Results for FRENLIT

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). Prerequisite: FRENLANG 126 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. Prerequisite: FRENLANG 126 or consent of instructor.

Major literary genres, and social and cultural contexts. Focus is on the emergence of new literary forms such as surréalisme, nouveau roman, and nouveau théâtre. Topics of colonization, decolonization, and feminism. Readings include Balzac, Baudelaire, Césaire, Colette, and Ionesco. Prerequisite: FRENLANG 126 or consent of instructor.

Major African and Caribbean writers. Issues raised in literary works which reflect changing aspects of the societies and cultures of Francophone Africa and the French Caribbean. Topics include colonization and change, quest for identity, tradition and modernity, and new roles and status for women. Readings in fiction and poetry. Authors include Laye Camara, Mariama Ba, and Joseph Zobel. In French. Prerequisite: FRENLANG 126 or consent of instructor.

The emergence of new social types in nineteenth-century fiction. Questions: How do groups differentiate themselves? Which groups are heroized and which are villainized? Who belongs and who doesn't? Topics include social climbers, dandies, philosophers, the poor, students, criminals, actresses, crowds, and the bourgeoisie. Authors include Balzac, Stendhal, Sue, Nerval, Vigny, Flaubert, Zola. Taught in French.

Senior honors students enroll for 5 units in Winter while writing the honors thesis, and may enroll in 189B for 2 units in Spring while revising the thesis. Prerequisite: DLCL 189.

Open to juniors with consent of adviser while drafting honors proposal. Open to senior honors students while revising honors thesis. Prerequisites for seniors: 189A, DLCL 189.

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

How the idea of the Enlightenment emerged in French intellectual circles, and how it evolved over the course of the eighteenth century. Focus in particular on the articulation between the Enlightenment and its two most illustrious precursors: the Scientific Revolution and the grand siècle. Readings include texts by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, d¿Alembert, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant.

Liberated from traditional forms and rhythms in the 19th century, poetry as an open field for exploration and self-redefinition in the 20th century. The poem as a fixed form, obsolete or artificial, endangers poetry as a privileged gate to truth, presence, ethics, or an authentic relation to the world. How in times of suspicion over the powers and failures of language, prose becomes the only truthful medium to approach a poetic essence beyond poetry. Readings include Mallarmé, René Char, Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, Jacques Réda, and literary critics.

The theater of the absurd as an evolving commentary on modern alienation and attempt to make a humorous yet philosophical peace with it through the concreteness of performance. Authors include Jarry, Marinetti, Pirandello, Salacrou, Cocteau, Camus, and Sartre.

Critical analysis of major issues relating to literatures in French language in and outside France. Focus is on exoticism and and self-representation, with an emphasis on the evolution of mentalities, new sensitivities and the role of literature in developing individual or collective identity. Readings include Le Clézio, Memmi, Malouf, Lopes, Schwarz-Bart, Delaygue, Glissant, Todorov, Kane and others. Primary sources, secondary sources and film. Taught in French.

Five-week course. May be repeated for credit.

Five-week course. May be repeated for credit.

May be repeated for credit.

The representation of Algeria through authors from both shores of the Mediterranean. Literature and Algerianism. Politics and the Algerian war. Memory and mourning. Readings include Louis Bertrand, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu, Benjamin Stora, Assia Djebar, Jean Pélégri, Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, and Nina Bouraoui.

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

The essay, whose tradition is firmly rooted in France, resists conventional taxonomies and tests the plasticity of genre. Not only does the essay borrow from all Aristotelian categories, it also merges disciplines, conflating art and science while constructing its own system of logic and its own codes. With exemplary works by 20th-century French essayists, issues include generic hybridity, open-endedness, voice, form, rhetorical devices and style, and political engagement. Montaigne, Apollinaire, Proust, Valéry, Beckett, Artaud, Ponge, Yourcenar, Sartre, Camus, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, and Cixous.

The lasting influence in Europe of absolutism. Topics include political theories, the importance of court life, art as a political tool, modifications in human sensibility, literature, and social transformations.

Molière's life and work as a point of departure for the notion of multiculturalism. Born in a bourgeois family, Molière was in contact with social milieux including the French peasantry for whom he wrote farces, and the court of Louis XIV for whom he provided spectacles at Versailles. Major plays, including Tartuffe, Le bourgeois gentilhomme, and Le malde imaginaire as the expression of the new court culture. Sociohistorical and contemporary literary approaches: Molière as the unifying artistic figure in a multicultural France.

Literary works as historical narratives; texts which envision ways of reconstructing or representing an ancient or immediate past through collective or individual narratives. Narration and narrator; relation between individual and collective history; historical events and how they have shaped the narratives; master narratives; and alternative histories. Reading include Glissant, Césaire, Dadié, Cixous, Pérec, Le Clézio, Mokkedem, Benjamin, de Certeau, and White.

How fiction articulates the tensions among the sensuous, the sensual, the embodied, and the aspiration to purity, abstraction, and transcendence. Focus is on questioning dichotomies such as nature/culture, masculine/feminine, sacred/profane, and written word/voice. Authors include Gide, Camus, Butor, Duras, and Tournier.