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This course primarily concerns how French artists, writers, and filmmakers have explored the intersecting themes of fashion and modernity in various media, including painting, sculpture, architecture, the decorative arts, poetry, novels, film, dance, and mass advertising. Using modern France as a case study, we will think critically about how the fashion, design, and luxury industries have influenced the production and reception of modern art - and vice versa. While the course is organized thematically, we will move chronologically from the late-18th century to the 1950s, conducting a survey of some of the major developments in French visual culture along the way. Finally, we will consider the ways that fashion-minded artists, designers, and entrepreneurs have helped to create, reflect, and critique modern French identities.

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 Primary materials for this course will consist of literary, visual, sociological, and historical documents (in translation); authors we will read include Boccaccio, Lope de Vega, Sor Juana, Montesquieu, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Irmgard Keun, Freud, and Borges.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.

Preference to sophomores. Political, social, and cultural events in Paris from the Napoleonic era and the Romantic revolution to the 30s. The arts and letters of bourgeois, popular, and avant garde cultures. Illustrated with slides. 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.