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Admissions | Course Atlas | Handbooks & Forms | Resources | Ph.D. in French
Ph.D. in French and Educational Studies | Graduate Requirements
Previous Graduate Seminars
Previous Graduate Seminars
Although courses are not generally repeated on a regular basis by the faculty, the following course list should give an idea of the kind of courses the Department offers.
CARTOGRAPHIES: CROSSING COLONIAL/NATIONAL BORDERS
THE ART OF LOVE
MEDIEVAL ALTERITY - THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE
BAROQUE AND CLASSICAL AESTHETICS
BALZAC: PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
SEX IN THE 19th CENTURY
ECRITURE ET PARFUM: LA QUESTION DE L'ODEUR
THE METANOVEL
CLAUDE SIMON
MALRAUX AND THE QUESTION OF BIOGRAPHY
NATION D'ECRIVAINS: APPARTENANCE ET IDENTITE DANS LA LITTERATURE FRANCOPHONE
TWENTIETH - CENTURY FRENCH AUTOBIOGRAPHY: LA VIE EST UN ROMAN
IRONY
INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM
PROBLEMS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING
PHILOSOPHY AND MODERN AESTHETICS
THEORIES OF SUBJECTIVITY
INAUGURATIONS
PEDAGOGICAL FlCTIONS
FRENCH FEMINIST THEORY AND ITS EFFECTS
DISCIPLINES OF MEMORY
BAUDELAIRE AND HIS READERS
FRENCH STYLISTICS
AUTOUR DE MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE
LA PENSEE DE ROLAND BARTHES
BODIES OF LETTERS: ABELARD AND HELOISE
THE INVENTION OF PASSIONS IN THE 17TH CENTURY
DIDEROT: LE DIALOGUE PHILOSOPHIQUE
FRANCIS PONGE, AUJOUR'DHUI
VIRTUAL BODIES: ANATOMY, TECHNOLOGY, METAPHYSICS
LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
IMAGINED OTHERS, RECONSTRUCTED SELF
VIOLENT MIRRORS
THE ART OF FORGETTING
GENESE DU ROMAN NATURALISTE
LITTERATURE, PEINTURE: L'EXEMPLE D'HENRI MICHAUX
LE ROMAN AU 18EME SIECLE
THE PLANTATION AMERICAS
LANGUAGE IN MODERN FRENCH THOUGHT
AFFECT AND MUTIC WRITING: LYOTARD
RAPTS/ENRAPTURES
MAUVAISES CONSCIENCES
UTOPIE CHEZ PONGE
FRENCH HEGEL
FRENCH LITERARY THEORY
CARIBBEAN FICTION AND THEORY
WALTER BENJAMIN'S FRENCH CORPUS: BAUDELAIRE, PROUST AND THE SURREALISTS
VISAGES DE MICHAUX OU LA QUESTION DE LA REPRESENTATION DANS LA PEINTURE MODERNE
DERRIDA
CARTOGRAPHIES: CROSSING COLONIAL/NATIONAL BORDERS.
We shall examine how the "map" of French cultural identity has been both constructed and challenged by reading a selection of French and Francophone literary, filmic and theoretical texts. Films include Muriel , La Bataille d'Alger, Chocolat, Indochine. Readings include works by Fanon, Césaire, Duras and Mariama Bâ. (Marder)
Taking as our starting point Ovid's account of the myth of Narcissus and its problematic articulation of vision and speech in the birth of the subject, we will trace the medieval speculation on love as being both a specular/fantasmatic process and an act of address, be it the lyric "envoi," the narrative "démarche," the testamentary legacy or the prayer to God. In all these cases, it will be a question of "finding" love ("finding" referring also to a tropological turn) in the very act of "addressing." We will also explore medieval writing as the "art" of addressing." We will also explore medieval writing as the "art" of addressing, translating, reiterating, breaking and conjoining. This art of writing will be shown to constitute an act of love in its own right. (Nouvet)
MEDIEVAL ALTERITY - THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE
This course is designed to be an introduction to medieval literature and medieval criticism through the close reading of the Romance of the Rose and the criticism surrounding it. Often described as a crucial turning point in medieval literature, the Romance of the Rose indeed raises some of the key issues that medieval criticism must address, issues such as generic translation, the use of allegorical and dream narratives, the status of the "I," the interrelated notions of author and of "oeuvre," etc. (Nouvet)
BAROQUE AND CLASSICAL AESTHETICS
This course outlines the signatory aspects of baroque and classical aesthetics. By analyzing the role of representation, we shall contrast their epistemological, linguistic, figurative and ideological presuppositions. In so doing, we shall highlight the emergence of critical discourse in the seventeenth century: d'Urfé, Sorel, Corneille, Garnier, Racine, Rotrou, Molière, Mme de Lafayette. (Judovitz)
Balzac occupe une position médiane entre deux traditions "philosophiques": une qui établit la vérité à l'exclusion du désir, et l'autre en fonction du désir. Nous analyserons les rapports balzaciens du désir et du savoir tels qu'ils se présentent à travers les Etudes philosophiques. (Harari)
