1 - 10 of 14 results for: FRENCH

Why is French culture so often associated with love and romance? This course examines romantic love--from the earliest romances written in French in the Middle Ages to its cinematic representations in the 21st century. We'll focus on the most passionate and controversial stories, exploring the problems posed by religion, class, race, and sexual orientation. We'll also look at the ways in which romantic love can be a trope in French culture, or a rhetorical instrument used to re-imagine personal awakenings, political situations, or one's relationship to the spiritual or to art. The approach is inter disciplinary, and students will study novels, theater, opera, and cinema. As this course is a gateway for French studies, special emphasis will be placed on oral proficiency. Taught in French.

This course will explore several of the most important texts of 19th- and 20th-century French literature. The aim of the course will be understanding stylistic and thematic experimentation in its historical/cultural context, with a focus on the theme of transgression : moral, political, and social. We will read works in all major literary genres (poetry, prose, and drama) and will discuss prominent movements such as Realism, Romanticism, Symbolism, Decadentism, and Existentialism through the works that best define them. Readings include Constant, Balzac, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Flaubert, Maupassant, Jarry, Gide, Apollinaire, Breton, Yourcenar, Sartre. All readings, discussion, and assignments are in French.

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. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works. Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin. 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.

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.

In this course, taught in French, we will explore theater from different angles including literary theory (the different dramatic genres), aesthetics (the classical representation) and cultural theories (the social function of theatre under absolutism). A new approach to acting will be considered, i.e. the many connections between theatre and possession. Amongst the authors considered, we will include Rotrou, Corneille, Cyrano de Bergerac, Racine, Molière and Regnard. Taught in French.

Few places have been as heavily romanticized and mythologized as Paris. To many observers, Paris and its attractions serve as icons of modernity itself. By engaging with fiction, film, journalism, painting, photography, poetry, song, and other media, we¿ll trace how different people at different times have used Paris as both backdrop and main protagonist, and we'll consider how the city itself has incorporated and rebelled against such representations. The scope of our inquiry will stretch from the late 18th century to the present, covering a host of topics, figures, and sites: from the French Revolution to the protests of May '68, from Baudelaire to Hemingway, from the Impressionists to the Situationists. Taught in English

An overview of the current awakening of French political thought as it is grounded in a new reading of the great classics of French social thought, from Rousseau to Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant. Readings of Lefort, Castoriadis, Louis Dumont, Ricoeur, Furet, Manent, Ferry, Renaut, Gauchet, Raynaud, etc. Readings in French. (Translations in English will be made available whenever possible.) Discussions in French and in English.