Results for FRENCH

Even if many of us don't fully believe in an afterlife, we remain fascinated by visions of it. This course focuses on Near-Death Experiences and the stories around them, investigating them from the many perspectives pertinent to the growing field of narrative medicine: medical, neurological, cognitive, psychological, sociological, literary, and filmic. The goal is not to understand whether the stories are veridical but what they do for us, as individuals, and as a culture, and in particular how they seek to reshape the patient-doctor relationship. Materials will span the 20th century and come into the present. Taught in English.

Close reading of Oscar Wilde's work together with major texts and authors of 19th-century French Decadence, including Symbolism, l'art pour l'art, and early Modernism. Points of contact between Wilde and avant-garde Paris salons; provocative, creative intersections between (homo)erotic and aesthetic styles, transgression; literary and cultural developments from Baudelaire to Mallarmé, Huysmans, Flaubert, Rachilde, Lorrain, and Proust compared with Wilde¿s Salomé, Picture of Dorian Gray, and critical writings; relevant historical and philosophical contexts. All readings in English; all student levels welcome.

Recent developments in and neuroscience and experimental psychology have transformed the way we think about the operations of the brain. What can we learn from this about the nature and function of literary texts? Can innovative ways of speaking affect ways of thinking? Do creative metaphors draw on embodied cognition? Can fictions strengthen our "theory of mind" capabilities? What role does mental imagery play in the appreciation of descriptions? Does (weak) modularity help explain the mechanism and purpose of self-reflexivity? Can the distinctions among types of memory shed light on what narrative works have to offer?

Examines a quintessential French figure "l'intellectuel" from a long-term historical perspective. We will observe how this figure was shaped over time by such other cultural types as the writer, the artist, the historian, the philosopher, and the moralist. Proceeding in counter-chronological order, from the late 20th to the 16th century, we will read a collection of classic French works. As this course is a gateway for French studies, special emphasis will be placed on oral proficiency. Taught in French; readings in French.

An examination of the current debates in France regarding national identity, secularism, and the integration of immigrants, notably from the former colonies. Confronts films' and other media's visual and discursive rhetorical strategies used to represent ethnic or religious minorities, discrimination, citizens' resistance to government policies, inter-racial marriages, or women's rights within immigrant communities. By embodying such themes in stories of love, hardships, or solidarity, the motion pictures make the movements and emotions inherent to immigration tangible: to what effect? Taught in French. Films in French with English subtitles. Additional paper for students enrolled in 235.

This course applies a humanistic and social scientific approach to economic processes. We will study works of fiction from Francophone Africa: novels, films and comics, which show how fiction provides socio-cultural interpretations of economic phenomena. We will also look at the economy as an elaborate fictional construct that has a direct impact on the real world. Finally, we will look at the conflict between economic development and social justice in postcolonial societies. nThemes include: postcolonialism, modernity, African socialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, globalization, the sacred, immigration, hip hop, social justice etc. Selected texts and films from: Ousmane Sembène, Frantz Fanon, Djibril D. Mambety, Aminata Sow Fall, Fatou Diome, Alphonse Mendy, Jean Joseph Goux, Gayatri Spivak, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Jean and John Comaroff, Zein-Elabdin and Charuscheela etc. Taught in French.

Why is French culture so often associated with love and romance? This course examines romantic love--from the earliest romances written in French in the Middle Ages to its cinematic representations in the 21st century. We'll focus on the most passionate and controversial stories, exploring the problems posed by religion, class, race, and sexual orientation. We'll also look at the ways in which romantic love can be a trope in French culture, or a rhetorical instrument used to re-imagine personal awakenings, political situations, or one's relationship to the spiritual or to art. The approach is inter disciplinary, and students will study novels, theater, opera, and cinema. As this course is a gateway for French studies, special emphasis will be placed on oral proficiency. Taught in French.

French intellectual and political culture has often been associated with revolutionary attempts to break free from the hold of tradition. Indeed, the concept of "revolution" has itself become a French tradition of sorts. Over the last 500 years, these revolutions have taken place in a number of arenas. In philosophy, René Descartes challenged all traditional learning and defined new principles that were central to the so-called ¿Revolution of the Mind.¿ In religion, Enlightenment thinkers not only advocated the toleration of different faiths but also questioned the veracity of Christianity and of all theistic worldviews. In politics, the French Revolution redefined the very concept of a political revolution and set the stage for modern conceptions of sovereignty. French socialist thinkers of the 19th century, in turn, reshaped the ways their contemporaries thought about socio-economic arrangements. Finally, 20th-century existentialists have attempted to rethink the very purpose of human existence. In this course, we will explore these and other seminal revolutionary moments that not only transformed French society, but that also had implications for European and, indeed, global culture. Taught in English, readings in English.

€œThe Don Draper of Existentialism€ for Adam Gopnik, â€the ideal husband of contemporary letters€ for Susan Sontag, and “the admirable conjunction of a man, of an action, and of a work€ for Sartre, Camus embodies the very French figure of the €œintellectuel engage€, or public intellectual. From his birth in 1913 into a poor family in Algeria to Stockholm where he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, from the cafes of Saint Germain-des-Prés to his predilection for Provence, Camus captured the quest for universalism, for the politics of justice and beauty, and engaged in the great ethical battles of his time, from communism to the use of the death penalty for nazi collaborators, to colonialism and the Algerian war (and his €œsilence over the war).