In this course, we shall examine representations of "non-normative" sexuality in several major nineteenth-century works. Many of these works are organized around explicit or implicit depictions of impotence, lesbianism, hysteria, and prostitution. By focusing on the importance of these figures, we shall explore how nineteenth century discussions of sexuality function as a means to articulate changing conceptions of the relationship between language, history, gender and power. Possible texts include: Armance (Stendhal), La Fille aux yeux d'or (Balzac), Mlle de Maupin (Gautier), Madame Bovary (Flaubert) and selections from Baudelaire. We shall also discuss paintings by Delacroix, Manet and Courbet. Critical readings will include works by Foucault, Benjamin, Alain Corbin, Thomas Laqueur and others. (Marder)
ECRITURE ET PARFUM: LA QUESTION DE L'ODEUR
Exclue de la sphère des connaissances, sans dignité conceptuelle, incapable, á ce qu'il paraît, de s'élever á l'excellence d'une signification théorique et abstraite, l'odeur, á quelques rares exceptions près, est la grande absente de la philosophie, qui n'en dit rien en effet. C'est cet "en effet" que j'aimerais interroger, et interroger à partir de la littérature, -- laquelle, à la différence de la philosophie, et depuis Baudelaire au moins, aura fait au contraire de la questions de l'odeur, telle est mon hypothèse en tout cas, l'un de ses enjeux les plus secrets. (Bonnefis)
While not a new genre, the metanovel, or novel about the writing and/or reading of novels, is a particularly characteristic mode of fictional production in the twentieth century. In this course, we shall study various theories and techniques of metafiction in modern and postmodern French literature, with attention to their implications regarding the role of the author and the reader, and the ontological status of the fictional text. (Lang)
Pas d'oeuvre qui n'ait été l'objet d'autant de malentendus. Du Nouveau au Nouveau-Nouveau Roman, de la sémiotique à la narratologie, de la consécration par Tel Quel aux célébrations du prix Nobel, l'oeuvre de Claude Simon a servi, pendant près de trente ans, de champ de manoeuvres à tous les tenants de la modernité qui se la sont disputée avec acharnement. (Bonnefis)
MALRAUX AND THE QUESTION OF BIOGRAPHY
Why does Malraux stubbornly refuse the biographical genre for himself and a genre in general? A discussion of the presuppositions implied in the writing of biographies, especially the one of a writer who was also a public character. (Lyotard)
NATION D'ECRIVAINS: APPARTENANCE ET IDENTITE DANS LA LITTERATURE FRANCOPHONE
De KatebYacine à Tahar Djaout en Algérie, d'Edmond Jabès à Jacques Derrida ou de Abdelwahab Meddeb et Azouz Begag en France de grands écrivains francophones contemporains ont fait du problème de l'identité ou de l'appartenance culturelles une question centrale de notre temps. Migrants, exilés, porteurs de cultures et de langues différentes, ils amènent à repenser de fond en comble le classement traditionnel des littératures dites nationales. En partant des oeuvres les plus significatives d'auteurs francophones du Magreb, ce cours tentera de mettre en évidence les nouvelles figures de l'identité qu'elles permettent d'expérimenter ainsi que les nouvelles formes d'appartenance qu'elles nous donnent à penser. (Bensmaïa, Visiting Faculty)
TWENTIETH - CENTURY FRENCH AUTOBIOGRAPHY: LA VIE EST UN ROMAN
"Life imitates art." Oscar Wilde's dictum might have been meant to characterize autobiography, which has consistently been modeled after the novel, even if the contrary appears more consistent with common sense and literary critical commonplaces. This course will study the relationship between the fictional writing and the supposedly "true," autobiographical writing. (Lang)
This course will survey some of the most important and influential definitions of, and commentaries on, irony throughout history, before concentrating on its fate in contemporary literary theory, and the critical controversies with which it is associated. Selections from Plato, Aristotle, Quintilien, eighteenth-century rhetorical treatises, Kierkegaard, Barthes, Deleuze, Lyotard, De Man, Booth, and others. (Lang)
INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM
A discussion of the historical and critical changes that have occurred in modern criticism. The course is centered around the evolution undergone by five key concepts: author, text, work, interpreter, critic. Readings from Spitzer, Auerbach, Saussure, Sartre, Starobinski, Barthes, Foucault, Saïd, Girard, Geertz, Lévi-Strauss and Derrida. (Harari)
PROBLEMS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING
This course is designed to provide foreign language teachers with an understanding of theories of second language acquisition and with practice in implementing these ideas in the classroom. (Herron)
