81 - 90 of 122 results for: FRENCH

This course offers a survey of painting in France from 1700 to around 1900. It introduces major artists, artworks, and the concepts used by contemporary observers and later art historians to make sense of this extraordinarily rich period. Overarching themes discussed in the class will include the dueling legacies of coloristic virtuosity and classical formalism, new ways of representing visual perception, the opposing artistic effects of absorption and theatricality, the rise and fall of official arts institutions, and the participation of artists and artworks in political upheaval and social change. The course ends with an interrogation of the concept of modernity and its emergence out of dialogue and conflict with artists of the past. Students will learn and practice formal analysis of paintings, as well as interpretations stressing historical context.

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.

Romantic love, it is often claimed, is an invention of the High Middle Ages. The vocabulary of sexual desire that is still current in the twenty-first century was authored in the twelfth and thirteenth, by troubadours, court poets, writers like Dante; even by crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. How did this devout society come to elevate the experience of sensual love? This course draws on primary sources such as medieval songs, folktales, the "epic rap battles" of the thirteenth century, along with the writings of Boccaccio, Saint Augustine and others, to understand the unexpected connections between love, death, and the afterlife from late antiquity to the fourteenth century. Each week, we will use a literary or artistic work as an interpretive window into cultural attitudes towards love, death or the afterlife. These readings are analyzed in tandem with major historical developments, including the rise of Christianity, the emergence of feudal society and chivalric culture, the crusading movement, and the social breakdown of the fourteenth century.

The Renaissance (14-16th c.) was a period of intense exploration: outwards, with the "discovery" and conquest of "new" continents and people; back in time, with the unearthing of Classical texts from antiquity; and inwards, with the first human dissections and the rise of gynecology. From all these experiences emerged multiple models and definitions of gender, conflicting norms of sexualities, and shifting accounts of sexual difference. Bodies became objects of constant scrutiny, speculation, and representation.Scientists, philosophers, writers, theologians, explorers discussed and documented hermaphrodites and animal-human hybrids, trans-gendering, vagrant uterus, male and female cosmic attributes, sexual drives, while poets dabbled in proto-pornography and subverted gender roles.We will look at scientific, literary, and artistic documents from 16th century France to investigate how gender, sex, race, and sexuality intersected in the age of the anatomical gaze.Readings from medical treatises, philosophy, novels (Rabelais), poetry (Scève, Ronsard, Labé), essays (Montaigne), and emblem literature. Taught in French.

An intensive reading of Vico's book - New Science. Emphasis will be on Vico's philosophy of history and theories of poetic wisdom, myth, and language. Vico will be put in dialogue with René Descartes, Rousseau, Auguste Compte, Claude Lévi Strauss, and Paul Feyerabend, whose ideas about myth and science converge in striking ways with Vico's.

Contemporary Brazilian, Caribbean, European, and American writers and artists who engage with media, forms, and temporalities of premodern cultures as they develop new epistemologies of the Global South. Readings include Augusto de Campos, Roberto Dainotto, Edouard Glissant, Ezra Pound, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Zrinka Stahuljak, Eliot Weinberger.

It is often said that "life is a narrative," or that "we live our lives in stories." But is this true? Do we always live our lives as narratives? Could we fail to live our lives as narratives? Could we choose not to live our lives as narratives? Even for those who do see their life as a story, will any old narrative do, or is there something special about the examples provided by the literary tradition? How does literary genre factor in? What is closure? And why are middles what they are? Readings from Appiah, Aristotle, Camus, Hume, Nietzsche, Simmel, G. Strawson, Velleman; Brooks, Woloch; Kahneman, Sacks; Shakespeare, Balzac, Sartre, Beckett, Calvino, Levi, Morrison. Films by Ephron, Kaufman, Polley. Taught in English.

This course is a critical examination of literature from the Francophone world of the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will travel through time and space with a selection of novels, poems, essays, and short stories. In this historical and cultural journey through Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, Vietnam and Mauritius, our objective will be to provide a reassessment of what Francophone studies mean in the 21st century. Topics discussed in the course will include race and representation, national and cultural identity, immigration and nationalism, transnationalism and diaspora, "littérature-monde," the politics of language, postcolonialism and universalism. Readings will include the works of Dani Laferrière, Bessora, Ken Bugul, Alain Mabanckou, Kim Thúy, Ananda Devi, Abdourahman Waberi, Véronique Tadjo and Abdelkebir Khatibi. Taught in French.

Casablanca, Algiers and Tunis embody three territories, real and imaginary, which never cease to challenge the preconceptions of travelers setting sight on their shores. In this class, we will explore the myriad ways in which these cities of North Africa, on the edge of Europe and of Africa, have been narrated in literature, cinema, and popular culture. Home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, they are an ebullient laboratory of social, political, religious, and cultural issues, global and local, between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. We will look at mass images of these cities, from films to maps, novels to photographs, sketching a new vision of these magnets as places where power, social rituals, legacies of the Ottoman and French colonial pasts, and the influence of the global economy collude and collide. Special focus on class, gender, and race.