Introduction to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The birth of a national literature and its evolution. Literature as addressing cultural, philosophical, and artistic issues which question assumptions on love, ethics, art, and the nature of the self. Readings: epics (La Chanson de Roland), medieval romances (Tristan, Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain), post-Petrarchan poetics (Du Bellay, Ronsard, Labé), and prose humanists (Rabelais, Montaigne). Taught in French. Prerequisite: FRENLANG 124 or consent of instructor.

The literature, culture, and politics of France from Louis XIV to Olympe de Gouges. How this period produced the political and philosophical foundations of modernity. Readings include Corneille, Molière, Racine, Lafayette, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, and Gouges. Taught in French. Prerequisite: FRENLANG 124 or consent of instructor.

This course will explore several of the most important texts of 19th- and 20th-century French literature. The aim of the course will be understanding stylistic and thematic experimentation in its historical/cultural context, with a focus on the theme of transgression : moral, political, and social. We will read works in all major literary genres (poetry, prose, and drama) and will discuss prominent movements such as Realism, Romanticism, Symbolism, Decadentism, and Existentialism through the works that best define them. Readings include Constant, Balzac, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Flaubert, Maupassant, Jarry, Gide, Apollinaire, Breton, Yourcenar, Sartre. All readings, discussion, and assignments are in French.

This course aims to equip students with an understanding of the cultural, political and literary aspects at play in the literatures of Francophone Africa and the Caribbean. Our primary readings will be Francophone novels and poetry, though we will also read some theoretical texts, as well as excerpts of Francophone theater. The assigned readings will expose students to literature from diverse French-speaking regions of the African/Caribbean world. This course will also serve as a "literary toolbox," with the intention of facilitating an understanding of literary forms, terms and practices. Students can expect to work on their production of written and spoken French (in addition to reading comprehension) both in and outside of class. Required readings include: Aimé Césaire, "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal," Albert Memmi, "La Statue de Sel," Kaouther Adimi, "L'envers des autres", Maryse Condé, "La Vie sans fards". Movies include "Goodbye Morocco", "Aya de Yopougon", "Rome plutôt sue Vous". Taught in French. Prerequisite: FRENLANG 124 or consent of instructor.

This course explores the central place Africa holds in prose writing emerging during periods of globalization across the Atlantic, including the middle passage, colonialism, black internationalism, decolonization, immigration and diasporic return. We will begin with Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789), a touchstone for the Atlantic prose tradition, and study how writers crossing the Atlantic have continued to depict Africa in later centuries: to dramatize scenes of departure and arrival in stories of new citizenship, to evoke histories of racial unity and examine social fragmentation, to imagine new national communities or question their norms and borders. Our readings will be selected from English, French, Portuguese and Spanish-language traditions. And we will pay close attention to genres of prose fiction (Adichie, Condé, Olinto), prose poetry (Césaire, Neto, Walcott), theoretical reflection (Fanon, Glissant), reportage (Gide, Gourevitch), ethnography (Leiris, Ouologuem) and autobiography (Barack Obama).

Through an analysis of medieval love, satirical and Crusade lyrics in the Old Occitan, Old French, and Galician-Portuguese traditions, we will study deictic address, corporeal subjectivity, the female voice, love debates, and the body as a figure of political conflict. Special attention will be given to the transmission of vernacular song from live performance to manuscripts. Authors include Ovid, Bernart de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, La Comtessa de Dia, Thibaut de Champagne, Dante, and Pound. Taught in English.

Focus on the French New Wave's cinematic revolution of 1959-1962. In a few years, the Nouvelle Vague delivered landmark works such as Truffaut€'s 400 Blows, Godard's Breathless, Chabro'€™s Le Beau Serge or Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour, and changed forever the way we make and think about movies. Why did these films look so radically fresh? What do they say about France's youth culture in the early 60s? How is the author's theory behind them still influencing us today? Focus is on cultural history, aesthetic analysis, interpretation of narrative, sound and visual forms.

Issues of freedom, morality, faith, knowledge, personal identity, and the value of truth explored through film; philosophical investigation of the filmic medium itself. Screenings to include Twelve Monkeys (Gilliam), Ordet (Dreyer), The Dark Knight (Nolan), Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Allen), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Kaufman). Taught in English.

How has Western culture constructed the world's oceans since the beginning of global ocean exploration? How have imaginative visions of the ocean been shaped by marine science, technology, exploration, commerce and leisure? Authors read might include Cook, Equiano, and Steinbeck; Defoe, Verne, Stevenson, Conrad, Woolf and Hemingway; Coleridge, Baudelaire, Moore, Bishop and Walcott. Films by Painlevé and Bigelow. Seminar co-ordinated with a spring 2015 Cantor Arts Center public exhibition. Visits to Cantor; other possible field trips include Hopkins Marine Station and SF Maritime Historical Park.

Required gateway course for Philosophical and Literary Thought; crosslisted in departments sponsoring the Philosophy and Literature track: majors should register in their home department; non-majors may register in any sponsoring department. Introduction to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works. Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin. Taught in English.

Restricted to French majors with consent of department. Normally limited to 4-unit credit toward the major. May be repeated for credit.