PHILOSOPHY AND MODERN AESTHETICS
What is at stake with modern and contemporary works of art and literature? Through the visible and the legible, something invisible and illegible? The question will be approached in terms of "phrasing" and time. (Lyotard)
This course examines the elaboration of subjectivity as a philosophical, literary and historical construct from the Late Renaissance to the Modern Age. (Judovitz)
The desire for an inaugural gesture haunts and defines any representation of writing in the second half of the 16th Century: to write becomes gradually synonymous with writing as a beginning beyond and independently from any scriptural antecedent. For the Pléiade and their successors, textual authority seems to be increasingly defined by the strength by which the illusion of an inaugural moment is imposed as such (as first and inaugural), and how it marks the beginning of an autonomous and proper space onto the very scene of the imitation of the Ancients . This seminar explores the different representations of inaugural writing and of writing as inaugural, as well as the contradictions in which such inaugural claims and representations are caught. Through a close reading of Ronsard's poetry (especially the various Amours collections) and of Montaigne's Essais, as well as some of their Latin sources(Virgil, Ovid and Quintilian), we will try to understand the limits and the conditions of these inaugural deployements which are at the very foundation of modern authorship (Bamps)
This course will examine the relationship between pedagogy and fiction in two interrelated ways: the use of the pedagogical fiction in literature as well as the inherent fictionality of the pedagogical relationship. (Nouvet)
FRENCH FEMINIST THEORY AND ITS EFFECTS
This course examines writings by some of theorists who have become known in the U.S. as the "New French Feminists" and the empact that these texts have had on debates in British and American Feminist Theory. We shall explore how, by engaging in active dialogue with the language and terminology of psychoanalysis and philosophy the French feminist have tried to articulate new understandings of the body and language, sexual difference, the ethical dimension of alterity, power and the law, and the gender of technology. Readings from Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rose, Gayatri Spivak, Jane Gallop, Avital Ronell, and others. (Marder)
This course is designed as an introduction to Renaissance French literature and criticism. It examines the redefinition of memory and forgetting through the close reading of major literary texts from the 16th century. We shall see how the transformation of concepts borrowed from the Latin rhetorical tradition (memory, imitation and exercise) maps out the conditions and the contradictions of writing and subjectivity in their inaugural attempt to exist without a past memory: Quintilian, Erasmus, du Bellay, Ronsard, Montaigne. (Bamps)
In this course, we shall examine both how the figure of the reader is inscribed in Baudelaire's writings (in his verse and prose poems) and how Baudelaire reads others (in his translations, aesthetic and literary criticism as well as his poems). We shall also ask why and how the history of literary criticism in the last century (and even today) is so preoccupied with Baudelaire's work. We shall read selections from some of the important readings of Baudelaire by Valéry, Sartre, Bataille, Blanchot, Poulet, Jakobson, Benjamin, de Man, Jauss and Derrida. Finally, we shall look at how Baudelaire has been read by a few French and American poets from Mallarmé to Ponge and Wallace Stevens. (Marder)
This course provides an intensive, text-based study of the French language and the mechanisms of style. Students do in-depth analyses of French as it is used in various types of texts - creative, analytic, expository, humoristic, etc. Rhetorical and stylistic aspects of each author's style are appraised, as well as the development of argument and the elaboration of content. Some attention is paid to grammatical analysis of different texts, with specific emphasis on recent developments in the field. (Kelley)
AUTOUR DE MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE
Around Marguerite of Navarre --and, more precisely, around a voice that attemps to restore and preserve true presence against the lies of rhetoric and the deception of commentary--we will try to sketch the lines of what defines the specificity and the condition (after all very trivial) of literary and religious writing at the beginning of the French Renaissance and Refornation. In the profane narratives of the Heptaméron (also interrupted by readings from the New Testament, by sacred exempla and by the chanting of the Psalms), in her intense correspondence with the Bishop of Meaux and in the wealth of answers her questions provoke, and finally even in the mysitical echoes found in her Prisons, we will find that Marguerite questions in a unique manner the authority of all writing and of all human voices in that they are but a profane belatedness in regard to the truth of the biblical Verb lost to this deserted land. Starting with the Heptaméron's novellas, we will see in particular how vision and oral transmission interconnect, and give to her narrative the basis for its verisimilitude, and also how she suggests in the margins of her narrative a vision, a way of listening and a voice capable of preserving , even though negatively, the access to an otherwise unattainable Truth. We will thereafter explore the roots of this alternative vision by looking at her letters as well as selected sacred and profane verses. (Bamps)
Roland Barthes, though generally classified as a literary critique, is best defined as a "thinker": theorist, aesthetician, intellectual, historian, writer. Seductive and persuasive but never dogmatic, his writings were both reflections of the philosophical and literary movements of his times and distinctive, innovative appropriations of them that in turn played a significant role in their evolution. Critics from a multiplicity of camps-marxist, structuralist, deconstructionist, feminist, queer, etc.-have acknowledged a debt to this "penseur glissant," as Robbe-Grillet liked to call him. In this course we will read texts from the various periods of Barthes's work with an eye to what made it so representative of the ideological trends of his times, and yet so uniquely "Barthesian." (Lang)
BODIES OF LETTERS: ABELARD AND HELOISE
Focusing on the notion of "letter," this course will explore the following issues: the translation of the theological articulation of the concepts of law, letter, and sacrifice into a literary context; the redefinition of castration as an encounter with the law of the letter; the notion of magister and the institution of the university; the link between the feminine and the letter as well as the inscription of a feminine desire in the perversion of a theological conversion. Texts: Abélard and Héloïse, Correspondance; Augustine: De Magistro; Derrida: La Carte postale; Paul: Epistle (Nouvet)
THE INVENTION OF PASSIONS IN THE 17TH CENTURY
This course will examine the invention of the passions in 17th century French literature and philosophy. The word invention is not intended to suggest that passions have not always been central to the literary project, but rather, that the rise of a rational conception of subjectivity, consciousness, and the body, leads to a radical redefinition of the terms and horizon of affectivity, anticipating later elaborations of the unconscious. Starting with an examination of the representation of the passions both physical and spiritual in baroque literary texts, we will then consider the re-embodiments of the passions and affective expression in the context of classical aesthetics. Primary works will include selections from d'Urfe, Guilleragues, Descartes, Racine, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld accompanied by theoretical readings from Foucault, Benjamin, Shefer, Marin, De Certeau, Bryson, etc (Judovitz)
DIDEROT: LE DIALOGUE PHILOSOPHIQUE
Le dialogue philosophique a été pendant toute l'antiquité (et pas seulement l'antiquité grecque et romaine) un genre tout à fait privilégié, de Platon aux philosophes cyniques...Au XVIIIème siècle, il connaît une renaissance éclatante, particulièrement avec Diderot. Mais ce n'est pas une résurrection pure et simple d'un genre qui avait surtout survécu comme exercice académique ou scolaire. On a affaire à un tout autre type de "sociabilité philosophique" et d'exercice intellectuel, très complexe. Cela se caractérise par une forme littéraire et philosophique qui témoigne d'un autre rapport à l'élaboration dans un échange (fictif) très libre, d'une pensée originale. On voit conjoindre des éléments divers dans un équilibre subtil, soutenu par une invention esthétique éblouissante: le rêve de rapports idéaux affranchis des conventions et des préjugés; la manifestation d'un génie dramatique beaucoup mieux réalisé que dans la forme théâtrale proprement dite; un instrument de questionnement intellectuel, de mise à l'épreuve par Diderot lui-même de sa propre pensée, au besoin contre lui-même.Texts: Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau; Le rêve d'Alambert (Entretien avec d'Alembert, Rêve d'Alembert, Suite de l'Entretien); Supplément au voyage de Bougainville; Entretien d'un philosophe avec la maréchale de ***; Arthur Wilson, Diderot; Elizabeth de Fontenay, Diderot ou le matérialisme enchanté. (Benrekassa, Visiting Professor)
