, Reading/Writing after Mallarmé.
Jean-Jacques Poucel
W 3:30-5:20
This seminar juxtaposes close readings of Stéphane Mallarmé's poetry and prose with studies in its reception, including perspectives in psychoanalysis, structuralism, and deconstruction. Secondary readings include Blanchot, Bowie, Derrida, Marchal, Murat, Rancière and Richard.
FREN 920b, Proust's Laughter.
Farid Laroussi
T 9:25-11:15
A study of one particular dimension of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu: laughter and humor. An examination on the reflective authenticity of laughter in relation to sexuality and sadism. We will also discuss to what extent Proust's narrative strategies regarding humor are nonessentializing tools used against the bourgeois construction of "comic relief" in fictional works. While laughter and humor may harness the possibilities of cultural subversion, we will examine how it may have eventually become one point of autobiographical reference deprived of moral scope. Readings include four volumes of A la recherche, as well as critical materials by Barthes, Beckett, Compagnon, Deleuze, Descombes, and Kristeva.
FREN 932b, The German Occupation in Film and Fiction.
Ora Avni
T 1:30-3:20
An examination of the evolving representations of the German Occupation over the last sixty 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 illustrate and problematize national memory, writing (and rewriting) history, cultural and political legacies, and the relationship of the arts and the realities they purport to depict. Tentative reading list includes Henry Russo, De Gaulle, Pétain, Modiano, Céline, Drieu la Rochelle, Sartre, Duras, Morand, Pagnol, Calaferte. Films: Nuit et Brouillard, Le chagrin et la pitié, Au revoir les enfants, M. Klein, Lacombe Lucien, Les violins du bal, Une histoire de femmes, Un héros très ordinaire, L'Oeil de Vichy, La Guerre des boutons.
FREN 947b, African-Caribbean Connections in French.
Christopher L. Miller
Th 1:30-3:20
The intertwined literary and cultural relations between Africa and the Caribbean, as established by the slave trade, French colonialism, and globalization. Focus on changing models of linkage and exile, beginning with nineteenth-century experiments and continuing with early twentieth-century movements in Haiti and in France; two versions of Negritude; social realism; independence; "creoleness." Authors include Maran, Senghor, Césaire, Roumain, Sembène, Glissant, Condé, Warner-Vieyra, Lopes. Reading knowledge of French required. Conducted in English. (Also AFAM 847b/AFST 847b/CPLT 947b)
