Fall 2024 Seminars
While (neo)colonial imaginaries and global linear thinking have mapped lands and waters, they continue to shape our vision of the world, and of its historical dynamics and cultural relations. Such worldviews also largely determine enduring taxonomies and representations, impacting how nations, peoples, and communities around the globe conceive of themselves, in relation to their human and non-human environments. A case in point, colonial imagination and colonial difference have persistently conceived of islands and archipelagoes of the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific as vulnerable, exploitable and fragmented isolates, largely irrelevant to our understanding of world history or even of concepts such as modernity, cosmopolitanism, and/or globalization. In opposition, this seminar considers how writers and creators from these three oceans, craft decolonial imaginaries which put to test global linear thinking, by expressing ways of knowing and of being in the world that break away from Western epistemologies and ontologies. Using a comparative and transversal approach to study the francophone literatures and expressive cultures from the Antilles, the Mascarene Islands, and Polynesia in particular, we shall reflect on the works of situated writers and on how their worldviews, embodied experiences, and local histories, long considered insignificant to the production of so-called universal knowledge, echo each other in ways that question the significance that we, even as scholars, often give to geographical divides/frontiers—whether natural, artificial, symbolic or political—when we study francophone literatures and cultures. By examining how the plurality of ways of being expressed in their works disrupts the hierarchical ordering of the world, we shall consider how their decentering narratives challenge abstract cogitos and disembodied universalist traditions, to favor mythologies, epistemologies, and ontologies that ‘re-world’ the world we know.
Instructor: Tracy Rutler
Thursdays 3:30-6:30pm
This course is designed to introduce you to a wide variety of schools of literary theory and criticism. In this course we will discuss not only what it is that we call “literature,” but also what we call “theory,” examining how schools build off of, react to, or engage with one another. We will learn how to judge a work of literary art objectively through theory and we will also learn to understand multiple interpretations of literature through different theoretical apparatuses. The goal of this course is not to help you to apply theory to a text, but rather to appreciate the history of theory, understanding the distinct schools of thought and their relation to one another. Although we will touch upon ancient and early modern critical methods, we will focus mainly on the schools of thought that emerged from the twentieth century to the present, including some of the newest turns we are seeing in theory today.
Instructor: Heather McCoy
Wednesdays 3:30-6:30pm
FR 581/GER 511 is designed to foster an informed professional outlook on the teaching and learning of French and German. It includes both theoretical and practical components, provides students access to professional resources for teaching, and introduces students to the necessary frames for participation in informed conversations about teaching and learning.
Instructor: Burleigh Hendrickson
Tuesdays 3:30-6:30pm
Beginning with the Enlightenment, this research seminar interrogates the dueling concepts of “dignity” and “indignation” as they unfolded in the modern Francophone world. Since at least the 18th Century, France has been at center of debates surrounding natural, civil, and human rights. Far less prevalent in the scholarship, however, are equally important discussions of “human dignity,” and the indignation that its absence can produce. How were these terms defined, understood, and debated by rational philosophers of the 18th century, and in what instances did the terms take on sentimental or universal qualities? Taking a genealogical approach, we will study what happens to “dignity” when it escapes the confines of philosophical or noble discourse, or when it is appropriated by indignant, marginalized peoples of the 19th and 20th centuries. How does one obtain dignity, and does its absence necessarily produce indignation, and in what form? As France emerged from two world wars, colonial peoples revisited the concept of dignity and imagined an alternative postcolonial existence. Culminating in 1968 after independence, young people across the former empire voiced indignation at both Western neo-imperialism and human rights abuses under postcolonial dictatorship. Comparative exploration of dignity and indignation will help place them in conversation with emerging discourses on related concepts of human rights and social justice.
Spring 2024 Seminars
Ce séminaire est consacré à l’analyse de la production littéraire des écrivaines du XIXe siècle, dans sa diversité et ses constantes, ses caractéristiques génériques (romans, récits de voyage, poésie, littérature didactique, journalisme, etc.) et ses objets. Comment comprendre ce que signifie la notion de « littérature féminine » (sinon d’« écriture féminine ») dans les contextes variés des genres abordés ? Comment le genre s’inscrit-il dans les genres ? Intellectuelles et écrivaines reconnues en leur temps telles Mme de Staël, Claire de Duras ou George Sand, figures emblématiques d’une histoire des femmes dont la dimension littéraire a longtemps échappé à l’historiographie du XIXe siècle telles Flora Tristan ou la comtesse de Ségur, femmes dont les œuvres balisent les territoires diversifiés et banalisés d’une production écrite allant s’accroissant (journalisme, ouvrages scolaires) : un tel corpus oblige à considérer les questions de genres dans leurs multiples manifestations et prolongements conceptuels (convention, reproduction, appropriation, contournement, détournement). Nous ferons usage du corpus critique grandissant de la recherche contemporaine s’attachant à l’examen des questions théoriques et socio-historiques que soulève l’esthétique de ces textes. Si les écrits de femmes sont de plus en plus étudiés et de mieux en mieux compris en relation avec les problématiques soulevées par l’histoire littéraire de manière générale, il existe de vastes domaines d’étude encore peu explorés qui méritent notre attention. Vous aurez donc la chance de vous trouver face à l’inconnu et de construire une lecture originale (dans les deux sens du terme) de textes trop souvent laissés pour compte. Profitez-en!
Largement consacré aux littératures francophones des îles du sud-ouest de l’océan Indien (Maurice, La Réunion, Rodrigues, Madagascar, Mayotte, entre autres), ce séminaire s’interrogera sur la manière dont ces littératures représentent les effets néfastes durables de la domination (néo)coloniale dans cette région archipélique du monde. Si l’océan Indien a de fait longtemps été le terrain de bataille de nombreux empires coloniaux (le Portugal, la Hollande, la France, la Grande-Bretagne), l’appropriation et l’exploitation coloniales des territoires insulaires et des routes india-océaniques y ont entraîné non seulement un déplacement massif de peuples, de langues et de cultures dans le contexte de l’esclavage et de l’engagisme ; mais également des fractures (géo)politiques, identitaires et économiques avec lesquelles ces sociétés insulaires/ archipéliques se débattent toujours. Considérées depuis longtemps comme des territoires à exploiter, voire à contrôler du fait de leur situation géographique sur la route maritime et commerciale reliant l’Europe aux Indes orientales, aujourd’hui encore nombre de ces îles constituent un atout géostratégique de taille pour les puissances militaires présentes dans la région (la France, les États-Unis, l’Inde et la Chine). Or, c’est précisément en rapport avec cette place qu’occupent les îles et les archipels dans les projets militaires, (néo)coloniaux et néolibéraux aux étendues planétaires, que ce séminaire propose d’aborder les œuvres d’auteur.e.s tel.le.s que Jean-Marie Le Clézio, Ananda Devi, Nathacha Appanah, Jean-François Samlong, Jean-Luc Raharimanana et Soeuf Elbadawi, entre autres. Plus précisément, nous nous intéresserons, au fil des séances, tant à la forme et à l’esthétique de leurs littératures, qu’aux visions du monde associées à la condition archipélique, et à la signification (ethno)culturelle, mémorielle et/ou identitaire de leur écriture. Si nombre de ces auteur.e.s donnent de fait voix aux traumatismes issus de la violence coloniale dans la région, leurs textes nous invitent surtout à rencontrer des personnages aux itinéraires multiples et ainsi à réfléchir aux thématiques de la migration, de la mémoire, de la transmission et de résistance au sein de ces géographies mutilées.
