printer friendly pageFRENCH 209: Famous French Figures: Celebrity and the Making of French Identity (HISTORY 235G, HISTORY 335G)
How do we think historically about something as fleeting as fame? In this seminar we¿ll engage with the biographies of eight famous French figures, exploring how each of these celebrated lives influenced popular perceptions of what it has meant to be French over the past two centuries. Questions we will ask include: How and why are public figures remembered and memorialized differently at different times and in different places? Who does and does not qualify for the role of French celebrity, and why? What work must biographers do to frame something as complex as a human life into a coherent narrative? What is gained and lost in approaching a given era through a close examination of one individual? Most central to this course: How do people create and contest their cultural and national identities through the collective celebration of particular individuals? We will study the lives and times of three men and five women: Marie Antoinette, Napoleon Bonaparte, Edouard Manet, Sarah Bernhardt, Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Albert Camus, and Francoise Sagan.
Last offered: Spring 2016
FRENCH 210: Representation and Theatre Culture in 20th Century France (TAPS 353)
This course will examine some major French playwrights such as Alfred Jarry, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jean Tardieu, Albert Camus or Jean Anouilh in their global cultural environment. Discussion in English; French majors read in French.
Last offered: Winter 2016
FRENCH 211: Emile Zola (COMPLIT 211A)
A comprehensive introduction to and historical analysis of Emile Zola's literary work as foundational for the late-nineteenth century literary movement that we call "Naturalism." The analysis of Zola's novels will be embedded in the historical situation of France in the transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic, with special emphasis on the epistemological situation of that time. Knowledge of French desirable but participation through English translations will be possible.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
FRENCH 213: When the World Spoke French: Kings, Writers, and Philosophers, 1630-1789/Old Regime France
Starting in the mid-17th century, France became the cultural trendsetter for most of Europe and parts of the world. How did French culture impose itself as culture tout court? We will examine the importance of politics, literature, and philosophy in this process. Readings will include Corneille, Descartes, Pascal, Racine, Moliere, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Beaumarchais. Taught in French; readings in French.
FRENCH 214: Pirandello, Sartre, and Beckett (COMPLIT 281E, COMPLIT 381E, FRENCH 314, ITALIAN 214, ITALIAN 314)
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.
Last offered: Winter 2015
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II
FRENCH 215: Taking to the Streets: Experiencing the Age of Revolutions (HISTORY 208G)
This seminar seeks to understand the experience of living in a time of revolution. It draws on recent histories describing the second half of the eighteenth century as a global 'Age of Revolutions,' not only in the United States and France, but in places as varied as Bengal, Haiti, and Latin America. The course will give an introduction to the spread of revolutions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Readings and viewings for the course will include works of history as well as novels, plays, paintings, and operas to bring the experience of street protest to life. Students will explore how revolutionary moments are structured by political, economic, and cultural forces, but are also deeply unpredictable and dependent on the felt experience of their participants. The course will be taught in English, with the option of readings in French for departmental majors.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Pesic, A. (PI)
FRENCH 217: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Transportation, Tourism, and the Making of Modern Europe (HISTORY 236E)
This course traces a history of how over the past two centuries various innovations in transportation technologies have shaped so much of how our world works: from how we eat, to how we relax, to how we dream, to the houses we live in, to how our financial systems work, and to how new ideas spread.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
Instructors:
Braude, M. (PI)
FRENCH 218: Skepticism and Atheism in Early-Modern French Thought
Religious belief was a fundamental part of early-modern life, and the proposition that human beings could not prove God's existence had profound implications for all realms of human experience. This course will explore the complex relationship between philosophical skepticism and religious belief in early-modern Europe (particularly France) and investigate how these heterodox philosophies transformed the understanding of humanity's interaction with the surrounding world. We will begin by looking at the origins of religious unbelief and the revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism in the 16th century. By placing the atheists and the skeptics in dialogue with their deist and Christian opponents, we will see how these ideas evolved over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries and consider the influence of these subversive theories on the social and political fabric of Europe. Taught in English. Readings in French (English translations available).
Last offered: Autumn 2013
FRENCH 219: The Renaissance Body in French Literature and Medicine (FRENCH 319)
If the Renaissance is famous for discovering unknown continents and ancient texts the body too was a new territory of conquest. How did literature respond to the rise of an anatomical gaze in the arts and in medicine and how did it stage the aesthetic religious philosophical and moral issues related to such a promotion or deconstruction of the body? Does literature aim at representing the body or does it use it instead as a ubiquitous signifier for intellectual emotional and political ideas? The locus of desire, pleasure and disease, the body also functioned as a reminder of human mortality and was caught in the web of gender issues, religious controversies and new norms of behavior. Texts from prose fiction (Rabelais) poetry (Scève Ronsard Labé D'Aubigné) essays (Montaigne) and emblem literature. Extra documents include music scores tapestries paintings philosophical and anatomical plates from medical treatises. Taught in English. Visit the Web site:
renaissancebodyproject.stanford.edu
Last offered: Winter 2016
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
FRENCH 221: Conceiving Other Worlds: Travel Narrative and Science Fiction in Early-Modern France
This course will concentrate on the important role of science fiction and travel literature in early-modern France. Although these narratives were intended to describe distant worlds and different ways of living, they frequently revealed more about the aspirations, assumptions, hopes, and concerns of the cultures in which they originated than about their actual subject matter. Authors frequently sought to determine the identity and uniqueness of their own cultures by contrasting them against the 'otherness' of their imagined subjects. Similarly, by describing either utopian or dystopian civilizations, writers attempted to highlight the problems that plagued their own societies. Among other texts, we will read selections from Montaigne's 'Essais,' Cyrano de Bergerac's 'L'Autre monde ou les états et empires de la Lune,' Huygens's 'Nouveau traité de la pluralité des mondes,' Fontenelle's 'Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes,' Voltaire's 'Micromegas,' Bougainville's 'Voyage autor du monde,' and Diderot's 'Supplement au voyage de Bougainville.' Taught in English. Readings in French (English translations available).
Last offered: Spring 2014
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
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