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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.

Ideas matter. Concepts such as race, progress, and evil have inspired social movements, shaped political systems, and dramatically influenced the lives of individuals. Others, like religious tolerance, voting rights, and wilderness preservation play an important role in contemporary debates in the United States. All of these ideas are contested, and they have a real power to change lives, for better and for worse. In this one-unit class we will examine these dangerous ideas. Each week, a faculty member from a different department in the humanities and arts will explore a concept that has shaped human experience across time and space. Some weeks will have short reading assignments, but you are not required to purchase any materials.

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.

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. 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. Special guest: LEILA SLIMANI (Goncourt Prize 2016). Required readings include: Leila Slimani, "Sexe et Mensonges au Maroc", 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", "Les Baies d'Alger". nTaught in French. Prerequisite: FRENLANG 124 or consent of instructor.

This course explores how Paris, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, became the political, cultural, and artistic capital of the modern world. It considers how the city has both shaped and been shaped by the tumultuous events of modern history- class conflict, industrialization, imperialism, war, and occupation. It will also explore why Paris became the major world destination for intellectuals, artists and writers. Sources will include films, paintings, architecture, novels, travel journals, and memoirs.

In April 1968, a group of students occupied their university residences, and were later forced out by the police who had stormed the campus. The students were protesting the university's links with the army. This student occupation did not take place in the 5th arrondissement of central Paris, home to the famous Sorbonne University at the heart of the student protests of May '68, but in Harlem at Columbia University in New York. May 1968 in Paris has come to symbolize - not just in France, but across the globe - the critical role of the young and of workers in the greatest upheavals in social, political and cultural life to take place since the Second World War. This course, which coincides with the 50th anniversary of this global event, will introduce students to the movements and happenings that took place in France and worldwide in and around May 1968. It will explore how these events and their afterlives shaped then and now French and global conversations around nationalism, imperialism, capital, gender, culture, globalization, and aesthetics.nNOTE: To be eligible for WAYS credit, you must take FRENCH 136 for a minimum of 3 Units and a Letter Grade.

Can we write the history of private life? Throughout this course, we will try out different historical approaches to the history of intimate matters in the French Empire. Beyond a more complete understanding of what colonialism was like, studying the intimate draws attention to the societal norms and anxieties of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Patriarchy, racism, and classism the power structures inherent in colonialism¿produce fruitful sites for prying into intimate matters. To that end, we will probe a wide variety of primary sources, including novels, films, paintings, letters, diaries, travel accounts produced by male and female Europeans, Africans, Arabs, and East Asians. Topics covered through these sources include, colonial masculinity and femininity; divorce; homosexuality; prostitution; and sexual violence. We will transcend racial and class divides, and cover a diverse geography including, France, North and West Africa, and Vietnam.

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.

Long before the 2017 #Metoo campaign, French women writers have explored through powerful fictions and autobiographies the different shades of economic, social, psychological, physical, or sexual violence that is exerted against, but also by and between, women. How does literature - the power of words - address, deconstruct or comfort power dynamics (during sex and between the sexes) that are usually silenced, taboo or unspeakable? nWe will contrast these narrative to debates among French feminist writers (Beauvoir, Badinter, Mona Ozouf, Françoise Héritier, Michelle Perrot) around the theory (or myth?) of a specifically French kind of gender relation (ex: "galanterie," "séduction"). nThemes explored: sex and gender, sex and power, rape culture, sexual and moral taboos (incest, abortion, pornography, infanticide), the body as social stigma or source of meaning, identity, power. Special attention will be given to narrative and descriptive strategies designed to avert, expose, deconstruct or account for specifically feminine experiences (rape, orgasm, pregnancy). nAward-winning author Leila Slimani will participate in person in the class discussion of her novel on infanticide. nAuthors include Marie Darrieusecq, Christine Angot, Annie Ernaux, Marie NDiaye, Virginie Despentes, Leila Slimani, Ivan Jablonka.nTaught in French.