The French Revolution was not just a haunting memory in nineteenth-century France: it was the decisive structure around which French politics, but also French culture and the arts more generally, were centered. As some historians have argued, the French Revolution might not even have really "ended" until 1880. In this course, we will examine both literary representations of the French Revolution, as well as the literary analyses of a society constantly dealing with the fears (or hopes) of a new Revolution. Primary readings by Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola. Taught in French.

Analysis of medieval love, satirical and Crusade lyrics of the trouabdours. Study of deictic address, corporeal subjectivity, the female voice, love debates, and the body as a figure of political conflict. Course readings include medieval treatises on lyric and modern translations of the troubadour tradition. Works by Ovid, Bernart de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, La Comtessa de Dia, Thibaut de Champagne, Raimon Vidal, Dante, and Pound. Taught in English. Course includes a lab component for creation of multi-media translation projects: trobar. stanford.edu.

This course examines key intellectual, social and political developments in Europe during the twelfth century, and inquires after the afterlife of the "€œRenaissance"€ into the thirteenth century. Readings include works of literature (Chrétien de Troyes, lyric poetry of troubadours and Minnesinger, fables such as Roman de Renart), philosophy (Peter Abelard and scholasticism), and studies about the rise of the Gothic architectural style. The course takes up the Fourth Lateran Council and the history of the crusading movement in the first half of the thirteenth century. Taught in English.

A comprehensive introduction to and historical analysis of Emile Zola's literary work as foundational for the late-nineteenth century literary movement that we call "Naturalism." The analysis of Zola's novels will be embedded in the historical situation of France in the transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic, with special emphasis on the epistemological situation of that time. Knowledge of French desirable but participation through English translations will be possible.

In this course we will read the main novels and plays of Pirandello, Sartre, and Beckett, with special emphasis on the existentialist themes of their work. Readings include The Late Mattia Pascal, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV; Nausea, No Exit, "Existentialism is a Humanism"; Molloy, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, Waiting for Godot. Taught in English.

If the Renaissance is famous for discovering unknown continents and ancient texts the body too was a new territory of conquest. How did literature respond to the rise of an anatomical gaze in the arts and in medicine and how did it stage the aesthetic religious philosophical and moral issues related to such a promotion or deconstruction of the body? Does literature aim at representing the body or does it use it instead as a ubiquitous signifier for intellectual emotional and political ideas? The locus of desire, pleasure and disease, the body also functioned as a reminder of human mortality and was caught in the web of gender issues, religious controversies and new norms of behavior. Texts from prose fiction (Rabelais) poetry (Scève Ronsard Labé D'Aubigné) essays (Montaigne) and emblem literature. Extra documents include music scores tapestries paintings philosophical and anatomical plates from medical treatises. Taught in English. Visit the Web site: renaissancebodyproject.stanford.edu

This course will concentrate on the important role of science fiction and travel literature in early-modern France. Although these narratives were intended to describe distant worlds and different ways of living, they frequently revealed more about the aspirations, assumptions, hopes, and concerns of the cultures in which they originated than about their actual subject matter. Authors frequently sought to determine the identity and uniqueness of their own cultures by contrasting them against the 'otherness' of their imagined subjects. Similarly, by describing either utopian or dystopian civilizations, writers attempted to highlight the problems that plagued their own societies. Among other texts, we will read selections from Montaigne's 'Essais,' Cyrano de Bergerac's 'L'Autre monde ou les états et empires de la Lune,' Huygens's 'Nouveau traité de la pluralité des mondes,' Fontenelle's 'Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes,' Voltaire's 'Micromegas,' Bougainville's 'Voyage autor du monde,' and Diderot's 'Supplement au voyage de Bougainville.' Taught in English. Readings in French (English translations available).

In this course, taught in French, we will explore theater from different angles including literary theory (the different dramatic genres), aesthetics (the classical representation) and cultural theories (the social function of theatre under absolutism). A new approach to acting will be considered, i.e. the many connections between theatre and possession. Amongst the authors considered, we will include Rotrou, Corneille, Cyrano de Bergerac, Racine, Molière and Regnard. Taught in French.

A close reading of Giacomo Leopardi's Canti and Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen in the context of 19th-century Europe. Discussion of the poetry will be enriched by selections from their essays on literature and art and by notes from the Zibaldone and Mon coeur mis à nu. Key themes and concepts include language, imagination, "noia," "spleen," and the oppositions between nature and civilization, modernity and antiquity. Taught in English.

Few places have been as heavily romanticized and mythologized as Paris. To many observers, Paris and its attractions serve as icons of modernity itself. By engaging with fiction, film, journalism, painting, photography, poetry, song, and other media, we¿ll trace how different people at different times have used Paris as both backdrop and main protagonist, and we'll consider how the city itself has incorporated and rebelled against such representations. The scope of our inquiry will stretch from the late 18th century to the present, covering a host of topics, figures, and sites: from the French Revolution to the protests of May '68, from Baudelaire to Hemingway, from the Impressionists to the Situationists. Taught in English

The major topic will be the indeterminacy regarding the survival of humankind. With the advent of the atomic bomb humankind became potentially the maker of its own demise. Will combine a number of significant case studies (environmental disasters, industrial catastrophes, threat of nuclear devastation, technological risks) with the lessons drawn from a form of literature that is at the intersection of STS and the Humanities, in particular the early warnings made by such thinkers as Ivan Illich, Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas, Günther Anders, and Hannah Arendt.