FRANCIS PONGE, AUJOUR'DHUI
De Jean-Paul Sartre à Jacques Derrida, Ponge aura retenu l'attention de la philosophie, plus d'un demi siècle durant. C'est même au point que lire Ponge a pu apparaître longtemps comme un exercice philosophique obligé. Ce n'est pas pour nous sans conséquences. L'oeuvre s'est opacifiée, devenue l'enjeu de questions dont rien n'assure qui elles étaient ses questions. Et opacifiée d'autant plus qu'elle servit en autre de terrain de manoeuvres à toutes les sciences humaines! Le moment est-il arrivé de revenir à Ponge ou d'y servir enfin? Le travail s'annonce difficile (tant de choses à déblayer), mais riche, ô combien, en surprises. Oui, cette oeuvre est encore capable de nous surprendre…. Texts: Le Parti pris des choses, Pièces, Méthodes, Comment une figue de paroles et pourquoi? (Bonnefis)
VIRTUAL BODIES: ANATOMY, TECHNOLOGY, METAPHYSICS
This course will examine the progressive virtualization and technologization of the body from the seventeenth into the twentieth century. It will document the shift from a humoral, scriptorial, and experientially defined body to the emergence of the body as anatomical and technological prototype, defined by its metaphysical virtualization. The rise of the mind-body dualism, the analogy of the body to a machine, the question of embodiment, the relation of ontological difference and sexuual difference, the body in the age of mechanical reproduction, the inhuman, will constitute major points of reference. Primary materials will include: Montaigne, Descartes, De la Mettrie, Sade, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, as well as, critical readings by Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Heidegger, Lyotard, etc. (Judovitz)
LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
How can literary and psychoanalytic models of interpretation be read with, through and against each other? In this course we will examine both how some key psychoanalytic concepts are based on literary and rhetorical structures as well as how literary texts articulate and challenge the psychoanalytic notions of truth and knowledge. Questions raised throughout the course will relate to problems of temporality, repetition, the "subject" of knowledge, the construction of identity, psychoanalytic articulations of sexual difference, fetishism, the status of the historical event, language and intersubjectivity, and writing and mourning. Texts may include works by Freud, Lacan, Kristteva, Andre Green, Adam Phillips, Poe, Sophocles, Proust, Balzac, Woolf and Duras. (Marder)
IMAGINED OTHERS, RECONSTRUCTED SELF
How did the colonizer reify the oppressed by imposing an image upon them? How do intellectuals in the post-colonial world reclaim, reconstruct, and reflect on their identity in the wake of colonization? The following components of postcolonial attempts to salvage identity from outside projections and distortions will be examined: history, geography, the body, the text, food, language, the name, and family structures. Special emphasis will be given to primary texts by Francophone authors. Materials studied will include fictional and theoretical works by Bhabha, Carpentier, Djebar, Fanon, Glissant, Hegel, bell hooks, Jamaica Kincaid, Said, Segalen, Spivak, and the following films: Rue-Case-Nègres, Lumumba, Death of a Prophet, and Afrique, je te plumerai. (Loichot)
The issue of narcissism will allow us to explore the very status of the self as well as its relation to the other be it one of love, domination, aggressivity (to the point of murder) or alienation (experience of being possessed, vampirized by the other.) First, we will study the traumatic violence inherent in the very constitution of one's own self image through a close-reading of Ovid's myth of Narcissus. We will then see how a medieval text, the Romance of the Rose, addresses the problem of love within a narcissistic frame. Salvador Dali's autobiographical texts (where he proclaims his own triumphant narcissism) stages the aggressive component of narcissism, its sadistic and murderous impulse. In the texts of the 19th-century writer, Guy de Maupassant, we will consider yet another version of narcissism that is, its necessary failure. We will focus in his writings on the theme of the mirror and the radical loss of self that it induces, a loss which is experienced as self-dispossession, alienation, and even madness. Finally, we will address the issue of cultural narcissism an the violence that it inflicts upon the other by focusing on excerpts of travel narratives written by 19th century writers (Maupassant, Gauthier). We will then see how 20th century francophone writers (Fanon, Djebar) both criticize and resist this cultural narcissism. Texts: Ovid, Narcisse; Guillaume de Lorris, Le Roman de la Rose;; Maupassant, Contes cruels et fantastiques, Lettres d'Afrique; Dali, Le poème de Narcisse, La vie secrète de Salvador Dali ; Journal d'un génie; Unspeakable Confessions; Fanon, Les damnés de la terre; Assia Djebar, L'amour, la fantasia. (Nouvet)
THE ART OF FORGETTING
This course is designed as an introduction to Renaissance French literature and criticism. It examines the redefinition of memory and forgetting through the close reading of major literary texts from the 16th century. We shall see how the transformation of concepts borrowed from the Latin rhetorical tradition (memory, imitation and exercise) maps out the conditions and the contradictions of a writing in its inaugural attempt to exist without a past memory, while being haunted by the reminiscence of its erasure. Texts: Quintilian, Erasmus, du Bellay, Ronsard, Montaigne. : Primary texts will include Erasmus, De pueris; Du Bellay, Defence et illustration de la langue française; Ronsard, Odes and Les Amours; La Boétie, selected poetry; Montaigne, Les Essais. (Bamps)
35LA GENESE DU ROMAN NATURALISTE
Pensée en acte (sur le monde, et dans le monde sur la place de l'homme), on aimerait tout au long de ce seminaire en faire la genèse. En suivre la lente elaboration, mais rassembler surtout, pour les analyser, les conditions qui l'ont rendue possible. Tant philosophiques (ne songeons, sous ce rapport, qu'à la place, absolument considérable bien que systematiquement sous-estimée, qu'occupe un Hippolyte Taine en cette fin du XIXème siècle), qu'esthétiques (naturalisme, historiquement, est un concept forgé par la critique d'art) et scientifiques (la médecine expérimentale sans doute, mais aussi, Michel Serres l'a bien montré, la thermodynamique, et, bien entendu, l'histoire naturelle). Texte: Zola, La Curée. (Bonnefis)
LITTERATURE, PEINTURE : L'EXEMPLE D'HENRI MICHAUX
Michaux peint. Il écrit et il peint. D'une peinture du moins qui s'attarde dans l'enfance, et qui, sous aucun prétexte ne la voudrait quitter. Etrangère en cela à l'écriture -- si vieille, cette dernière, qu'on se demande où elle peut encore bien trouver la force de vieillir. L'écriture n'en finit pas de finir, quand le dessin, tout a l'inverse, n'en finit pas de commencer. C'est le Vieux qui parle dans la langue, c'est l'Ancien, c'est monsieur Je-sais-tout ; mais c'est toujours la menotte malhabile du bambin qui se crispe sur le pinceau... Partagé, comme entre deux ages, tel est le Michaux que l'on aimerait ce semestre étudier à partir des recueils, peintures et poésies. Textes: Passages, Connaissance par les gouffres, Emergences-Resurgences, Saisir, Par des traits . (Bonnefis)
LE ROMAN AU DIX-HUITIEME SIECLE
An examination of the social, political and philosophical questions that determined the development and evolution of the French eighteenth century novel. Montesquieu, Prevost, Marivaux, Casanova, Laclos, Rousseau, and Sade. (Harari)
This course will explore how the Plantation machine produced repeating patterns in different parts of the Americas. We will look particularly at textual and cultural productions of the Caribbean and the Plantation South of the United States. Among the topics we will consider: family structures, including perversions of geneology, inversions of naming process; challenging authorship of texts; boundless proliferating narratives; creolized language; predominance of the oral collective voice; exploded notions of space; hybrid forms of temporality. Fictional and theoretical readings from Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Maryse Condé, Edwige Danticat, Michael Dash, William Faulkner, Edouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, Saint-John-Perse, among others. (Loichot)
LANGUAGE IN MODERN FRENCH THOUGHT
The course will examine some central modern French reflections on the question of language, from Saussure's seminal Cours de linguistique générale, through selected texts by Benveniste, Barthes, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard and Derrida. Our guiding thread will be the concept of the sign as the apparent basis for thinking about language, and the possibility of more or less radical critiques of that concept after Saussure (Bennington)
Mutic-a neologism, coined by Jean-François Lyotard, for that which is without voice, inaudible, inarticulate, an intractable remainder. The questions that will concern us are the following: is a mutic writing possible? Or do writing (in its extended sense of 'inscription') and the mutic mutually exclude each other? We will approach these questions via Lyotard's own writings, lending an ear to his description of the "differend" in terms of a "wrong" that can find no expression, his subsequent retractions of some of the central claims of The Differend's "philosophy of phrases" in the course of his rethinking of silence, affect and Nachträglichkeit in his later works, especially his rereadings of the case of Emma discussed by Freud. Readings include Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend (excerpts), "Prescription" "Voix" in Lectures d'Enfance, Postmodern Fables, "Emma", "La phrase-affect", "c'est-à-dire le supplice (Une glose de L'Expérience intérieure) in Misère de la philosophie, The Confession of Augustine; Sigmund Freud, "A Project for a Scientific Psychology". (Nouvet)
Love's initial and fatal rapture (when a chance look at the object of one's desire irrevocably wounds and marks the lover's heart and memory) is at the center of early modern French literary endeavors. This course proposes to explore the significance of these representations, and the meaning behind such literary common place through a close reading of both Renaissance and some more contemporary discourses on love and of love. Always lived through the delay of memory and, hence, never experienced as a present, the initial rapt (as we will attempt to see) represent the singular and initial moment when an "I" comes to exist and to speak, and therefore to write. We will explore the imaginary born out of such inaugural scenes in novels, novellas and in poetry as well as in the visual representation of the Valois dynasty as they shape the beginnings of a modern French literature and culture. Readings include: Marguerite de Navarre, L'heptaméron; Louise Labé, Débat de folie et d'amour and Sonnets; Ronsard, Les amours; Marguerite Duras, Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein; Pascal, Discours sur la condition des grands and Le mémorial; and critical readings from Barthes, Freud, Caruth, Marin, De Certeau, Derrida (Bamps)
What is guilt? And how is it intimately associated with the impulse to narrate? These are the questions to be explored in this course, through the study of critical and literary works in which the origin of the notion of the "guilty conscience" is related to an apparently universal human urge to account for one's actions by recounting them in an explanatory narrative. That is, we will seek to understand how narrative functions in a moral economy based on the need to "redeem" oneself by "paying" for one's presumed trangressions by considering the manner in which guilt is either theorized or exorcised in a variety of texts . Readings: Freud, Totem and Taboo; Reik, Myth and Guilt, Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (selections); Foucault, Technologies of the Self (selections); Augustine, Confessions (selections); Gide, L'Immoraliste; Camus, La Chute; Sartre, Les mots; from L'Etre et le néant (selections); Robbe-Grillet, Le Miroir qui revient. (Lang)
:Petit monde fermé, à l'image même d'un séminaire, l'oeuvre de Ponge décrit en somme une société idéale, harmonieuse, où les lois de la nature, comme chez Leibniz, s'appelleraient politesse, courtoisie, affabilité. Qu'il s'agisse du Soleil placé en abyme, du Volet suivi de sa scolie ou de l'Araignée publiée à l'intérieur de son appareil critique, je ne sache pas, à cet égard, en tout cas, d'utopie au charme plus convaincant… De quelque renoncement qu'en y cédant nous ayons à payer le droit que, sans le savoir peut-être, nous ne nous en donnons pas moins, de tourner ainsi le dos à l'histoire; c'est-à-dire, en somme, et comme Ponge dans son orange, son abricot ou ses olives, le droit de nous retirer à notre tour en l'une quelconque de ces chambres paisibles que sont, au milieu des pires désastres, les textes qu'il écrit. Chambres avec vue sur le cosmos, comme on dit sur la mer. Nos travaux porteront essentiellement sur les oeuvres suivantes de Ponge: Le Parti pris des choses, Gallimard/Poésie Le Grand Recueil, Méthodes, Gallimard/Poésie Le Grand Recueil, Pièces, Gallimard/Poésie L'Atelier contemporain, NRF, Gallimard (Bonnefis)
FRENCH HEGEL
This course will aim to identify and analyse the formation of a 'French Hegel' in the work of some major twentieth-century French thinkers. We shall begin from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as influentially read by Alexandre Kojève in the lectures that are published as Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, and follow the traces and effects of this reading in Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot. In the second part of the course we shall consider the more general re-readings of Hegel proposed by Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Nancy. (Bennington)