Instructor: Adlai Murdoch
Tu & Th 12:05-1:20pm
In large measure, the culture of the Francophone Caribbean has been perceived and defined through the discursive framework of négritude, followed more recently by the ethnocultural approaches and transnational resonances of antillanité and créolité. But the inherent risk in such an undifferentiated view is not to take into account the temporal and geopolitical changes that have given rise to these theories even as French Caribbean society itself undergoes continuous transformation and change. What were the accomplishments of négritude, and why was it ultimately sidelined? How, if at all, do the theories of antillanité and créolité articulate the political and ethnocultural experience of the Caribbean, and what are their similarities and differences? How can we locate a Caribbean postcolonial component separate from ‘traditional’ postcolonialism but reflecting the geopolitical ambiguities of the dom-tom? How have migration, integration into the EU, and the growth of Franco-Caribbean diasporic communities shaped and impacted the location and presence of French Caribbean subjectivity as it continues to evolve? This course will use select texts to explore the relationship between these discourses and the evolving terms of Francophone Caribbean literary and cultural production.
Fall 2023 Seminars
Instructor: Tracy Rutler
Mo 6:00pm-9:00pm
In an article on disability and postcolonialism, Clare Barker and Stuart Murray write, “Disability Studies problematically transports theories and methodologies developed within the western academy to other global locations, paying only nominal attention to local formations and understandings of disability.” However, the problem may lie less in the theories and methodologies in question than in the origins of modern notions of disability itself. What we tend to think of as normative ability in the West emerges, in large part, from Enlightenment-era science that sometimes relied upon ghastly experimentation on unwilling subjects. These experiments defined what “normal” bodies can and should do, focusing on bodies as matter to be examined rather than fellow humans in need of care. In this seminar we will examine a variety of literary sources including fictional, philosophical, and scientific texts, sources from eighteenth-century medical school archives, personal journals and letters, and more to respond to the following questions: what is (dis)ability? How might it be defined differently if we look to practices outside of the burgeoning medical profession of the 18th century? What if we included care and healing practices of the early French colonies? In short, what does it mean to talk about bodies, medicine, and care in an early modern context, and how might that still shape/haunt the way we think of these categories today?
Instructor: Fabienne Kanor
Th 3:30pm-6:00pm
It was during a stay in Croatia that Aimé Césaire, then a student, transformed his homesickness and his experience of having been colonized into literary ferment. To discover that the Croatian island he sees every morning is called Martiniska repatriates him in poetry to his home, in Martinique. From this experience was born Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. This anecdote encourages us to explore the underside of creation and to experience the creative act for real. In this seminar, I therefore propose to reconcile two approaches: the practice of creative writing and the critical analysis of materials (written and visual) in which the artistic process is revealed and/or dissected. Through a trans-regional and trans-disciplinary approach, we will explore works of varied nature, from French-speaking authors and artists (Africa, Caribbean, Quebec, Pacific, France) for the most part, and English speaking. Among the authors/artists of the corpus : Patrick Chamoiseau, Dany Laferrière, Nally Kaplan, Marguerite Duras, Chantal Spitz, Ananda Devi, Véronique Kanor, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Felwine Sarr, Raphael Confiant, Toni Morrison, Léon Gontran-Damas, etc. Intense and intimate, these sessions/workshops will allow you to give birth to a consistent creative work at the end of the semester.
Spring 2023 Seminars
Instructor: Tracy Rutler
Tu 3:30pm-6:00pm
This course is designed to introduce you to the modern schools of literary theory and criticism. In this course, we will discuss not only what it is that we call “literature,” but also what we call “Theory” (with a capital T). We will learn how to judge a work of literary art objectively through theory and we will also learn to understand multiple interpretations of literature through different literary apparatuses. The goal of this course is not to help you to apply theory to a text, but rather to appreciate the history of theory, understanding the distinct schools of thought and their relation to one another. Although we will touch upon ancient and early modern critical methods, we will focus mainly on the schools of thought that emerged from the twentieth century to the present, including some of the newest turns we are seeing in theory today.
Instructor: Maria-Gratias Sinon
We 3:30pm-6:00pm
This seminar aims to explore the direct and indirect links between Caribbean and sub-Saharan basic texts (novels, poems, films, and plays) and theoretical and critical texts that call into question the controversies or identity conflicts expressed within French-speaking Caribbean and sub-Saharan societies and within metropolitan France. We will address, among other things, questions concerning French citizenship, immigration, and coloniality. We will also define the French-speaking world in postcolonial and transnational contexts, in space and time. Our collective goal will be to deepen the understanding of contemporary French and Francophone spaces, the complexity of literary and socio-cultural phenomena, considering their history and their transformation to refine the critical eye.
Fall 2022 Seminars
Instructor: Jennifer Boittin
We 3:30-5:30 p.m.
This seminar’s goal is to explore various aspects of French and Francophone cultural, intellectual, and sociopolitical history from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Rather than presenting a simple chronology of events, this class explores historical events or moments via precise themes, including colonialism, literature, gender, race, class, sexuality, violence, visual studies, and so forth, thereby linking historiographical approaches to a variety of other disciplinary approaches. The types of “readings” will vary from historical texts to various cultural objects, and also include novels, graphic novels, and films. Topics include the French Revolution, Haiti’s war of independence, Algeria, the Commune, and French Indochina (today Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and territory in China).
Instructor: Fabienne Kanor
Mo 4:00-7:00 p.m.
In his famous introspective lyric poem “Heritage,” Countee Cullen wonders what Africa is. The response resembles a catalogue, Cullen’s Africa is “Copper sun,” “strong bronzed men,” Jungle star,” etc., indicating an irreducible distance between the African-American writer and the country of his ancestors. This poem, came out of the Harlem Renaissance, is at the forefront of this trans-disciplinary graduate seminar designed to be a return journey – imaginative or real, to Africa-s. Through various lenses and different forms of contemporary works rooted in Africa and in the African Diaspora (films, literature, visuals arts), we will explore issues of race, immigration, cultural shifts, colonization, identity and more. Here are some of the works that we will study: the feature film Africa paradise by Beninese Sylvestre Amoussou, the short film directed by Senegalese Ben Diogaye Ben Les princes noirs de St-Germain-des-prés, the philosophical book Afrotopia by Senegalese Felwine Sarr, Maryse Condé’s novel En attendant le Bonheur (Guadeloupe) as well as the artwork of Congolese artist Sammy Baloji….
Spring 2022 Seminars
Instructor: Fabienne Kanor
Tu 9-11.30am
If for the descendants of Africans deported to America by the Atlantic slave trade, the hold of the slave ship remains a damned place of memory, where their enslaved ancestors experienced social annihilation, violent death, struggle and survival, it resists oblivion and keeps haunting the living because. Beyond the figures disclosed by historians, dated maps, and some written and material traces documenting the history of slave ships, our knowledge of the slave ship’s hold remains incomplete and theoretical. We cannot visit the hold of an existing slave ship; it’s a fact. We can no longer descend into the hold. In order to imagine what the African captives endured at the bottom of the ocean, in the womb of the slave ship, all that remains for us is art. In this trans-national and trans-disciplinary seminar, we will examine the protective, emancipatory and curative powers of art. Faced with a memory deficit and the lack of records existing for the history of the slave trade, as it was experienced by the captives, the artists and thinkers we will consider put the hold at the heart of their concerns, or of their sets. Ghostly, fantastical or realistic, this hold is an important motif in their works and, in most of the cases, a motor to transcend pain and to replace by more personal images, the visions fueled by collective memory: images of bodies stocking together, images of chains, images of night, of a sky suddenly disappeared, images of sharks waiting for chained bodies thrown into the sea, already dead or sometimes alive. Over the stopovers that we will make (Benin, Antilles, America, France), and the different artistic practices to which we will lean (literature, installation, cinema, performance, video clip), we will question the limits of art facing history, and facing the process of mourning and the duty of remembrance. Our multidisciplinary approach looks into transnational artistic works with a corpus ranging from Casey (rap singer), Orlando Paterson (historian), Guy Deslauriers (filmmaker), Edouard Glissant (philosopher), to Robert Jones Jr. and Zora Neale Hurston (literature), Kanor’s sisters (performances and literature), and Kara Walker (performer) among others.
This seminar will be taught in French and will also include a couple of creative writing workshops.
