printer friendly pageFRENCH 260A: Transcultural Perspectives of South-East Asian Music and Arts (COMPLIT 148, COMPLIT 267, MUSIC 146N, MUSIC 246N)
This course will explore the links between aspects of South-East Asian cultures and their influence on modern and contemporary Western art and literature, particularly in France; examples of this influence include Claude Debussy (Gamelan music), Jacques Charpentier (Karnatak music), Auguste Rodin (Khmer art) and Antonin Artaud (Balinese theater). In the course of these interdisciplinary analyses - focalized on music and dance but not limited to it - we will confront key notions in relation to transculturality: orientalism, appropriation, auto-ethnography, nostalgia, exoticism and cosmopolitanism. We will also consider transculturality interior to contemporary creation, through the work of contemporary composers such as Tran Kim Ngoc, Chinary Ung and Tôn-Thât Tiêt. Viewings of sculptures, marionette theater, ballet, opera and cinema will also play an integral role. To satisfy a Ways requirement, this course must be taken for at least 3 units. In AY 2020-21, a letter grade or `CR¿ grade satisfies the Ways requirement. WIM credit in Music at 4 units and a letter grade.
Terms: Win
| Units: 2-4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Kretz, H. (PI)
FRENCH 264: Crossing the Atlantic: Race and Identity in the African Diaspora (AFRICAAM 264, COMPLIT 264, CSRE 265)
This course interrogates the relationship between literature, culture, race and identity in the African diaspora. We will analyze racial discourses through literature, and various forms of cultural expression while examining the role of class and gender in these configurations. As we follow the historical and geographical trajectories of people of African descent in different parts of the world, students will explore literary and political movements with the objective of examining how race has been constructed and is performed in different regions of the diaspora. Our readings will take us from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, France, and Senegal to Cuba, Brazil, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Topics discussed will include: Race, identity, gender, class, memory, oral tradition, Afro-Caribbean religions, Negrismo, Négritude, Antillanité, Créolité, colonialism, modernity and national belonging. Readings will include the works of: Jean Price-Mars, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, Frantz Fanon, Nicolás Guillén, Nancy Morejon, Maryse Condé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edouard Glissant, among others. Taught in English.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Seck, F. (PI)
;
Brault, C. (TA)
FRENCH 266: Food, Text, Music: A Multidisciplinary Lab on the Art of Feasting (FRENCH 166, FRENCH 366, MUSIC 133, MUSIC 333)
Students cook a collection of unfamiliar recipes each week while learning about the cultural milieus in which they originated. The course focuses on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a time of great banquets that brought together chefs, visual artists, poets, musicians, and dancers. Students read late-medieval cookbooks under the guidance of professional chefs, learn songs and poetry with the help of visiting performers, and delve into a burgeoning scholarly literature on food history and sensory experience. We will also study trade routes and food networks, the environmental impact of large-scale banquets, the science of food, and the politics of plenty. This course may count towards the Medieval component of the French major, and corresponds to
DLCL 121, a course requirement for the Medieval Studies Minor. Students interested in applying for course must email the professor (jrodin@stanford.edu) by 20 September with a statement of up to 350 words that includes: (a) reasons for wanting to take the class; (b) relevant background in cooking/medieval studies/etc.; (c) stated commitment to attend all ten course meetings; and (d) any dietary restrictions/preferences.