The course will track some of the principal moments in 20th-century French theoretical reflection on literature, from the linguistic basis provided by Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale, passing through Sartre (‘Qu’est-ce que la literature?’), Structuralism (especially Genette and Barthes), Phenomenology (the so-called ‘Ecole de Genève’), Marxism (Macherey), and ending with Derrida’s assessment of these different movements and some of his own readings of literary texts. Our guiding question will be that of reading, and the extent to which the reading called for by literary texts exceeds the grasp of theory as such. (Bennington)
This course will explore various fictional and theoretical strategies used by Caribbean writers to reconstruct language, narrative, and histories in the aftermath of colonial conquest, slavery, and Diaspora. Special emphasis will be put on Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haïti. Primary readings will include texts by: Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, René Ménil, Jacques Roumain, and Derek Walcott. (Loichot)
WALTER BENJAMIN'S FRENCH CORPUS: BAUDELAIRE, PROUST AND THE SURREALISTS
Before his untimely suicide in 1940, Walter Benjamin spent much of the last decade of his life in Paris working on his great unfinished book on the Paris Arcades known now as the Passagen-Werk. In this course we
shall read Benjamin's "French" writings as a way of approaching his conceptions of materialist historiography, translation, experience, the body, and allegory in his late works. Throughout the course, we shall pay special attention to the ways in which French writers (Proust, Valéry, Aragon, etc), French artists & architecture, the French language, French philosophy and history inflect his later texts culminating in his final, unwritten book on Baudelaire. By reading Benjamin through Baudelaire and Baudelaire through Benjamin, we will attempt to enrich our understanding of the specificity and importance of both figures. Readings include: Benjamin: The Arcades Project, Charles Baudelaire and selected essays on Proust, surrealism, translation, etc. Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, Proust, Le Temps retrouvé. (Marder)
VISAGES DE MICHAUX OU LA QUESTION DE LA REPRESENTATION DANS LA PEINTURE MODERNE
Le sien naturellement, le sien pour commencer : la tête d'un fou furieux " qui sent, dit-il, le gouffre" (la Mescaline, décidément, fait un très bon miroir). Et les visages qu'il peint. S'il est vrai que les visages qu'il peint (mais son oeuvre ne nous donne guère la possibilité d'en douter) se ramènent tous, comme le voulait Francis Bacon, à " la figure d'un homme qui, en général, a l'air d'avancer, péniblement, à travers des gouffres". Cela dit, on ne se jette pas, tête première, dans un gouffre. On demande d'abord à réfléchir.
Ce temps de la réflexion, en ce qui nous concerne, je suggère que nous le prenions, par exemple, dans Antonin Artaud (" Portraits et Dessins", " Artaud le Mômo", " Ci-gît"), Jean-Christophe Bailly (" L'Apostrophe muette. Essai sur les portraits du Fayoum"), Georges Bataille (" La Peinture préhistorique. Lascaux ou la naissance de l'art"), Maurice Blanchot (" Henri Michaux ou le refus de l'enfermement"), Gilles Deleuze (" Mille plateaux"), Jacques Derrida (" Prégnances", " Mémoires d'aveugle", " Artaud le Moma"), Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux (" Du masque au visage"), Hubert Haddad (" Du visage et autres abîmes"), André Malraux (" Les Voix du silence"), Jean-Luc Nancy (" Le Regard du portrait"), Pline l'Ancien (" Histoire naturelle", Livre XXXV), Pascal Quignard (" Portraits crachés"), Rainer Maria Rilke (" Les Carnets de Malte Laurids Brigge"), Jean-Louis Shefer (" Sur les dessins de Henri Michaux"), Victor I. Stoichita (" Brève Histoire de l'ombre"), Jean-Pierre Vernant (" La Mort dans les yeux. Figures de l'Autre en Grèce ancienne. Artémis, Gorgô") Outre ses peintures, dont des reproductions seront distribuées, les oeuvres de Michaux étudiées seront " Passages" (Gallimard, coll. " Poésie"), " Misérable Miracle" (Gallimard, coll. " Poésie"), " Émergences. Résurgences" (Skira, coll. " Les sentiers de la création"). (Marder)
The aim of the course is to come to a general understanding of Derrida's thinking since the 1960s. In the first part of the course we shall concentrate on texts from the 60s and early 70s in an endeavour to clarify key Derridean terms such as différance, écriture, dissémination and trace. In the second part we shall explore some more recent developments, especially in the areas of ethics, politics and religion. (Bennington)