Selections from all seven volumes of "In Search of Lost Time". Focus on issues of personal identity (perspective, memory, life-narrative); interpersonal relations (friendship, love, homosexuality, jealousy, indirect expression); knowledge (objective truth, subjective truth, necessary illusions); redemption (enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment); aesthetics (music, painting, fiction); and Proust'™s own style (narrative sequence, sentence structure, irony, metaphor, metonymy, metalepsis). Taught in English; readings in French or English.

This course examines the ways writers in literature and medicine have used the narrative form to explore the ethics of care in what has been called the developing world. We will begin with an introduction to global health ethics as a field rooted in philosophy and policy that address questions raised by practice in resource-constrained communities abroad. We will then spend the quarter understanding the way literature may deepen and even alter those questions. For instance: how have writers used scenes of practice in Africa, the Caribbean or South Asia to think through ideas of mercy, charity, beneficence and justice? How differently do they imagine such scenes when examining issues of autonomy, paternalism and language? To what extent, then, do novels and memoirs serve as sites of ethical inquiry? And how has literary study revealed the complexities of narrating care for underserved communities, and therefore presented close reading as a mode of ethics for global health? Readings will include prose fiction by Albert Camus, Joseph Conrad, Amitav Ghosh and Susan Sontag as well as physician memoirs featuring Frantz Fanon, Albert Schweitzer, Abraham Verghese and Paul Farmer.

This course explores the emergence of Francophone cinema and literature from North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco) in the post-indepence era: aesthetics, exile, language message, race and gender relations, collective memory, parallax, nationalism, laicité, religion, emigration and immigration, and the Arab Spring will be covered. Special attention will be given to judeo-maghrebi history, and to the notions of francophone / maghrebi / "beur" / diasporic cinema and literature. Readings from Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Kateb Yacine, Albert Camus, Colette Fellous, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Leila Sebbar, Benjamin Stora, Lucette Valensi, Abdelwahab Meddeb. Movies include Viva Laldjérie, Tenja, Le Chant des Mariées, Française, Bled Number One, Omar Gatlato, Casanegra, La Saison des Hommes. Taught in French. Films in French and Arabic with English subtitles.

An overview of the current awakening of French political thought as it is grounded in a new reading of the great classics of French social thought, from Rousseau to Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant. Readings of Lefort, Castoriadis, Louis Dumont, Ricoeur, Furet, Manent, Ferry, Renaut, Gauchet, Raynaud, etc. Readings in French. (Translations in English will be made available whenever possible.) Discussions in French and in English.

Writing is not a mere recording of the past, but a selection and reinvention of our experiences. We will look at how writing is central to the philosophical project of fashioning the self, even as it reveals that much of what we call the self is a fictional construct. Materials include fiction and memoirs (Primo Levi, Michel Tournier, Melania Mazzucco, Jonathan Littell), and theoretical works in philosophy (Bergson, James, Freud, Jung, Derrida, Wyschogrod, Nehamas), psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. Taught in English.

A both systematic and historical presentation of "Deconstruction" as a philosophical and intellectual movement that dominated academic and general culture in many western societies during the final decades of the twentieth century, with special focus on the writings of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Deconstruction's specific reception history obliges us to ask the question of whether the extremely high esteem that it enjoyed over two decades was intellectually justified – or the result of a misunderstanding. Participation through English translations is possible.

This course concerns how writers, artists, and other cultural producers understood and represented the traumas of the First World War and its aftermath. Rather than tracing a political or military history of the conflict, we¿ll focus on how the horrors of War (both in the trenches and on the home front) fostered broader social and cultural shifts, as people questioned the very foundations of European civilization. Most specifically, we'll explore the connections between the War and the emergence of post-War modernist movements, as writers and artists created new works to help them make sense of the catastrophe and the new world it wrought. Though France provides our starting point, we'll also travel beyond the Hexagon to incorporate other views and major works. Course readings will be in English, though students may elect to read works in French if they wish.

In this course, we will explore how the different discoveries concerning the self during the XXth Century (throughout philosophy, politics or psychoanalysis) do reflect in the domain of literature. Nouveau roman, autobiography, auto fiction or self references will be amongst the themes explored in class. Our main texts will be taken out of the official list issued by the French Department. Taught in French.

Close reading of Oscar Wilde's work together with major texts and authors of 19th-century French Decadence, including Symbolism, l'art pour l'art, and early Modernism. Points of contact between Wilde and avant-garde Paris salons; provocative, creative intersections between (homo)erotic and aesthetic styles, transgression; literary and cultural developments from Baudelaire to Mallarmé, Huysmans, Flaubert, Rachilde, Lorrain, and Proust compared with Wilde¿s Salomé, Picture of Dorian Gray, and critical writings; relevant historical and philosophical contexts. All readings in English; all student levels welcome.

In this course we will read the main novels and plays of Pirandello, Sartre, and Beckett, with special emphasis on the existentialist themes of their work. Readings include The Late Mattia Pascal, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV; Nausea, No Exit, "Existentialism is a Humanism"; Molloy, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, Waiting for Godot. Taught in English.

Recent developments in and neuroscience and experimental psychology have transformed the way we think about the operations of the brain. What can we learn from this about the nature and function of literary texts? Can innovative ways of speaking affect ways of thinking? Do creative metaphors draw on embodied cognition? Can fictions strengthen our "theory of mind" capabilities? What role does mental imagery play in the appreciation of descriptions? Does (weak) modularity help explain the mechanism and purpose of self-reflexivity? Can the distinctions among types of memory shed light on what narrative works have to offer?

If the Renaissance is famous for discovering unknown continents and ancient texts the body too was a new territory of conquest. How did literature respond to the rise of an anatomical gaze in the arts and in medicine and how did it stage the aesthetic religious philosophical and moral issues related to such a promotion or deconstruction of the body? Does literature aim at representing the body or does it use it instead as a ubiquitous signifier for intellectual emotional and political ideas? The locus of desire, pleasure and disease, the body also functioned as a reminder of human mortality and was caught in the web of gender issues, religious controversies and new norms of behavior. Texts from prose fiction (Rabelais) poetry (Scève Ronsard Labé D'Aubigné) essays (Montaigne) and emblem literature. Extra documents include music scores tapestries paintings philosophical and anatomical plates from medical treatises. Taught in English. Visit the Web site: renaissancebodyproject.stanford.edu

A close reading of Giacomo Leopardi's Canti and Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen in the context of 19th-century Europe. Discussion of the poetry will be enriched by selections from their essays on literature and art and by notes from the Zibaldone and Mon coeur mis à nu. Key themes and concepts include language, imagination, "noia," "spleen," and the oppositions between nature and civilization, modernity and antiquity. Taught in English.

Provides students with an overview of some major genres in the history of the modern novel, along with major theorists in the critical understanding of the form. Novels might include works by Cervantes, Defoe, Lafayette, Radcliffe, Goethe, Scott, Balzac, Melville, and Woolf. Theorists might include Lukacs, Bakhtin, Jameson, Gallagher, Barthes, Kristeva, and Bourdieu. *PLEASE NOTE: Course for graduate students only.*

For many years indigenous knowledges were treated as a field of research for anthropologists and as "mistaken epistemologies," i. e., unscientific and irrational folklore and childish worldviews. This old view of animism was a product of the evolutionist and anthropocentric worldview of the Enlightenment. However within the framework of ecological humanities, current interest in posthumanism, postsecularism and discussions on building altermodernity (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), indigenous thought is used to critique modern epistemology and develop an alternative to the Western worldview. Treating native thought as an equivalent to Western knowledge is presented as a decolonizing and liberating practice. The term alter-native modernities as response to the challenges of Euromodernity and suggests modernities that might emerge out of indigenous ways of being in the world. Comparison between literature on indigenous cultures from Latin America and from Russia (animism in Amazonia and Siberia). Following recent works by anthropologists and archaeologists such as Nurit Bird-Rose, Philippe Descola, Graham Harvey, Tim Ingold and Viveiros de Castro, new animism is treated as an alternative (relational) ontology that allows rethinking the problem of matter and agency, goes beyond human exeptionalism and embraces non-humans. Topics include: alternative and alter-native modernities; Jean Piaget's theory of childhood animism; problem of anthropomorphism and personification; indigenous knowledge and the problem of epistemic violence; vitalist materialism (Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti); connectedness as the principle of life (relational epistemologies and ontologies); non-human agency (Bruno Latour).

This course explores the central place Africa holds in prose writing emerging during periods of globalization across the Atlantic, including the middle passage, colonialism, black internationalism, decolonization, immigration and diasporic return. We will begin with Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789), a touchstone for the Atlantic prose tradition, and study how writers crossing the Atlantic have continued to depict Africa in later centuries: to dramatize scenes of departure and arrival in stories of new citizenship, to evoke histories of racial unity and examine social fragmentation, to imagine new national communities or question their norms and borders. Our readings will be selected from English, French, Portuguese and Spanish-language traditions. And we will pay close attention to genres of prose fiction (Adichie, Condé, Olinto), prose poetry (Césaire, Neto, Walcott), theoretical reflection (Fanon, Glissant), reportage (Gide, Gourevitch), ethnography (Leiris, Ouologuem) and autobiography (Barack Obama).

This course concerns how writers, artists, and other cultural producers understood and represented the traumas of the First World War and its aftermath. Rather than tracing a political or military history of the conflict, we¿ll focus on how the horrors of War (both in the trenches and on the home front) fostered broader social and cultural shifts, as people questioned the very foundations of European civilization. Most specifically, we'll explore the connections between the War and the emergence of post-War modernist movements, as writers and artists created new works to help them make sense of the catastrophe and the new world it wrought. Though France provides our starting point, we'll also travel beyond the Hexagon to incorporate other views and major works. Course readings will be in English, though students may elect to read works in French if they wish.

How has Western culture constructed the world's oceans since the beginning of global ocean exploration? How have imaginative visions of the ocean been shaped by marine science, technology, exploration, commerce and leisure? Primary authors read might include Cook, Banks, Equiano, Ricketts, and Steinbeck; Defoe, Cooper, Verne, Conrad, Woolf and Hemingway; Coleridge, Baudelaire, Moore, Bishop and Walcott. Critical readings include Schmitt, Rediker and Linebaugh, Baucom, Best, Corbin, Auden, Sontag and Heller-Roazen. Films by Sekula, Painlevé and Bigelow. Seminar coordinated with a 2015 Cantor Arts Center public exhibition. Visits to the Cantor; other possible field trips include Hopkins Marine Station and SF Maritime Historical Park. Open to graduate students only.