Last offered: Autumn 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
FRENCH 285: Texts and Contexts: French-English Translation (COMPLIT 285, CSRE 285, FRENCH 185)
This course introduces students to the ways in which translation has shaped the image of France and the Francophone world. What texts and concepts were translated, how, where, and to what effect? Students will work on a translation project throughout the quarter and translate texts from French to English and English to French. Topics may include the role of translation in the development of cultures; the political dimension of translation, translation in the context of migration, and the socio-cultural frameworks that shape translations. Case studies: Camus, Fanon, Glissant, de Beauvoir, Meddeb, Duras. Prior knowledge of French language required.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-CE
Instructors:
Seck, F. (PI)
;
Ulloa, M. (PI)
FRENCH 287: Sex, Gender, and Violence: French Women Writers Today (FEMGEN 187X, FEMGEN 287X, FEMGEN 387X, FRENCH 187, FRENCH 387)
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? Themes explored: sex and gender, sex and power, rape culture, sexual and moral taboos (incest, abortion, pornography, infanticide, lesbianism), the body as social stigma or source of meaning. Special attention given to narrative and descriptive strategies designed to avert, expose, deconstruct or account for specifically feminine experiences (rape, orgasm, pregnancy). Authors include Marie Darrieusecq, Christine Angot, Annie Ernaux, Marie NDiaye, Virginie Despentes, Leila Slimani, Ivan Jablonka along with feminist theory. Taught in French.
Last offered: Winter 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
GERMAN 68N: Franz Kafka: Literature and the Modern Human Condition
This class will address major works by Franz Kafka and consider Kafka as a modernist writer whose work reflects on modernity. We will also examine the role of Kafka's themes and poetics in the work of contemporary writers.
Last offered: Winter 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
GERMAN 75N: Famous Last Words
What would you say if you knew it would be the last thing you would ever say? Who would you want to hear your words? Would you want to inspire somebody? Terrify them? Shout your defiance or your love in their direction?nThis is a course about last words the final utterances left as legacies for the world in the face of revolution, war, betrayal, heartbreak, or that simplest of endings, death. We will look at a wide variety of last words, including last words codified as genres¿quotations, suicide notes, epitaphs, dying declarations, Japanese death poems, confessions, and the like as literary devices (last sentences, envois, punch lines, epilogues), and as forms of social or cultural practice (the making of heroes, idols, and martyrs in religious, political, and popular culture). We will look at fictional last words, real last words, last words spoken by heroes, gods, and ordinary people. And we will end the course, each of us, by writing out our own last words imagining what we each would write, if we had to sum up what mattered most to us, and if we wanted some small selection of signs to stand in, as it has for many of the authors we will read, for our life and the legacy of it.
Last offered: Autumn 2018
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
GERMAN 97: 10 Poems That Will Change Your Life
This course is for anyone who has ever been afraid of poetry, anyone who has ever thought that poems are too difficult to understand, a course for anyone who has fallen in love with poetry before, and for anyone who has used a poem to make a difference in someone's life. You will learn how to read, understand, and if you don't already like poetry. We will read poems from different centuries, different kinds of writers, and different media (paper, computer screens, and even DNA); they will be about loss and love and war and loyalty and bacteria. Some of them will be about you. You will develop interpretive skills that come with this range of poetic forms and structures and will learn how to think about what it means for something to be poetic, whether it is a poem, a Leonard Cohen song, a last minute field goal, or a toilet. Can the poems in this class really change your life? (What would that even mean? We'll discuss.) Maybe; maybe not. But they're certainly going to try.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Pao, L. (PI)
;
Martinez, N. (TA)
GERMAN 101: Germany in 5 Words
This course explores German history, culture and politics by tracing five (largely untranslatable) words and exploring the debates they have engendered in Germany over the past 200 years. This course is intended as preparation for students wishing to spend a quarter at the Bing Overseas Studies campus in Berlin, but is open to everyone. Taught in English.
Last offered: Spring 2020
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
GERMAN 106: Turkish-German Literature, Cinema, and Theater (GERMAN 206)
One in five people in Germany now has, as it is termed, a background of migration. Immigration from Turkey is probably the most prominent not only in terms of its massiveness and demographic consequences, but also for its significant role in changing Germany's overall cultural, social, and economic landscape. In this course, through analyzing selected literary works, films, and plays produced by Turkish-German writers and artists, we will discuss complex ideas like migration, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and class, resorting not to oversimplifications and binary thinking but instead to relevant literary concepts and formative historical moments which have shaped the Turkish-German experience. Remote synchronous with plenty of opportunities to participate in group and breakout room discussions and creative projects.
Terms: Sum
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Deniz, M. (PI)
Filter Results: