Results for FRENCH

This three-quarter sequence asks big questions of major texts in the European and American tradition. What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? The second quarter focuses on the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity, Europe's re-acquaintance with classical antiquity and its first contacts with the New World. Authors include Dante, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Cervantes, and Milton.

This three-quarter sequence asks big questions of major texts in the European and American tradition. What is a good life? How should society be organized? Who belongs? How should honor, love, sin, and similar abstractions govern our actions? What duty do we owe to the past and future? This third and final quarter focuses on the modern period, from the rise of revolutionary ideas to the experiences of totalitarianism and decolonization in the twentieth century. Authors include Locke, Mary Shelley, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Primo Levi, and Frantz Fanon.

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.

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.

Examines 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, radicalization, terrorism, 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 English. Films in French with English subtitles. Additional paper for students enrolled in 332.

"The Don Draper of Existentialism" for Adam Gopnik, "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 "intellectuel engagé," or public intellectual. From his birth in 1913 into a poor family in Algeria to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, from Saint Germain-des-Prés to his predilection for the mediterranean culture, Camus captured the quest for universalism, for the politics of justice, and engaged in the great ethical battles of his time, from the fight against nazism and communism, from questioning colonial rules to the haunting Algerian War, and his complex "silence" over the war. Camus the Algerian, Camus the moralist, Camus the Resistant: through readings and films, we will explore his multiple, long-lasting legacies. Readings from Albert Camus, Kamel Daoud, Mouloud Feraoun, Alice Kaplan, Orhan Pamuk, A.B. Yehoshua, Assia Djebar, Jean-Paul Sartre, Yasmina Khadra. Movies include "The Stranger," and "Far from Men." This course is a gateway for French Studies, with special emphasis on oral proficiency. Taught in French.

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 may include Corneille, Molière, Racine, Lafayette, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, and Gouges. Taught in French. Prerequisite: FRENLANG 124 or consent of instructor.

How did the train, the free-verse poem, or the camera change the way we think about the world? Many ideas, technologies, and literary forms that we take for granted today were sources of great inspiration and anxiety for 19th and 20th century writers and artists. The aim of this course is to explore how French literature responded to these literary, cultural, and technological revolutions and how we relate to these changes today. Comparing Hugo¿s romantic landscapes to Baudelaire¿s crowded cities, Zola¿s attempts at scientific writing with Verne¿s science fiction, and Maupassant¿s fantastic tales to Ponge's surrealist science, we will examine how poems, short stories, novels, and films express our changing understandings of society, technology, nature, and art. Readings include Hugo, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Zola, Verne, Apollinaire, Ponge, Camus, Barthes, and Le Clézio. Taught 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 early and modern periods of globalization across the Atlantic, including the middle passage, exploration and 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 self-making or new citizenship, to evoke histories of racial unity or examine psychic and 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 (Conrad, Condé, Olinto), epic and prose poetry (Césaire, Walcott), theoretical reflection (Gilroy, Glissant, Mudimbe, Benitez-Rojo), and literary autobiography (Barack Obama, Saidiya Hartman).

This course looks at theories of revolution and political or social change from ancient Greece to the Arab Spring. The course will provide a close reading of a selection of texts from ancient Greek political writing (Plato, Aristotle), medieval and early modern political advice literature (Marsilius of Padua, Machiavelli), and modern political thought (Tocqueville). Later sections of the course look at how the insights derived from the history of political thought can help generate a new framework for the study of modern revolutions, such as the Iranian Revolution and the Arab Spring. INSTRUCTOR: Vasileios Syros Note: Instructor has submitted WTWD for Social Inquiry (SI) and Ethical Reasoning (ER).

Issues of authenticity, morality, personal identity, and the value of truth explored through film; philosophical investigation of the filmic medium itself. Screenings to include Blade Runner (Scott), Do The Right Thing (Lee), The Seventh Seal (Bergman), Fight Club (Fincher), La Jetée (Marker), Memento (Nolan), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Kaufman). Taught in English.

Where did monsters appear before starring in comic-books and blockbusters? How were they represented and what did they symbolize? You may be familiar with ghosts, vampires and zombies but have you heard of the Scythian Lamb? The Monk Fish? The Monopod? The Wind-Eaters from the Island of Ruach? The giants Gargantua and Pantagruel? "Monstrum," in Latin, was used to refer to a prodigy that did not fit the laws of nature. Thus, the monster, not only generates wonder, curiosity or fear, but also challenges and disrupts the norms and values of a given society. Throughout the course, students will learn how to closely analyze a multi-genre corpus of literary works (novel, travel narrative, medical treatise, essay and epic poem) in relation to the historical and cultural context of 16th century France, a time when writers, doctors, and travelers developed a critical reflection on monstrosity. The course is designed to help students reach an advanced level of French. Readings will include: selections from classical authors such as Homer and Ovid; the Legend of Saint Georges and the Dragon; Francois Rabelais: "Gargantua," "Quart Livre;" Jean de Léry: "Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil;" Ambroise Paré: "Des Monstres et Prodiges;" Michel de Montaigne: "Essais;" Agrippa d¿Aubigné: "Les Tragiques." Taught in French.

Students cook a collection of unfamiliar recipes each week while learning about the cultural milieus in which they originated. The course focuses on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a time of great banquets that brought together chefs, visual artists, poets, musicians, and dancers. Students read late-medieval cookbooks under the guidance of professional chefs, learn songs and poetry with the help of visiting performers, and delve into a burgeoning scholarly literature on food history and sensory experience. We will also study trade routes and food networks, the environmental impact of large-scale banquets, the science of food, and the politics of plenty. This course may count towards the Medieval component of the French major, and corresponds to DLCL 121, a course requirement for the Medieval Studies Minor. Students interested in applying for course need to email Professors Galvez and Rodin (mailto:mgalvez@stanford.edu and mailto:jrodin@stanford.edu) with a statement of intent and dietary restrictions/preferences.

This course takes students on a trip to eight capital cities, at different moments in time: Renaissance Florence, Golden Age Madrid, Colonial Mexico City, Enlightenment and Romantic Paris, Existential and Revolutionary St. Petersburg, Roaring Berlin, Modernist Vienna, and bustling Buenos Aires. While exploring each place in a particular historical moment, we will also consider the relations between culture, power, and social life. How does the cultural life of a country intersect with the political activity of a capital? How do large cities shape our everyday experience, our aesthetic preferences, , and our sense of history? Why do some cities become cultural capitals? Primary materials for this course will consist of literary, visual, sociological, and historical documents (in translation); authors we will read include Boccaccio, Lope de Vega, Sor Juana, Montesquieu, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Irmgard Keun, Freud, and Borges.

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, with particular focus on the question of value: what, if anything, does engagement with literary works do for our lives? Issues include aesthetic self-fashioning, the paradox of tragedy, the paradox of caring, the truth-value of fiction, metaphor, authorship, irony, make-believe, expression, edification, clarification, and training. Readings are drawn from literature and film, philosophical theories of art, and stylistically interesting works of philosophy. Authors may include Sophocles, Chaucer, Dickinson, Proust, Woolf, Borges, Beckett, Kundera, Charlie Kaufman; Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas; Plato, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre. 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.

For much of modern history (ca. 1600-1900), French culture occupied a similar global place that American culture does today: it was the preferred "other" culture in the realms of entertainment, research, and polite conversation. As with America today, the French state was also a military superpower in European and global affairs. This course will explore how French culture and government combined to create this new model of culture based on refinement and the projection of power. Expressed through language, literature, and architecture (most famously, Versailles), this elite form of culture would come to symbolize education and social status from Lisbon to St-Petersburg. Readings will include historical accounts of early-modern France and Europe, as well as works by Corneille, Molière, Racine, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Taught in French.