Instructor: Jennifer A. Boittin
Tu 3.30-5.30pm
This class ensures that students gain a core understanding of events and movements in French and Francophone cultural, intellectual, and sociopolitical history during a period shaped by revolutions (political and sociocultural), wars, and colonialism. We will read texts by historians who explore, for example, the history of mentalities, memory, representation, and violence, and who use various approaches to explore that history, including intersectional forms of analysis anchored for example in class, race, or gender. We will also consider first-hand accounts, including literature, film, and iconography.
Fall 2021 Seminars
Instructor: Marc Authier
MWF 9:05-9:55 a.m.
Ce cours est une introduction à la linguistique théorique, une science qui vise à cerner et à formaliser les règles inconscientes qui régissent le fonctionnement des langues humaines. Comme nous le verrons, ces règles se divisent en cinq domaines : celles qui déterminent la structure des phrases, celles qui régissent l’interprétation littérale des phrases, celles qui permettent leurs interprétations étendues en contexte, celles qui gouvernent la prononciation, et celles qui contraignent la forme des mots. Chacun de ces domaines constitue une sous-composante de la linguistique. Il s’agit là de la syntaxe, de la sémantique, de la pragmatique, de la phonologie, et de la morphologie. Dans ce cours, nous examinerons ces sous-composantes en faisant référence à des phénomènes exhibés par la langue française. Bien que le but principal de ce cours soit de vous faire comprendre en quoi consiste l’analyse linguistique d’une langue, nous nous pencherons aussi sur ce à quoi on peut appliquer la théorie linguistique. Par exemple, nous verrons comment un critique littéraire peut parfois utiliser la théorie linguistique pour affiner son analyse de texte; comment un enseignant de langue peut utiliser la théorie linguistique dans ses cours de stylistique ou dans ses cours de français langue seconde; et enfin comment un anthropologue (ou un historien) peut utiliser certaines notions de linguistique pour mieux cerner la culture d’un groupe de locuteurs particuliers.
Instructor: Jennifer A. Boittin
W 3:30-6:00 p.m.
This class ensures that students gain a core understanding of events and movements in French and Francophone cultural, intellectual, and sociopolitical history during a period shaped by revolutions (political and sociocultural), wars, and colonialism. We will read texts by historians who explore, for example, the history of mentalities, memory, representation, and violence, and who use various approaches to explore that history, including intersectional forms of analysis anchored for example in class, race, or gender. We will also consider first-hand accounts, including literature, film, and iconography.
Instructor: Jennifer A. Boittin
Th 3:30-6:00 p.m.
One of the FFS department’s core courses, FR580 gives students an overview of approaches and methodologies that shape French and Francophone cultural studies. The course introduces students to key texts in disciplines such as history, anthropology, or sociology as well as a number of interdisciplinary theories in fields such as cultural studies, visual studies, gender studies, and so forth. We also explore how to apply these approaches and methods to the various objects one analyzes in cultural studies, such as archives, images, buildings, maps, statues, and graphic novels.
Instructor: Burleigh Hendrickson
Tu & Th 9:05-10:20 a.m.
Beginning with the Enlightenment, this research seminar interrogates the dueling concepts of “dignity” and “indignation” as they unfolded in the modern Francophone world. Since at least the 18th Century, France has been at center of debates surrounding natural, civil, and human rights. Far less prevalent in the scholarship, however, are equally important discussions of “human dignity,” and the indignation that its absence can produce. How were these terms defined, understood, and debated by rational philosophers of the 18th century, and in what instances did the terms take on sentimental or universal qualities? Taking a genealogical approach, we will study what happens to “dignity” when it escapes the confines of philosophical or noble discourse, or when it is appropriated by indignant, marginalized peoples of the 19th and 20th centuries. How does one obtain dignity, and does its absence necessarily produce indignation, and in what form? As France emerged from two world wars, colonial peoples revisited the concept of dignity and imagined an alternative postcolonial existence. Culminating in 1968 after independence, young people across the former empire voiced indignation at both Western neo-imperialism and human rights abuses under postcolonial dictatorship. Comparative exploration of dignity and indignation will help place them in conversation with emerging discourses on related concepts of human rights and social justice.
* Reading knowledge of French is required
Spring 2021 Seminars
Instructor: Bruno Jean-François
Th 9:00-11:30 a.m. Via Zoom
As global linear thinking mapped islands and oceans, continents and seas, it also conditioned our minds and geographical frameworks. Colonial imagination, in particular, has persistently conceived of islands and archipelagoes from the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific, as vulnerable, exploitable, and fragmented isolates. Their peoples, cultures, and ways of being have long been mired in exotic clichés, based on mythologies of racial degeneracy, the excesses associated with tropical nature, and the deficiencies attributed to indigeneity, slavery, and orality. They are often represented as irrelevant to our understanding of modernity, cosmopolitanism, or cultural exchange. But by consistently challenging the divide between lands and seas, islands and oceans, the literatures from the Mascarenes, the Antilles, and Polynesia have long trained our minds to think relationally about (trans)oceanic movements. Their representation of human mobility tests our capacity to conceive differently of world history, and to question the colonial taxonomies that have resulted in the division between the powerful North and the so-called isolates of the Global South. In this seminar, we shall consider how Francophone expressions from these islands challenge disembodied conceptions of space and fixed notions of borders in order to redraw the contours of oceans and archipelagoes as fluid and permeable geo-assemblages. Using a variety of approaches, we will namely discuss the transformative interventions of postcolonial writers such as Aimé Césaire and Nathacha Appanah, Chantal Spitz and Ananda Devi, Raharimanana and Shenaz Patel whose works reinvent the contours of their fragmented worlds. This seminar will be conducted in French; and in the spirit of thinking beyond borders and divides, some sessions will be run with the other 2 spring seminars offered by Prof. Monicat and Prof. Kanor. It will be our pleasure to think of our work and our course contents relationally.
Instructor: Bénédicte Monicat
MW 3:45-5:00 p.m. Willard Bldg 174.
L’histoire des prix littéraires permet d’aborder nombre de questions que ce séminaire propose d’explorer à partir d’un cas d’étude révélateur de l’histoire et de l’historiographie littéraire du dixneuvième siècle, le prix Montyon de l’Académie française, et de poursuivre jusque dans la période contemporaine sur les traces des prix Goncourt, Fémina, et autres distinctions pourvoyeuses d’une certaine reconnaissance. Prendre pour point de départ le cas du prix Montyon permet de réfléchir aux questions de genres (littéraires et sexués), d’identités (de classes et de races), à celles des conditions de production de la littérature telles que le dix-neuvième siècle les pose (et se les pose), et à leurs transmutations contemporaines. La première partie du semestre sera donc consacrée à l’exploration et à l’analyse de ce que reconnaissance veut dire pour les récipiendaires du prix Montyon, dont un très grand nombre furent des femmes. La deuxième partie du semestre, structurée autour de l’ouvrage de Sylvie Ducas, La littérature à quel(s) prix ?, vous laissera le choix de travailler sur les prix, les auteur.e.s, les corpus de votre choix. Des sessions communes sont prévues entre les trois séminaires offerts au printemps, projets et discussions inter-séminaristes bienvenus!
Instructor: Fabienne Kanor
Tu 9:00-11:30 a.m. Via Zoom.
Mainly based on contemporary French and Francophone literature, cinema, visual arts & performance, this trans-disciplinary graduate seminar will show how troubled and disabling the relationship between metropolitan France and its two former colonies, Martinique and Guadeloupe, has always been; how this unstable unbreakable relationship inspired authors and artists belonging to these French territories, still under control. We will address topics such as identity, the legacy of slavery, marronnage, independence, displacement and migrations; we will also consider art as a miraculous tool which can help build an imaginary home/world, which does not belong to anyone else but oneself. We will explore a trans-disciplinary corpus composed of ultra-contemporary works such as Combien de Solitudes by V. Kanor, M, comme Marronnage by P. Le Namouric, Je m’appelle Vénus by C. Loïal, as well as classical opus including Le soleil partagé by J. Zobel or Cahier d’un retour au pays natal by Aimé Césaire. To get a better understanding of these creative works, we will navigate across notions such as “dépossession” as conceptualized by Edouard Glissant, “alienation” (Fanon, Memmi), or “marronisme” (René Lise) among others. Also, we will broaden our perspective by approaching works by non Francophone Black creators: J. Baldwin, Kara Walker, Isaac Julien… Last but not least: this seminar will give us an unique opportunity to explore the arcana of creation through regular creative workshops which should lead us to reflect more poetically and intimately on the thematics and problematics addressed by this seminar. Bridges between our three spring seminars: some sessions will be run by two or three professors (Professor Bénédicte Monicat and Professor Emmanuel Bruno Jean François), therefore offering different approaches and perspectives on the same topic.
Fall 2020 Seminars
Instructor: JC Vuillemin
Baroque & Roll! Based on the revisited Foucaldian concept of “épistémè” and on the Nietzschean views of history and genealogy, this seminar –while discussing current criticism on early modern France– proposes the notion of “Baroque” as a pertinent heuristic tool apt to refresh the traditional conception of 17th-Century French Literature. It thus deconstructs the illusion of “French classicism,” challenges the ideological claim of a baroqueless France, and reconsiders major canonical texts in the context of key philosophical trends: Epicure, Aristotle, Descartes, Galilée, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Foucault. Baroque will thus appear much more as a philosophical notion than as an aesthetic category. In addition to pieces from selected philosophers, we will enjoy excerpts from Montaigne, Bernini, Poussin, Pascal, Corneille, Pascal, Molière, Racine, Lully, Boileau, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Mme de La Fayette, Mme de Sablé, La Fontaine, Bossuet… and some other cool dudes.
Instructor: Tracy Rutler
This course is designed to introduce you to the modern schools of literary theory and criticism. In this course, we will discuss not only what it is that we call “literature,” but also what we call “Theory” (with a capital T). We will learn how to judge a work of literary art objectively through theory and we will also learn to understand multiple interpretations of literature through different literary apparatuses. The goal of this course is not to help you to apply theory to a text, but rather to appreciate the history of theory, understanding the distinct schools of thought and their relation to one another. Although we will touch upon ancient and early modern critical methods, we will focus mainly on the schools of thought that emerged from the twentieth century to the present, including some of the newest turns we are seeing in theory today.
Instructor: Heather McCoy
The course introduces students to the theory and methods of teaching both languages at the
college level. It deals not only with techniques, materials, and bibliography of the field but also
evaluates the contributions of applied linguistics to college-level language
pedagogy. French 581 / German 511 familiarizes students with current theories of foreign
language education as they relate to post-secondary language acquisition. This course further
includes the practical aspects of college-level teaching with special reference to problems related
specifically to the teaching and learning of both languages.
Instructor: Willa Silverman
This year’s research seminar on the Belle Époque will be entitled “The Dreyfus Affair in History and Memory.” It will present the scandal that wracked France from 1894 to 1906 as an event of world-historic significance, a template for analyzing phenomena including the birth of modern anti-Semitism; the collective engagement of intellectuels; ‘fake news;’ the roles, in a democratic republic, of the judicial system and of the military; the carceral universe; and human rights. Our readings and discussions will engage not only the history of l’Affaire and its selected contemporary representations (in caricature, literature, cinema and history-writing) but also recent polemics such as the debates concerning both a possible panthéonisation of Alfred Dreyfus and Roman Polanski’s 2019 film, J’Accuse. Readings from Bernard-Lazare (Une erreur judiciaire : La Verité sur l’affaire Dreyfus, 1898), Léon Blum (Souvenirs sur l’Affaire, 1935), Alfred Dreyfus (Cinq années de ma vie, 1894-1899, 1901), Anatole France (Monsieur Bergeret à Paris, 1901), Jean Jaurès (Les Preuves, 1898), Marcel Proust (Jean Santeuil, 1952), Séverine (Vers la lumière…impressions vécues, 1900), Émile Zola (La Vérité en marche : L’Affaire Dreyfus, 1901) and others.
This seminar will be taught in English. Reading knowledge of French is required.
Spring 2020 Seminars
Instructor: Jennifer Boittin
This year-long course introduces students to various components of graduate studies while
training them for diverse activities associated with their future academic positions. Throughout
the course, we explore the scholarly and instructional dimensions of French and Francophone
Studies with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity, considering everything from publication outlets
to teaching portfolios, grant writing to dissertation or book proposals. During the Fall semester,
we focus heavily upon job market preparation (C.V., job application letters, mock interviews, job
talks, etc.).
Instructor: Tracy Rutler
What does it mean to be normal? How does the concept of normalcy become solidified in the 17th and 18th centuries? And what does that mean for those who are abnormal? In this seminar, we will examine how philosophical, scientific, and literary works from the early modern period in France construct the idea of a heterogeneous “normal” subject, while also reading works that attempt to disrupt this normative discourse. The period of the Enlightenment in particular is one in which the classification of knowledge becomes valorized to previously unseen extents. Figures that remain unclassifiable are thus often excluded from the production of knowledge, or worse, they become instruments in the battle to maintain and reproduce social, religious, and cultural norms. Throughout the semester we will read novels, letters, and plays that center on characters who defy early modern formulations of normativity, and we will reflect upon the ways in which these texts produce different kinds of knowledge. Our discussions will also be informed by readings of modern critical work on norms and abnormality.
This course will be conducted in French.
Instructor: Bruno Jean-François
Taking the works of Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant as a point of departure to a series of conversations, this seminar will discuss some of the salient aspects of his thinking, that include concepts such as Relation, creolization, archipelagic thinking, and chaos-world. By putting his texts in dialogue with the works of both postcolonial and decolonial writers, thinkers, philosophers, and critics, who write from a variety of geographical locations, cultural experiences, and epistemological traditions, we shall discuss how Glissant’s poetics and philosophy foreground ways of being, knowing, and thinking, that break away from both the Enlightenment thought and the Cold War area studies model. In particular, we shall consider how his concern with a non-Hegelian dialectics, his despatialization of time, and his alternative genealogy of the subject as non-transcendental, have produced frameworks that generate renewed understandings of identity, culture, and history, through notions such as rhizome, errantry, entanglement, and totality. Indeed, in Glissant’s thinking, the chaotic network of Relation is constituted through contacts between cultures, but these cultures are not discursive objects tied to territory, nor do they refer to a filiation or legitimacy established through political or epistemological domination. As a means of investigating the many resonances of Glissant’s thinking with a diversity of modes of expression, we shall examine works from a variety of genres that include novels, poetry, visual arts, indigenous writings, philosophical texts, and theoretical readings. We shall consequently discuss how the thematic, aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological expressions of these works disarticulate oppressive modes of modernity, cultural classifications, as well as the taxonomies of racial and cultural segregation, that colonial and modern imaginaries have persistently consolidated.
The seminar will be conducted in French mainly, although theoretical discussions of texts written/translated in English may also occasionally be conducted in English.
Instructor: Jennifer Boittin
Instructor: Abigail Celis
This course is for students who wish to improve their skills in visual analysis and gain an understanding of current theoretical discussions in film and visual studies. The primary sources will, for the most part, be drawn from the French-speaking world in the 20th/21st century, with an emphasis on documentary, photojournalism, and ethnography, along with the work of artists and filmmakers who work creatively with archival sources and ethnographic methods. Attention will be given to embodied dimensions of making and viewing images, and to images as material, auratic, and tactile resources. Some of the key issues we will address include race and representation, viewing ethics, politics of visibility, and sensory experience. Together, we will work towards and understanding of how still and moving images make sense and are sensemaking. This course will include a writing workshop component with weekly writing exercises and regular sharing of written work. This course has been approved for credit toward the Visual Studies dual-title Ph.D.
The course will be taught in English; students may turn in their assignments in French or English.
Fall 2019 Seminars
Instructor: Jennifer Boittin
This year-long course introduces students to various components of graduate studies while
training them for diverse activities associated with their future academic positions. Throughout
the course, we explore the scholarly and instructional dimensions of French and Francophone
Studies with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity, considering everything from publication outlets
to teaching portfolios, grant writing to dissertation or book proposals. During the Fall semester,
we focus heavily upon job market preparation (C.V., job application letters, mock interviews, job
talks, etc.).
Instructor: Marc Authier
This course is an introduction to theoretical linguistics, a scientific field of inquiry the goal of
which is to discover and formalize those subconscious rules that allow us to produce and process
natural language sentences. Such rules can be divided into four basic types: those that determine
sentence structure (syntax), those that constrain invariant aspects of sentential meaning
(semantics), those that seek to capture variable aspects of meaning arising from the context of
utterance (pragmatics), those that determine the pronunciation of words and phrases
(phonetics/phonology), and those that constrain the combinatorial properties of affixes wordinternally
(morphology). We will study and illustrate each of these components through data
drawn from French. Although our main objective will be to arrive at an understanding of what
knowledge of language consists of, we will also consider some of the applications of linguistic
theory. More specifically, we will see how it can be used to inform second language acquisition
research, language pedagogy, literary analysis and cultural studies.
Instructor: Jennifer A. Boittin
Intersectionality, race, colonialism, gender… these are highly charged terms in contemporary
France. So we will begin this seminar by rethinking our understandings of these concepts from
outside the American academy, before using them to frame our readings of the histories and
cultures of (post)colonial migrations and circulations. Thematically we will pay particular
attention to waterways and ports as they are analyzed and represented in historiography, theory,
literature, visual studies and cinema, among other sources and approaches.
Instructor: Bénédicte Monicat
Ce séminaire prend comme point de départ et cadre de référence la production littéraire des
écrivaines du XIXe siècle, dans sa diversité et ses constantes, ses caractéristiques génériques
(romans, récits de voyage, poésie, littérature didactique, journalisme, etc.) et ses multiples
objets. Comment comprendre ce que signifie la notion de « littérature féminine » (sinon
d’ « écriture féminine ») dans les contextes variés des genres abordés? Comment le genre
s’inscrit-il dans les genres ? Intellectuelles et écrivaines reconnues en leur temps telles Mme de
Staël, Claire de Duras ou George Sand, figures emblématiques d’une histoire des femmes dont la
dimension littéraire a longtemps échappé à l’historiographie du XIXe siècle telles Flora Tristan
ou la comtesse de Ségur, femmes dont les oeuvres balisent les territoires diversifiés et banalisés
d’une production écrite allant s’accroissant (journalisme, ouvrages scolaires) : un tel corpus
oblige à considérer les questions de genres dans leurs multiples manifestations et prolongements
conceptuels (convention, reproduction, appropriation, contournement, détournement). Nous
ferons usage du corpus critique grandissant de la recherche contemporaine s’attachant à l’examen
des questions théoriques et socio-historiques que soulève l’esthétique de ces textes. Si les écrits
de femmes sont de plus en plus étudiés et de mieux en mieux compris en relation avec les
problématiques soulevées par l’histoire littéraire de manière générale, il existe de vastes
domaines d’étude encore peu explorés qui méritent notre attention. Vous aurez donc la chance de
vous trouver face à l’inconnu et de construire une lecture originale (dans les deux sens du terme)
de textes trop souvent laissés pour compte. Vous pourrez aussi examiner les questions soulevées
en travaillant des objets en aval ou en amont de la période ici considérée. Profitez-en!
Instructor: Julia Goetz (Dept. of German)
The course introduces students to the theory and methods of teaching both languages at the
college level. It deals not only with techniques, materials, and bibliography of the field but also
evaluates the contributions of linguistics and psychology to college-level language
pedagogy. French 581 / German 511 familiarizes students with current theories of foreign
language education as they relate to post-secondary language acquisition. This course further
includes the practical aspects of college-level teaching with special reference to problems related
specifically to the teaching and learning of both languages.
Instructor: JC Vuillemin
Figure aussi essentielle qu’intempestive de l’humanisme de la Renaissance et, plus largement
encore, de l’histoire intellectuelle française, Montaigne fut un génial précurseur de l’essai et de
l’autoportrait littéraires, voire de l’écriture de soi. Pour un coup… d’essai, ce fut incontestablement
un coup de maître. À partir d’une sélection idoine de chapitres tirés des trois livres des Essais
agrémentée de textes de nature diverse — philosophique, poétique, plastique, politique — du XVIe
au XXIe siècle ce séminaire offre une vision compréhensive des multiples facettes de la pensée
montaignienne ainsi que de l’épistémè où elle s’inscrivit, et insiste sur le fait que maintes
problématiques théoriques d’aujourd’hui (rapports à soi et à autrui ; identité et altérité ; genres et
sexualités ; corps et esprit ; tolérance et diversité ; etc.) suscitaient déjà la réflexion de l’un des
meilleurs esprits de l’Europe baroque de la première modernité.
Spring 2019 Seminars
Instructor: Tracy Rutler
As we enter a moment in which the effects climate change are redefining the contours of our world in considerable and irreparable ways, scholarship that aims to understand the very matter of our world and its inhabitants has become increasingly important and timely. Life in the Anthropocene is one in which we must account for the way matter – human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, active and inert – affects our lives in real and sometimes unexpected ways. The growing field of New Materialisms (which also engages with such fields as Posthuman Studies, Animal Studies, and Environmental Humanities), attests to our human desire to understand how matter matters. In this course, however, we will see that such a fascination with matter is not new to humanity. Going back about 300 years, we will see how scientists and philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries were theorizing matter in ways that may seem at times familiar and at others strange. In this course, we will read scholars such as Rosi Braidotti, Mel Chen, and Jane Bennett alongside texts by Baruch Spinoza, Denis Diderot, and Rétif de la Bretonne, among others. We will also examine how many experiments performed by scientists in France and throughout Western Europe had lasting effects on how we think about such categories as gender, race, and ability.
Instructor: Bruno Jean-François
Considering a largely overlooked region in the study of Francophone Cultures of the Global South, this seminar engages with postcolonial literatures and visual cultures of the Indian Ocean, especially the ones from the Mascarene region, Madagascar and the Comoros archipelago. With over 5000 years of human interaction—compared to 2000 for the Pacific and 1000 for the Atlantic (Pearson 2003)—the Indian Ocean is the oldest travelled body of ocean in human history. As global movements of heterogeneous populations, experiences, and cultures left their mark on the dynamics of the region, they led to complex situations of identity loss and reconstruction, biological and cultural mixing, new forms of economic development, and sociopolitical challenges. Focusing both on literary texts and artistic productions from the South West of the Indian Ocean, the seminar will thus examine how transcolonial, transnational and “re-worlding” expressions from so-called minor islands can recalibrate both our historical and geopolitical understanding of diasporic cultures, multicultural societies and dynamics of creolization. Using relevant theories—and approaching the ocean both as a metaphor and a continuum that challenge islands’ geographical frontiers, notions of ‘isolates,’ and cultural historiographies—we shall reflect on the role played by local histories in featuring transversal dialogues, democratic solidarity, and epistemic justice.
The course will be conducted entirely in French.
Instructor: Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire
Theme for Spring 2019: Québec Through Literature and Film: A Survey
Situé aux frontières de l’Europe et de l’Amérique, mais défini par une géographie, une histoire, une culture, qui lui sont propres, le Québec sera le sujet d’étude de ce séminaire. Nous nous intéresserons ainsi à un contexte francophone singulier, mais marqué par des écrivaines et écrivains aux postures et aux racines plurielles. Notre objectif sera de composer un portrait nuancé du Québec passé et présent, et cela en nous familiarisant avec ses grandes œuvres cinématographiques, sa musique et, surtout, avec sa littérature. Nous aborderons ainsi des œuvres essentielles du patrimoine (en prose, en poésie et en théâtre), cela depuis les explorateurs du seizième siècle jusqu’aux romanciers néoquébécois et aux poétesses contemporaines des premières nations.
Fall 2018 Seminars
Instructor: Fabienne Kanor
Mainly based on contemporary French and Francophone literature, cinema & visual arts, this trans-disciplinary graduate seminar will show how the Middle Passage, and in particular the hold of the slave ship, haunts contemporary creation made by authors and artists of African descent. During the period of the Atlantic slave trade, the slave ship’s hold was the only place Black people put in chains could appropriate. There was no other place they could claim as their own since they knew nothing of the New World to which they were being deported by force. A space where the memory of the native land quickly deteriorated, the hold became the main “home” with which the uprooted captives could identify. Therefore, it became a “lieu de mémoire”, a place that kept traumatizing the descendants of people enslaved. In this seminar, we will work on a primary corpus of works of fiction and poetry such as Le Quatrième Siècle by Edouard Glissant, Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle by Simone Swartz-Bart, La saison de l’ombre by Léonora Miano, Zong! by NourbeSe Philip, Humus by Fabienne Kanor and a series of critical texts. We will also use historical archives and a wide corpus of films and visual arts such as Passage du Milieu (Guy Deslauriers), « La bouche du Roi » de Romuald Hazoumé, or no world by Kara Walker. This transnational and trans-disciplinary corpus will help us navigate across notions such as “la dépossession” as conceptualized by Edouard Glissant, “lieux de mémoire” (Pierre Nora), “social death” (Orlando Patterson), “alienation” (Fanon, Memmi), and “mélancolie” (Aimé Césaire), and hunt down the ghosts of the past and the evil spirits of the hold.
Le séminaire se tiendra en français “transmissible”, mais les étudiants pourront, sur papier, disserter en français ou en anglais, selon leur choix. Certains livres à lire seront en anglais (la plupart des textes francophones sont traduits en anglais quoi qu’il en soit) et les éléments audiovisuels utilisés (films) seront dans la mesure du possible sous-titrés.
Instructor: Tracy Rutler
This course is designed to introduce you to the modern schools of literary theory and criticism. In this course we will discuss not only what it is that we call “literature,” but also what we call “Theory” (with a capital T). We will learn how to judge a work of literary art objectively through theory and we will also learn to understand multiple interpretations of literature through different literary apparatuses. The goal of this course is not to help you to apply theory to a text, but rather to appreciate the history of theory, understanding the distinct schools of thought and their relation to one another. Although we will touch upon ancient and early modern critical methods, we will focus mainly on the schools of thought that emerged from the twentieth century to the present, including some of the newest turns we are seeing in theory today.
Instructor: Jean-Claude Vuillemin
Everything you wanted to know about Foucault but were afraid to ask…
Based on an emblematic selection of Michel Foucault’s major writings, this seminar is designed to provide a comprehensive and a sound knowledge of Foucault’s stimulating theories. Many of Foucault’s philosophical stands have significantly contributed to opening up new fields of investigation in a variety of domains and are frequently mentioned in numerous debates, in and out academe. It is therefore only fair that students in French Studies be conversant in the critical works — in their original and splendid ‘baroque’ French — of a philosopher so widely used, and too often abused. Fostering an awareness of philosophy as both une pratique (ergon) et une herméneutique (logos) this seminar, while theoretical in nature, will also encourage students to make use of the proverbial Foucauldian “tool-box” in their respective research fields and to test some of Foucault’s bold and inspiring postulates.
Instructor: Heather McCoy
This course is designed to foster an informed professional outlook on the teaching and learning of French. It includes both theoretical and practical components, provides students access to professional resources for teaching, and introduces students to the necessary vocabulary for participation in informed conversations about teaching and learning.
Spring 2018 Seminars
Instructor: Jennifer Boittin
Instructor: Marc Authier
Instructor: Bruno Jean-François
Instructor: Bénédicte Monicat
Fall 2017 Seminars
Instructor: Jennifer Boittin
Afin de marquer le centenaire de la Grande Guerre, nous allons revoir cet événement en trois parties : la guerre ; l’après-guerre ; et la mémoire contemporaine. Ce faisant, nous allons étudier les liens entre le genre, la classe et la race à l’aide de quelques exemples d’approches, de méthodologies, d’historiographies et de théories nous permettant d’explorer des sources aussi diverses que des romans, des films, des photographies et des bandes dessinées produites tout au long des vingtième et vingt-et-unième siècles francophones. Notre approche à la guerre sera donc sociale et culturelle. Le cours prendra comme exemples des cas tirés surtout de l’expérience francophone (y compris coloniale) de la guerre, mais vous pourrez aussi élargir vos recherches dans le cadre de vos contributions au cours et de votre mémoire de fin de semestre.
Instructor: Jennifer Boittin
Spring 2017 Seminars
Instructor: Jean-Claude Vuillemin
Grounded in current theater/performance theories, reception theories and semiotics of drama, this seminar is an archeo-genealogy of France’s theater from the Baroque episteme to the present. Based on a selection of major French plays and unavoidable playwrights, the course, while encouraging incursions into contemporary Francophone theater, will foster an awareness of theater as both dramatic and performance texts, literary and social events, and last, but certainly not least, will emphasize the critical role of the spec-actor.
Instructor: Tracy Rutler
Denis Diderot’s bourgeois drama, Le fils naturel (1757) opens with the narrator gazing in on a scene of intimate family drama. What follows is a play where romantic and familial relationships are called into question as each character’s true identity slowly unfolds. In the spectator’s gaze, the inherently intimate becomes overtly political. Blurring the boundary between the public and the private spheres, many authors of eighteenth-century France interrogate modes of political governance via a discourse on the family and its dissolution. In this course, we will read pieces of domestic fiction, taking a cue from Nancy Armstrong and re-linking the language of domesticity to its political power. Texts to be read may include: Diderot’s Fils naturel; Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne; Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse; Sade’s Justine; and Voltaire’s Zaire. Framing our discussion will be works by Plato, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Armstrong, Jacques Rancière, Michel de Certeau, Nancy K. Miller, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, among others.
Instructor: Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François
While global linear thinking mapped lands and waters, it also conditioned our minds and geographical frameworks. As such, colonial imagination persistently envisioned islands and archipelagoes as vulnerable, exploitable and fragmented isolates, irrelevant to our understanding of processes of cosmopolitanism. Engaging with island literatures (and expressive cultures) of the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Pacific regions, this seminar examines how ‘insular’ histories and experiences relate more to stories of exchanges and encounters than one would initially imagine. Exploring the possible interactions between relevant postcolonial concepts (mondialisation, Relation, créolisation) and the emerging field of the ‘New Thalassology’ or Ocean studies, we shall consider how Francophone expressions challenge disembodied conceptions of space and fixed notions of borders in order to redraw the contours of islands, oceans, and archipelagoes as fluid and permeable geo-assemblages. Using a variety of approaches, and focusing on both the decentered and decentering narratives offered by postcolonial writers (Devi, Appanah, Collen, Pyamootoo, Glissant, Condé, Chamoiseau, Pineau, Spitz), who make sense of their fragmented worlds differently, we will discuss their particular transformative interventions as a way of challenging exclusionary representations of so-called minor communities and experiences.
The course will be conducted in English, and will only include works that have been translated from French to English. Students who are familiar with written French are however encouraged to read these texts in their original version.
Fall 2016 Seminars
Instructor: Julie Kleinman
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar focuses on how encounters between Francophone Africa and the West have shaped culture, society, and politics in the Francophone world. Drawing on historical, ethnographic, and literary texts, we will move beyond the colonial encounter to study decolonization and negritude, the construction of African modernities, and contemporary encounters shaped by new forms of movement and migration. The structure of the class mimics the encounter model, as each section puts texts written by African authors into conversation with Euro-American counterparts. The course is designed to give students a historical context for understanding contemporary debates on African-European relations, as well as the conceptual tools to analyze issues of modernity, race, otherness, and cultural encounter from African perspectives.
Instructor: Jean-Claude Vuillemin
Based on the revisited Foucaldian concept of “épistémè” and the Nietzschean views of history and genealogy, this seminar –while discussing current criticism on early modern France– proposes the notion of “Baroque” as a pertinent heuristic tool apt to refresh and to question the traditional conception of 17th-Century French Literature. It thus deconstructs the so-called “French classicism,” challenges the ideological claim of a baroqueless France, reconsiders major canonical texts and early modern trends of thought (Aristotelianism, ‘modern science’, Jansenism, Libertinage), and promotes the Baroque as a philosophical concept rather than an aesthetic category.
Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault will read Montaigne, Galileo, Kepler, Bernini, Pascal, Corneille, Descartes, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Mme de La Fayette, Racine, Mme de Sablé, Bossuet… Baroque & Roll!
Instructor: Jean-Claude Vuillemin
While encouraging students to develop a sound theoretical grounding related to their own research interests, this course should help them to debunk ideologies in their thinking, and to gain fluency in theory and criticism. Along with an acquaintance with the most prominent “French Theory” actors: Foucault, Althusser, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, Rancière, etc., this course provides students with a systematic study of major theoretical trends (Formalism, New Criticism, Nouvelle Critique, Structuralism, Phenomenology, Reception Theories, New Historicism, Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, Performance Theories) whose knowledge is essential for engaging into fruitful (literary) criticism and for participating effectively in some of the most innovative contemporary philosophical debates. The course will also discuss the problematics of the subject as envisioned by Foucault in his latest research (‘souci de soi’ [epimeleia heautou], ‘dire-vrai [parrêsia]), and the assumed boundaries between philosophy and literature.
Instructor: Monique Yaari
The seminar examines the current “cultural turn” in French Studies as grounded in a variety of disciplines and their interactions: anthropology, historiography, semiotics, sociology, philosophy. The objects discussed consist primarily of practices, representations, and ideologies, ranging in scope from the local to the national and beyond, and from the quotidian to the visual arts. Examples include historical events and commemorations, urban spaces and public exhibitions, tourism, paintings. Seeking to foster development of analytical and interpretative skills, the approach adopted in this seminar combines close formal analysis with contextual and historically informed interpretation.
Instructor: Heather McCoy
This course is designed to foster an informed professional outlook on the teaching and learning of French. It includes both theoretical and practical components, provides students access to professional resources for teaching, and introduces students to the necessary vocabulary for participation in informed conversations about teaching and learning.
Spring 2016 Seminars
Instructor: Willa Z. Silverman
This year-long course introduces students to various components of graduate studies while training them for diverse activities associated with their future academic positions. Throughout the course, we explore the scholarly and instructional dimensions of French and Francophone Studies with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity. We consider everything from publication outlets to teaching portfolios, grant writing to dissertation or book proposals. During the Spring semester, we focus on skills as varied as writing a conference paper abstract; transforming a seminar paper into an article manuscript; and crafting grant and thesis proposals.
Instructor: Marc Authier
An in-depth survey of the subfields of linguistic theory, namely, syntax, semantics and phonetics/phonology based on data from French.
Instructor: Bénédicte Monicat
This seminar explores the diversity of women’s literary production and the variety of its objects in nineteenth-century France through the conceptual lens of genre and gender construction. It examines what the notion of “women’s literature” might entail, looks at the ways in which genre and gender intersect, and reflects upon the construction of literary historiography.
Instructor: Bruno Jean-François
Engaging with critical concepts such as postcolonialism, Francophonie and World literature, this seminar will focus on themes of mobility, cultural encounter and globalization as represented in contemporary texts from diverse geographical regions (the Indian Ocean, Africa and the Caribbean). Considering how postcolonial literary productions call for a revision of our historical, spatial and cultural frameworks, we will discuss a variety of approaches (mondialisation, Relation, créolisation, coolitude, afropéanisme) and examine their convergences and divergences as we refine our understanding of the specific contributions of Francophonie to the development of an ‘enlarged thinking’. We shall also examine how the discourse ethic of postcolonial writers from minor/marginal/peripheral Francophone worlds enhances epistemic justice, by challenging abstract cogitos and disembodied universalist traditions, and by bringing into discussion a new interactive definition of World literature, that acknowledges plurality of modes of being, of knowing and of thinking.
Instructor: Monique Yaari
This seminar will approach the city as material and cultural object, as a prism through which to view the contemporary world, and as object of literary representations. Theories of urban and landscape design, the poetics of space, place, and memory, evolving notions of modernity, and potentially new paths of inquiry such as eco- and geo-criticism will inform our discussions.
Fall 2015 Seminars
Instructor: Willa Z. Silverman
This year-long course introduces students to various components of graduate studies while training them for diverse activities associated with their future academic positions. Throughout the course, we explore the scholarly and instructional dimensions of French and Francophone Studies with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity. We consider everything from publication outlets to teaching portfolios, grant writing to dissertation or book proposals. During the Spring semester, we focus on skills as varied as writing a conference paper abstract; transforming a seminar paper into an article manuscript; and crafting grant and thesis proposals.
Instructor: Jean-Claude Vuillemin
While encouraging students to develop a sound theoretical grounding related to their research interests, this course helps them to debunk ideologies in their own ways of thinking, and to gain fluency in theory and criticism. Along with an acquaintance with the most prominent contributors to the famous “French Theory”: Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, etc., this course provides students with a systematic study of major theoretical trends (Formalism, New Criticism, Nouvelle Critique, Structuralism, Phenomenology, Reception Theories, New Historicism, Post-structuralism, Deconstruction) whose knowledge is essential for engaging into fruitful literary criticism and for participating effectively in some of the most innovative contemporary philosophical debates.
Instructor: Allan Stoekl
This seminar considers a number of contemporary French “empiritexts,” novelistic (but often non-fiction) writings that engage the reader in the consideration of objects, movement, terrains, technologies, and cities. Readings from Jean Rolin, Michel Bon, Annie Ernaux, Bruno Latour, Georges Perec, Olivia Rosenthal, Marie Darrieusecq, and others.
Instructor: Heather McCoy
This course is designed to foster an informed professional outlook on the teaching and learning of French. It includes both theoretical and practical components, provides students access to professional resources for teaching, and introduces students to the necessary vocabulary for participation in informed conversations about teaching and learning.
Instructor: Tracy Rutler
This seminar examines how philosophical and literary works from the early modern period in France construct the idea of a heterogeneous subject, while simultaneously reading works that attempt to disrupt this normative discourse.
The period of the Enlightenment in particular is one in which the classification of knowledge becomes valorized to previously unseen extents. Figures that remain unclassifiable are thus often excluded from the production
of knowledge, or worse, they become instruments in the battle to maintain and reproduce social, religious, and cultural norms. Throughout the semester, we will read novels, letters, and plays that center on characters that defy early
modern formulations of normativity, reflecting upon the ways in which these texts produce different kinds of knowledge. Our discussions will also be informed by readings of modern critical work on norms and abnormality.
Instructor: Jennifer Boittin
In this particular version of the Francophone Cultures course, we will explore connections between gender, sexuality and race in several French colonies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using relevant theories, historiographical texts, film and literature, we will consider how thinking about the French empire as a gendered space can help us to better understand the local dynamics that shaped both its varied and diverse spaces and the individuals within them.
Instructor: Willa Z. Silverman
This course presents an introduction to theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of French and Francophone history and culture. While one focus of the course will be on historiography (the Annales School, the cultural and linguistic ‘turns,’ histoire du temps présent, égo-histoire, transatlantic, transnational, and global history), we will also consider approaches to cultural objects drawn from semiotics, sociology, cultural studies, gender studies, LGBT studies, print culture studies, and other fields and disciplines.
