1 - 10 of 11 results for: FRENCH ; Currently searching spring courses. You can expand your search to include all quarters

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.