This seminar seeks to understand the experience of living in a time of revolution. It draws on recent histories describing the second half of the eighteenth century as a global 'Age of Revolutions,' not only in the United States and France, but in places as varied as Bengal, Haiti, and Latin America. The course will give an introduction to the spread of revolutions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Readings and viewings for the course will include works of history as well as novels, plays, paintings, and operas to bring the experience of street protest to life. Students will explore how revolutionary moments are structured by political, economic, and cultural forces, but are also deeply unpredictable and dependent on the felt experience of their participants. The course will be taught in English, with the option of readings in French for departmental majors.

This course traces a history of how over the past two centuries various innovations in transportation technologies have shaped so much of how our world works: from how we eat, to how we relax, to how we dream, to the houses we live in, to how our financial systems work, and to how new ideas spread.

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 malade imaginaire as the expression of the new court culture. Sociohistorical and contemporary literary approaches: Molière as the unifying artistic figure in a multicultural France. Taught in French.

How STS and the Humanities can together help think out the looming catastrophes that put the future of humankind in jeopardy.

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 a call made by the editor-in-chief of The Lancet for a literature of global health, namely fiction modeled on the social reform novels of the nineteenth century, understood to have helped readers develop a conscience for public health as the field emerged as a modern medical specialty. We will then spend the quarter understanding how colonial, postcolonial, and world literatures have answered and complicated this call. Readings will include prose fiction by Albert Camus, Joseph Conrad, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, Amitav Ghosh, Susan Sontag as well as physician memoirs featuring Frantz Fanon, Albert Schweitzer, Abraham Verghese, Paul Farmer. And each literary reading will be paired with medical, philosophical, and policy writings that deeply inform the field of global health.

Every story is in some ways a travel story, a journey from here to there. In this seminar we'll explore how different people in different times and places experimented with the travel-story form to make sense of their social worlds. We'll focus on the twentieth century, during which people, images, and ideas moved around the world at an unprecedented scale and with increasing speed. Some journeys take us across oceans, while others are limited to just a few city blocks. For a final project students may complete a standard research paper related to themes of the course, or may produce their own travel narrative, however they choose to interpret this rubric. nSPECIAL GUEST LECTURER: Pico Iyer, travel writer.

This course examines the relationship between art and the market, from the château-builders of the French Renaissance to avant-garde painters in the nineteenth-century Salon des Refusés. Using examples drawn from France, this course explores the relationship between artists and patrons, the changing status of artists in society, patterns of shifting taste, and the effects of museums on making and collecting art. Students will read a mixture of historical texts about art and artists, fictional works depicting the process of artistic creation, and theoretical analyses of the politics embedded in artworks. They will engage in sustained analysis of individual artworks, as well as the market structures in which such artworks were produced and bought. The course will be taught in English, with the option of readings in French for departmental majors.

More than any other European country and any other period, 19th century France seems to be dominated by the conflict between capital and periphery, between Paris and the provinces. If Paris was the capital of the 19th century, then what of the rest of France? Is it a space of conservatism, boredom, and stagnation, or one of natural beauty, escape, and transgression? In this seminar we will look at how French novels of the period analyzed and re-imagined life outside of Paris and, conversely, how a sense of what life in the provinces is had a reflection on different novelistic genres. Readings by Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo, Sand, and Zola. Taught in French.

The Enlightenment as a philosophical, literary, and political movement. Themes include the nature and limits of philosophy, the grounds for critical intellectual engagement, the institution of society and the public, and freedom, equality and human progress. Authors include Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hume, Diderot, and Condorcet.

How does modern fiction, aided by modern philosophy, give the lie to Descartes' famous "I think therefore I am"? And how does writing convey the desire for a different, perhaps stronger, integration of mind and body? Does the body speak a particular truth that we must learn to hear, that the mind is not always connected to? How do modern metaphors for the mind-body connection shape our experience? These questions will be explored via the works of major French and Italian writers and thinkers, including Pirandello, Calvino, Camus, Houellebecq, Sartre, and Agamben.

This course offers to study the Algerian Wars since the French conquest of Algeria (1830-1847) to the Algerian civil war of the 1990s. We will revisit the ways in which the wars have been narrated in historical and political discourse, and in literature. A special focus will be given to the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). The course considers the continuing legacies surrounding this traumatic conflict in France and Algeria and the delicate re-negotiation of the French nation-state that resulted. A key focus will be on the transmission of collective memory through transnational lenses. We will examine how the French and Algerian states, but also civil societies (Pieds-Noirs, Arabs, Kabyles, Jews, veterans, Harkis, "suitcase carriers") have instrumentalized the memories of the war for various ends, through analyses of commemorative events and monuments. Readings from Alexis de Tocqueville, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, Mouloud Feraoun, Rachid Mimouni, Wassyla Tamzali, Germaine Tillion, Pierre Nora, Benjamin Stora, Todd Shepard, Sarah Stein, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, James Lesueur. Movies include "The Battle of Algiers," "Indigènes," and "Viva Laldjérie." Taught in French.

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.

This course explores how France experienced some of the most tumultuous episodes in modern history, including world wars, collaboration and genocide, wars of decolonization, globalization, immigration, and economic decline. Our sources will include a rich combination of novels, films, architecture, and memoirs, including many classics of their chosen genres.

This course will probe the thought of nothingness in various European writers and thinkers. The main authors include Giacomo Leopardi, Nietszsche, Michelstader, Heidegger, Beckett, and Emile Cioran.

Examines 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, radicalization, terrorism, 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 English. Films in French with English subtitles. Additional paper for students enrolled in 332.

This course explores the central place Africa holds in prose writing emerging during early and modern periods of globalization across the Atlantic, including the middle passage, exploration and 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 self-making or new citizenship, to evoke histories of racial unity or examine psychic and 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 (Conrad, Condé, Olinto), epic and prose poetry (Césaire, Walcott), theoretical reflection (Gilroy, Glissant, Mudimbe, Benitez-Rojo), and literary autobiography (Barack Obama, Saidiya Hartman).

How does modern fiction, aided by modern philosophy, give the lie to Descartes' famous "I think therefore I am"? And how does writing convey the desire for a different, perhaps stronger, integration of mind and body? Does the body speak a particular truth that we must learn to hear, that the mind is not always connected to? How do modern metaphors for the mind-body connection shape our experience? These questions will be explored via the works of major French and Italian writers and thinkers, including Pirandello, Calvino, Camus, Houellebecq, Sartre, and Agamben.

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.

This course explores how France experienced some of the most tumultuous episodes in modern history, including world wars, collaboration and genocide, wars of decolonization, globalization, immigration, and economic decline. Our sources will include a rich combination of novels, films, architecture, and memoirs, including many classics of their chosen genres.

Students cook a collection of unfamiliar recipes each week while learning about the cultural milieus in which they originated. The course focuses on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a time of great banquets that brought together chefs, visual artists, poets, musicians, and dancers. Students read late-medieval cookbooks under the guidance of professional chefs, learn songs and poetry with the help of visiting performers, and delve into a burgeoning scholarly literature on food history and sensory experience. We will also study trade routes and food networks, the environmental impact of large-scale banquets, the science of food, and the politics of plenty. This course may count towards the Medieval component of the French major, and corresponds to DLCL 121, a course requirement for the Medieval Studies Minor. Students interested in applying for course need to email Professors Galvez and Rodin (mailto:mgalvez@stanford.edu and mailto:jrodin@stanford.edu) with a statement of intent and dietary restrictions/preferences.

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

This course will probe the thought of nothingness in various European writers and thinkers. The main authors include Giacomo Leopardi, Nietszsche, Michelstader, Heidegger, Beckett, and Emile Cioran.

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.