A history of literary theory for entering graduate students in national literature departments and comparative literature.

Discussion of one contemporary or historical text from the Western philosophical tradition per quarter in a group of faculty and graduate students. For admission of new participants, a conversation with H. U. Gumbrecht is required. May be repeated for credit. Taught in English.

Enrollment is limited to French/Italian Ph.D. students. Course is designed for French/Italian Ph.D. students to prepare for department milestone exams.

For students in French working on special projects or engaged in predissertation research.

This course provides students with the opportunity to practice speaking French at the advanced level. Recreating the atmosphere of a French salon, participants will develop greater oral proficiency through discussions of literature, film, politics, and contemporary culture. Please note that all Maison Française courses take place at the Maison Française and begin during Week 2 of the quarter. Prerequisite: FRENLANG 23C or equivalent.

This course examines how verbal descriptions of objects change over time, and represent how the individual relates to the world. How do they embody common ideals, individual desires, or social anxieties? We will study descriptions of various animate and inanimate objects in texts that reflect key cultural and literary values in French literary history, such as medieval objects of war and love, the description of the Renaissance woman, and the nineteenth-century Gothic cathedral. Taught in French.

An intellectually intense, document-based approach to the identity of French culture, made palpable through five moments in the history of Paris (which, more perhaps than any other capital in the western world, has been the center and focus of that nation's productivity. Readings and subsequent discussions will focus on the following contexts in Paris's past: 12th/13th century: the University of Paris as a center of Christian spirituality, intellect, and passion; 17th century: the performance of tragedy on the stages of the city; comedies at the Court of Versailles; 1794: the moment of Terror in the French Revolution and a turning point towards a new form of political life; 1889: Eiffel Tower and World Expo, Paris as the first City of Modernity; 1958: Général de Gaulle assumes power: de-colonization, Existentialism, and France's new identity within Europe. Offered as a part of the Gateways to the World program. Taught in English.

Survey course on religion, the self, and society in 20th-century French novels and film. Readings may include: Gide, Camus, and Bernanos for the novels, and films by Robert Bresson and others. Taught in French.

For French majors and minors. Explore the French passion for theater in the 17th and 18th centuries, from the great classics to private theater. A selection of plays from the official and the private repertory will be used to illustrate the evolution of French theater as a genre and to discuss its role in the sociopolitical shifts of the period. All readings, discussions, and assignments will be in French.

This course explores the emergence of Francophone cinema and literature from North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco) in the post-independence era: aesthetics, language metissage and hybridization, ethnic interactions, gender relations, collective imagination and collective memory, nationalism, popular culture, religion, urbanism, post-colonialism, migration, and the Arab Spring will be covered. Special attention will be given to Moroccan cinema, and to the notions of francophone/maghrebi/"beur"/diasporic cinema and literature. Readings from Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Kateb Yacine, Albert Camus, Reda Bensmaia, Assia Djebar, Colette Fellous, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Michel de Certeau, Benjamin Stora, Lucette Valensi, Abdelwahab Meddeb. Movies include Viva Laldjérie, Rome plutot que vous, Les Sabots en or, Les Silence des Palais, Halfaouine, Satin Rouge, Le Chant des Mariées, and Mort à Vendre. Taught in French. Films in French and Arabic with English subtitles.

Preference to sophomores. Political, social, and cultural events in Paris from the Napoleonic era and the Romantic revolution to the 30s. The arts and letters of bourgeois, popular, and avant garde cultures. Illustrated with slides. Taught in English.

This course will examine some major French playwrights such as Alfred Jarry, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jean Tardieu, Albert Camus or Jean Anouilh in their global cultural environment. Discussion in English; French majors read in French.

Starting in the mid-17th century, France became the cultural trendsetter for most of Europe and parts of the world. How did French culture impose itself as culture tout court? We will examine the importance of politics, literature, and philosophy in this process. Readings will include Corneille, Descartes, Pascal, Racine, Moliere, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Beaumarchais. Taught in French; readings in French.

Religious belief was a fundamental part of early-modern life, and the proposition that human beings could not prove God's existence had profound implications for all realms of human experience. This course will explore the complex relationship between philosophical skepticism and religious belief in early-modern Europe (particularly France) and investigate how these heterodox philosophies transformed the understanding of humanity's interaction with the surrounding world. We will begin by looking at the origins of religious unbelief and the revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism in the 16th century. By placing the atheists and the skeptics in dialogue with their deist and Christian opponents, we will see how these ideas evolved over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries and consider the influence of these subversive theories on the social and political fabric of Europe. Taught in English. Readings in French (English translations available).

A both systematic and historical presentation of "Deconstruction" as a philosophical and intellectual movement that dominated academic and general culture in many western societies during the final decades of the twentieth century, with special focus on the writings of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Deconstruction's specific reception history obliges us to ask the question of whether the extremely high esteem that it enjoyed over two decades was intellectually justified - or the result of a misunderstanding.

Introduction to the premodern period of French literature through the interpretation of major works (La Chanson de Roland; Béroul and Thomas, Tristan; lais of Marie de France; romans of Chrétien de Troyes; Le Roman de la Rose). Special attention given to the socio-cultural contexts in which these works were composed and first received, and to the emergence of the concept of writing as a self-defining act. Study of Old French language and the material aspects of a medieval work. Taught in English.

An intensive reading of Vico's New Science with special emphasis on Vico's theory of anthropogenesis, myth, and the poetic origins of human consciousness. Vico's thought will be placed in relation to Lévi-Strauss's theories of myth and so-called "primitive thought". Readings include Vico's New Science and Lévi-Strauss's "The Structural Study of Myth", and the first chapters of his book The Savage Mind. Taught in English.

An overview of the current awakening of French political thought as it is grounded in a new reading of the great classics of French social thought, from Rousseau to Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant. Readings of Lefort, Castoriadis, Louis Dumont, Ricoeur, Furet, Manent, Ferry, Renaut, Gauchet, Raynaud, etc. Discussions in French and in English.

A comparative seminar on medieval love books and their reception. We will examine and question the notion of "amour courtois," which arose in the lyrics and romances of medieval France and was codified in Romantic-era criticism. Primary readings will be enriched by thinking about this notion through the lens of modern theories of desire, such as those of Girard, Lacan, and Zizek. Conducted in English with readings in translation.

Introduction to medieval French literature through the analysis of representations of cross-cultural contact in historical perspective. Class conducted in French. Readings in modern French translation (with occasional reference to Old French) and in English. Readings include La Chanson de Roland; Le Charroi de Nîmes; La Prise d'Orange; Le Conte de Floire et Blancheflor; and Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés. No previous knowledge of Old French or medieval literature is expected; willingness to engage with historical texts and questions required.

Analysis of literary works as historical narratives. Focus on the relationship history, fiction, and memory as reflected in Francophone literary texts that envision new ways of reconstructing or representing ancient or immediate past. Among questions to be raised: individual memory and collective history, master narratives and alternatives histories, the role of reconstructing history in the shaping or consolidating national or gender identities. Readings include fiction by Glissant, Kane, Condé, Schwarz-Bart, Djebar, Perec, as well as theoretical texts by Ricoeur, de Certeau, Nora, Halbwachs, White, Echevarrîa. Taught in French.

Working through a selection of novels by the author widely considered as a founder of western (19th-century) "Literary Realism." Balzac's will be contextualized within his life and the French culture and literature of his time. We will also approach, from a philosophical point of view, the emergence and functions of "Literary Realism." Another focus will be Balzac's work as exemplary of certain traditions within Literary Criticism (particularly Marxist Literary Criticism). Taught in English.

The starting point for our seminar is the question of how postcolonial thought enhances our possible understandings of Italy - as a nation, as a territorial unit coalescing cultural parts that remain disparate to this day, and as a population that has not come fully to terms with its fascist history, its crimes in World War II, or the atrocities it perpetrated as a colonizing state. The Italian case is unusual compared to others, in that the country's colonial past in north and east Africa is still being uncovered after a long period of public silence and government suppression; and what might be called the postcolonial Italian project has begun only recently, driven by a distinct minority of scholars, 'migrant' authors, and activists.nnFrench cultural politics and history are often taken as a point of reference from which to analyze Italian phenomena. In this case, we will make use of the French postcolonial tradition as a point of both comparison and differentiation. Among other things, we will focus on the different meanings of 'postcolonial' in a country that is strongly centralized (France) and another which is unremittingly fragmented (Italy). As just one example, we will scrutinize how Gramsci's work has been understood in Anglophone and Francophone criticism (cultural studies, Subaltern studies, and so on), as opposed to how it may be read in its original Italian context, where it concerned subalterns within the nation-state.nnAsking what is postcolonial, for whom, when, and where?, ultimately our goal is to discern the specific contours of Italy's postcolonialism by juxtaposing it with France's, and to simultaneously ask what light can be shed on French postcolonial particularities by placing it in this dialogue. Beginning with fundamental historical readings (Gramsci, Fanon, Memmi) and touching on some early Anglophone postcolonial critics (Said, Bhabha), the seminar will then be structured around key literary and theoretical readings from Italy and France. Ideally, readings will be in the original language, but as often as possible they will be selected such that they will be accessible in English translation as well. Taught in English.

Conceptions of evil and its nature and source, distinctions between natural and moral evil, and what belongs to God versus to the human race have undergone transformations reflected in literature and film. Sources include Rousseau's response to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake; Hannah Arendt's interpretation of Auschwitz; Günther Anders' reading of Hiroshima; and current reflections on looming climatic and nuclear disasters. Readings from Rousseau, Kant, Dostoevsky, Arendt, Anders, Jonas, Camus, Ricoeur, Houellebeck, Girard. Films by Lang, Bergman, Losey, Hitchcock.

From the times of the religious wars to those of Louis XIV, a series of French thinkers played a major role in the speculations that helped establish the norms of what is now thought of as "Western modernity." We will look at some of these, especially their moral and political philosophy in the contexts of a centralizing growth toward bureaucratic absolutist monarchy, of increasing colonization and imperialist urges, of growing intolerance (leading eventually to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes - more or less simultaneous in 1685 with the promulgation of the Code noir, seeking to control the treatment of slaves in the colonies). We shall also be interested in the complex "development" of the modern western "individual," of new notions of "truth," ethical conduct, the politics of authoritarian individualism, the aesthetics of "taste," and the perplexities of gender politics. Closely examining a number of works, we will look at the interplay between these contexts and the epistemology, psychology, ethics and politics that gradually became normative. Authors from among: Montaigne, Gournay, Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes (De cive), Cyrano, Madame de Lafayette, but participants may wish to bring other authors to the table. Taught in French.

This course will introduce students to the major intellectual and historical movements of twentieth-century France. We will consider the impact of key events (including WWI, the rise of fascism, the Nazi occupation, and May '68) on literary and intellectual life. Special importance will be placed on existentialism, structuralism, leftism, and feminism. Students will read a variety of literary, philosophical, and political essays. Taught in French.

This course will read three great novels of the French 19th century: Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir; Balzac's Le Père Goriot; Flaubert's Madame Bovary. These texts are the classics of "Realism." But this course intends to complicate the genre designation. "Realist" novels are richer and deeper than any "objective recording" of external and internal events could capture. They are visionary, poetic, and politically explosive. Reading them today requires us to stretch beyond what many critics have asserted about them, and indeed beyond what the novels asserted about themselves. That will be a significant objective of our analysis. Taught in French.

Five-week course. May be repeated for credit. Taught in French.

Five-week course. May be repeated for credit. Taught in French.

Devoted to an in depth analysis of Molière's major plays, as well as a study of contemporary productions of his work. Taught in French.

The course will examine the need to rethink the traditional western idea of the strong subject. Through close readings of works by Agamben, Braidotti, Derrida, Deleuze, Hall, Haraway, Latour, Wolfe, among others, this course will explore posthumanist theories of individual and collective subjectivity that challenge traditional ways of defining the human and the non-human subject/person and promote fundamental reconsideration of issues such as agency, autonomy, essence, freedom, dignity, otherness, substance, personhood, sociality, and life itself. The course would consider, how we can empower the subject and community in order to develop a desired model of participatory democracy. Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor

The role of narrative in the well-lived life. Are narratives necessary? Can they, and should they, be literary? When might non-narrative approaches, whether literary or otherwise, be more relevant? Is unity of self something given, something to be achieved, or something to be overcome? Readings from Aristotle, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, MacIntyre, G. Strawson, Velleman; Ricoeur, Brooks; Shakespeare, Stendhal, Musil, Levi, Beckett, Morrison; film. Taught in English.

An intensive reading of Vico's New Science with special emphasis on Vico's theory of anthropogenesis, myth, and the poetic origins of human consciousness. Vico's thought will be placed in relation to Lévi-Strauss's theories of myth and so-called "primitive thought". Readings include Vico's New Science and Lévi-Strauss's "The Structural Study of Myth", and the first chapters of his book The Savage Mind. Taught in English.

Course examines medieval treatises and literature relating to the practice of confession as well as modern examples, with a focus on medieval concern with a sincere and authentic confession in theological, ethical, and aesthetic terms. Study includes expressions of subjectivity, institutional frameworks of confession, and the phenomenon as an instrument for political activity such as crusade. Texts: Augustine¿s Confessions, pastoral treatises, Aquinas, Arthurian romances concerning the grail legend, crusade lyric, and Foucault; films such as Dreyer and martyrdom videos. Taught in French.

This course examines the Gothic as a both a narrative subgenre and an aesthetic mode, since its 18th century invention. Starting with different narrative genres of Gothic expression such as the Gothic novel, the ghost tale, and the fantastic tale by writers such as Walpole, Radcliffe, Sade, Poe, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, the course goes on to ask how the Gothic sensibility permeates a wide range of 19th century cultural phenomena that explore the dark side of Enlightenment, from Romantic poetry and art to melodrama, feuilleton novels, popular spectacles like the wax museum and the morgue. If time permits, we will also ask how the Gothic is updated into our present in popular novels and cinema. Critical readings will examine both the psychology of the Gothic sensibility and its social context, and might be drawn from theorists such as Benjamin, Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Zizek.

This course will explore the relationship between history, ecological evolution and mass killing in the age of humanly caused species extinction. It will explore the universalization of the notion of the Jewish Holocaust, its use to integrate into genocide studies the Native American "spiritual" holocaust, the Japanese nuclear holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, and the ethical dilemmas posed by the ideas of biotic, animal and ecological holocausts. Anthropology and history of genocides and extinctions as well as posthumanist, multispecies theories will provide theoretical frames for the course.

This course explores the emergence of Francophone cinema and literature from North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco) in the post-independence era: aesthetics, language metissage and hybridization, ethnic interactions, gender relations, collective imagination and collective memory, nationalism, popular culture, religion, urbanism, post-colonialism, migration, and the Arab Spring will be covered. Special attention will be given to Moroccan cinema, and to the notions of francophone/maghrebi/"beur"/diasporic cinema and literature. Readings from Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Kateb Yacine, Albert Camus, Reda Bensmaia, Assia Djebar, Colette Fellous, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Michel de Certeau, Benjamin Stora, Lucette Valensi, Abdelwahab Meddeb. Movies include Viva Laldjérie, Rome plutot que vous, Les Sabots en or, Les Silence des Palais, Halfaouine, Satin Rouge, Le Chant des Mariées, and Mort à Vendre. Taught in French. Films in French and Arabic with English subtitles.