Instructor: Bruno Jean-François
This seminar will engage with the literature (and expressive cultures) of the Indian Ocean, especially the ones located in the islands of the Mascarene region. The Indian Ocean is the oldest in human history, and it has been marked, for over 5000 years, by episodes of migration, displacement, and re-settlement that have affected all the ethnic groups traveling across its expanse. These diasporic movements, due to trade exchanges, colonialism, slavery, and indenture continue to have an impact on the economic, cultural, and social history of the region. Using relevant theories, we will consider how this history of exchange has led to identity loss and reconstruction, to biological and cultural mixing, to complex situations of oceanic creolization. We shall also reflect upon how the dynamic forms of economic development and political challenges represented in the literature of this region can help recalibrate the geopolitics and discourses of democratic practice in multicultural and multiethnic contexts at large.
Fall 2014 Seminars
Instructor: Allan Stoekl
In this seminar we will read Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Ponge in light of Poe’s esthetic theory, as elaborated in his essay “Poetics of Composition”. We will also consider Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire as an urban poet—again in the wake of Poe (“The Man of the Crowd”)–and consider as well how readings of Poe led to a rethinking of the urban (poetic) object, with ramifications in both Mallarmé and Ponge.
Instructor: Heather McCoy
This course is designed to foster an informed professional outlook on the teaching and learning of French. It includes both theoretical and practical components, provides students access to professional resources for teaching, and introduces students to the necessary vocabulary for participation in informed conversations about teaching and learning.
Instructor: Bénédicte Monicat
Informed by longstanding debates on women’s education and focusing on the nineteenth century as a pivotal moment in women’s history, this seminar looks at women’s instructional writings as critical sites for exploring questions of genre, gender, and knowledge construction.
Instructor: Jean-Claude Vuillemin
In addition to confirming the relevance of Montaigne and Foucault in our daily historical experiences, this new seminar will provide students with an analysis of some Montaigne’s essays (from Les Essais, II & III) and an in-depth exploration of Foucault’s selected problematics and main theoretical concepts. While Montaigne’s essays are emblematic of some philosophical and literary issues of (early) modernity, they are also proleptic of many fundamental questions and/or intellectual debates, which will be revisited some four hundred years later by Foucault, as well as by other major contemporary “continental” philosophers.
Spring 2014 Seminars
Instructor: Willa Z. Silverman
This course introduces students to various components of graduate studies while training them for diverse activities associated with their future academic positions. Throughout the course, we explore the scholarly and instructional dimensions of French and Francophone Studies with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity. We consider everything from publication outlets to teaching portfolios, grant writing to dissertation or book proposals. During the Fall semester, we focus heavily upon job market preparation (C.V., job application letters, mock interviews, job talks, etc.). During the Spring semester, we focus more on skills as varied as transforming a seminar paper into an article manuscript; crafting a thesis proposal or writing a book prospectus; and planning a curriculum.
Instructor: Marc Authier
This course is an introduction to theoretical linguistics, a scientific field of inquiry the goal of which is to discover and formalize those subconscious rules that allow us to produce and process natural language sentences. Such rules can be divided into four basic types: those that determine sentence structure (syntax), those that constrain invariant aspects of sentential meaning (semantics), those that seek to capture variable aspects of meaning arising from the context of utterance (pragmatics), those that determine the pronunciation of words and phrases (phonetics/phonology), and those that constrain the combinatorial properties of affixes word-internally (morphology). We will study and illustrate each of these components through data drawn from French. Although our main objective will be to arrive at an understanding of what knowledge of language consists of, we will also consider some of the applications of linguistic theory. More specifically, we will see how it can be used to inform second language acquisition research, language pedagogy, literary analysis and cultural studies.
Instructor: Bénédicte Monicat
Literary manifestations of exoticism are most symbolically and problematically embodied by novelistic female heroines who signal a desire to abolish the very distance they represent. As figures of sexual and racial otherness, their functions and meanings are far from stable, allowing for a critical reflection on the power relations thus revealed through representation and on the critical power of representation.
Instructor: Willa Z. Silverman
This interdisciplinary seiminar explores two contrasting yet interrelated notions often used to describe the period from approximately 1880 to 1914 in France: that of a ‘Belle Epoque’ and that of an era of ‘decadence.’ Drawing on close readings of novels, private writings, and contemporary history, sociology and philosophy texts, but also art and music, we study what contemporaries considered the sources of the grandeur and decadence of this period ; the emblems of progress associated with the Belle Epoque ; and the presumed symptoms of decadence. We examine, too, the perceived historical antecedents of modern decadence as well as ‘antidotes’ against it. Finally, we study how certain artists and witers of this period valorized the notion of decadence, making it the cornerstone of a key esthetic of the late-nineteenth century, overlapping and echoing other esthetic trends such as Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Japonism, and Dandyism.
Fall 2013 Seminars
Instructor: Willa Z. Silverman
See description for FR 501B: Pro-Seminar in French Studies II, above.
Instructor: Monique Yaari
Modernism, postmodernism, historical and post-war avant-gardes: these are the concepts we will examine and question in this seminar, from theoretical, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, marking, as we go along, the centennial of some of the first ‘modernist’ cultural events of 1913. While we will generally proceed from texts and objects to theories, we will also be moving to and fro between the two. Primary sources for this seminar include literary texts ranging from Baudelaire to Van Cauwelaert, accompanied by a selection of objects drawn from the visual arts, architecture, and urbanism. Among the secondary sources included in our readings, Jean-François Lyotard’s reflection on the seminar’s key concepts will be central to our discussions. Other versions of this course take as their focus the contemporary French city.
Instructor: Allan Stoekl
Established contemporary literary texts, figures, and aesthetic movements in various genres from Proust to Sartre and from Genet to Condé.
Instructor: Jean-Claude Vuillemin
While encouraging students to develop a sound theoretical grounding related to their research interests, this course helps them to debunk ideologies in their own ways of thinking, and to gain fluency in theory and criticism. Along with an acquaintance with the most prominent contributors to the famous “French Theory”: Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze, etc., this course provides students with a systematic study of major theoretical trends (Formalism, New Criticism, Nouvelle Critique, Structuralism, Phenomenology, Reception Theories, New Historicism, Post-structuralism, Deconstruction) whose knowledge is essential for engaging into fruitful literary criticism and for participating effectively in some of the most innovative contemporary philosophical debates.
Instructor: Celeste Kinginger
This course is designed to foster an informed professional outlook on the teaching and learning of French. It includes both theoretical and practical components, provides students access to professional resources for teaching, and introduces students to the necessary vocabulary for participation in informed conversations about teaching and learning.
Spring 2013 Seminars
Instructor: Kathryn Grossman
This seminar focuses on various manifestations of romanticism and realism (and, by extension, naturalism) from the First Empire to the Third Republic. What are the relations between the real and the ideal, the grotesque and sublime, the “masculine” and the “feminine,” in the poetry, theatre, and prose fiction of the period? We examine the evolution, theoretical underpinnings, and distinguishing elements of each literary movement in the context of social and political revolution. We also investigate the critical discussion that surrounds each text. Our primary sources include, but are not limited to, selections from the master’s reading list. Class time deals with central texts, with major critical issues addressed by the nineteenth-century French studies interpretive community, and with bibliographical resources and strategies for research in this area by present and future dix-neuviémistes.
Instructor: Bénédicte Monicat
This seminar explores the diversity of women’s literary production and the variety of its objects in nineteenth-century France through the conceptual lens of genre and gender construction. It examines what the notion of “women’s literature” might entail, looks at the ways in which genre and gender intersect, and reflects upon the construction of literary historiography.
Instructor: Monique Yaari
As Marc Augé puts it, the city is a microcosm of the contemporary world. Focusing on 20th and 21st century France, we will examine the contemporary French city as a prism through which to access existing tensions between past, present and future, memory and history, material space and immaterial networks, quotidian realities and utopian aspirations, center and periphery, built environment and ecological concerns. The cultural dimensions of the city—from its role as cultural magnet to the symbolic representations and image construction it conveys will also be discussed. Throughout, the modern, postmodern, après-moderne axis will serve as a theoretical and historical guiding thread. Finally, we will analyze representations of the city in the literature of the period.