printer friendly pageFRENCH 75N: Narrative Medicine and Near-Death Experiences (ITALIAN 75N)
Even if many of us don't fully believe in an afterlife, we remain fascinated by visions of it. This course focuses on Near-Death Experiences and the stories around them, investigating them from the many perspectives pertinent to the growing field of narrative medicine: medical, neurological, cognitive, psychological, sociological, literary, and filmic. The goal is not to understand whether the stories are veridical but what they do for us, as individuals, and as a culture, and in particular how they seek to reshape the patient-doctor relationship. Materials will span the 20th century and come into the present. Taught in English.
Last offered: Autumn 2017
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
FRENCH 131: Absolutism, Enlightenment, and Revolution in 17th- and 18th-Century France
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, Moli¿re, Racine, Lafayette, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, and Gouges. Taught in French. Students are highly encouraged to complete
FRENLANG 124 or to successfully test above this level through the Language Center. This course fulfills the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Edmondson, C. (PI)
FRENCH 140: Paris: Capital of the Modern World (FRENCH 340, HISTORY 230C, URBANST 184)
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. Course taught in English with an optional French section.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
FRENCH 159: French Kiss: The History of Love and the French Novel (FRENCH 256, HISTORY 236F)
The history of the French novel is also the history of love. How did individuals experience love throughout history? How do novels reflect this evolution of love through the ages? And, most significantly, how have French novels shaped our own understanding of and expectations for romantic love today? The course will explore many forms of love from the Ancien R¿gime to the 20th century. Sentiment and seduction, passion and desire, the conflict between love and society: students will examine these themes from a historical perspective, in tandem with the evolution of the genre of the novel (the novella, the sentimental novel, the epistolary novel, the 19th-century novel, and the autobiographical novel). Some texts will be paired with contemporary films to probe the enduring relevance of love "¿ la fran¿aise" in the media today. Readings include texts by Lafayette, Pr¿vost, Laclos, Dumas fils, Flaubert, Colette, Yourcenar, and Duras. This is an introductory course to French Studies, with a focus on cultural history, literary history, interpretation of narrative, thematic analysis, and close reading. Undergraduate students should enroll for
FRENCH159, while graduate students may enroll for
FRENCH256. Readings and discussion in English.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Edmondson, C. (PI)
FRENCH 175: CAPITALS: How Cities Shape Cultures, States, and People (COMPLIT 100, DLCL 100, GERMAN 175, HISTORY 206E, ILAC 175, ITALIAN 175, URBANST 153)
This course takes students on a trip to major capital cities at different moments in time, including Renaissance Florence, Golden Age Madrid, colonial Mexico City, imperial Beijing, Enlightenment and romantic Paris, existential and revolutionary St. Petersburg, roaring Berlin, modernist Vienna, and transnational Accra. 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).
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
FRENCH 178: The Haitian Revolution: Slavery, Freedom, and the Atlantic World (AFRICAAM 178S, HISTORY 78S)
How did the French colony of Saint-Domingue become Haiti, the world's first Black-led republic? What did Haiti symbolize for the African diaspora and the Americas at large? What sources and methods do scholars use to understand this history? To answer these questions, this course covers the Haitian story from colonization to independence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our course will center Africans and people of African descent, both enslaved and free, as they negotiated and resisted systems of racial and economic oppression in the French Caribbean. Our inquiry will critically engage with conceptions and articulations of human and civil rights as they relate to legal realities and revolutionary change over time, as well as the interplay between rights and racial thinking. Tracing what historian Julius Scott called the "common wind" of the Haitian Revolution, we will also investigate how the new nation's emergence built on the American and French Revolutions while also influencing national independence movements elsewhere in the Atlantic World. Priority given to history majors and minors; no prerequisites and all readings are in English.
Last offered: Winter 2022
| UG Reqs: WAY-EDP, WAY-SI
FRENCH 213E: Culture and Revolution in Africa (AFRICAAM 213, COMPLIT 213, HISTORY 243E)
This course investigates the relationship between culture, revolutionary decolonization, and post-colonial trajectories. It probes the multilayered development of 20th and 21st-century African literature amid decolonization and Cold War cultural diplomacy initiatives and the debates they generated about African literary aesthetics, African languages, the production of history, and the role of the intellectual. We will journey through national cultural movements, international congresses, and pan-African festivals to explore the following questions: What role did writers and artists play in shaping the discourse of revolutionary decolonization throughout the continent and in the diaspora? How have literary texts, films, and works of African cultural thought shaped and engaged with concepts such as "African unity" and "African cultural renaissance"? How have these notions influenced the imaginaries of post-independence nations, engendered new subjectivities, and impacted gender and generational dynamics? How did the ways of knowing and modes of writing promoted and developed in these contexts shape African futures?
Terms: Spr
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-SI, WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Seck, F. (PI)
FRENCH 217: Love, Death and the Afterlife in the Medieval West (FRENCH 317, HISTORY 217D, HISTORY 317D, ITALIAN 217, ITALIAN 317)
Romantic love, it is often claimed, is an invention of the High Middle Ages. The vocabulary of sexual desire that is still current in the twenty-first century was authored in the twelfth and thirteenth, by troubadours, court poets, writers like Dante; even by crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. How did this devout society come to elevate the experience of sensual love? This course draws on primary sources such as medieval songs, folktales, the "epic rap battles" of the thirteenth century, along with the writings of Boccaccio, Saint Augustine and others, to understand the unexpected connections between love, death, and the afterlife from late antiquity to the fourteenth century. Each week, we will use a literary or artistic work as an interpretive window into cultural attitudes towards love, death or the afterlife. These readings are analyzed in tandem with major historical developments, including the rise of Christianity, the emergence of feudal society and chivalric culture, the crusading movement, and the social breakdown of the fourteenth century.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Phillips, J. (PI)
FRENCH 238: Art and the Market (ARTHIST 238C)
This course examines the relationship between art and the market, from Renaissance artisans to struggling Impressionist painters to the globalized commercial world of contemporary art and NFTs. 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 examine 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.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
Instructors:
Pesic, A. (PI)
;
Davidian, T. (TA)
FRENCH 252: Art and Power: From Royal Spectacle to Revolutionary Ritual (ARTHIST 252A)
From the Palace of Versailles to grand operas to Jacques-Louis David's portraits of revolutionary martyrs, rarely have the arts been so powerfully mobilized by the State as in early modern France. This course examines how the arts were used from Louis XIV to the Revolution in order to broadcast political authority across Europe. We will also consider the resistance to such attempts to elicit shock-and-awe through artistic patronage. By studying music, architecture, garden design, the visual arts, and theater together, students will gain a new perspective on works of art in their political contexts. But we will also examine the libelous pamphlets and satirical cartoons that turned the monarchy¿s grandeur against itself, ending the course with an examination of the new artistic regime of the French Revolution. The course will be taught in English with the option of French readings for departmental majors.
Last offered: Spring 2018
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
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