Resources for Graduate Students

Teaching Assistant Training and Teaching Opportunity (TATTO)

Every student pursuing the Ph.D. in French must complete TATTO as one component
of his/her academic requirements. TATTO represents a graduated approach to preparing graduate students to teach and requires:

1. Completion of a three and one-half day summer course prior to the student's first teaching experience

2. Completion of "Problems in Foreign Language Teaching," a departmental methods course

3. Teaching assistantship and/or associateship for at least four semesters.

Whenever possible, over the course of TATTO students will have the opportunity to teach a broad range of courses, including elementary and intermediate language, conversation and composition, introduction to civilization, and literature courses. Students who demonstrate exceptional research promise and teaching ability may be eligible to apply for appointment as Dean's Teaching Fellows. To be eligible for consideration, a student must have completed all graduate school and departmental requirements except the dissertation and must have been admitted to Ph.D. candidacy. Teaching fellows have complete responsibility for one course in each semester of the award year. The graduate school offers up to thirty of these teaching fellowships each year, with a $17,000 stipend in 2007-2008.

Foreign Language Requirements
The department considers a thorough mastery of the language to be the indispensable basis for an understanding of literature. All doctoral candidates must also demonstrate proficiency in one foreign language in addition to English and French. Medievalists must demonstrate knowledge of either Latin or Old French. The language requirement must be fulfilled before the presentation of the Ph.D. thesis proposal.

Professional Activities
Graduate students are encouraged to participate fully in their future profession by publishing papers and presenting them at professional meetings. The department in conjunction with the Graduate Student Association offers travel funds for students who present papers at professional meetings.

Merit Awards

George W. Woodruff Fellowships
The Woodruff Fellowship is awarded to exceptional students who have demonstrated outstanding academic achievement and who plan to pursue doctoral programs of study. Students who previously applied to any doctoral program at Emory are ineligible. The fellowship covers all tuition and fees for five years and provides a supplement to the base stipend to a level of $20,000 or higher depending on the amount of the base stipend offered in the student’s department ($16,000 in French in 2007-2008). Fifteen fellowships are available each year. Awards are renewed annually contingent upon satisfactory academic performance. Woodruff Fellowships are awarded solely on the basis of merit.

Emory Graduate Diversity Fellowship (EGDF)
This fellowship was instituted to promote the diversity of the graduate student body. Eligible students may belong to a specific ethnic group, race, culture, socioeconomic group, or gender traditionally underrepresented in their proposed field of study, or possess other qualities that will enhance the diverse community of scholars in the Graduate School. The Graduate School considers each applicant’s promise of making a notable contribution to their incoming class by exhibiting particular strengths or characteristics, including a unique intellectual achievement, employment experience, nonacademic performance, or personal background. The EGDF covers all tuition and fees for five years and provides a minimum annual stipend of $20,000. Only U.S. citizens and permanent residents are eligible for the Emory Graduate Diversity Fellowship.
Arts and Science Graduate Fellowships
The A&S Fellowship is awarded to outstanding first year doctoral students in humanities or social sciences programs; it covers tuition up to five years and provides a $4,000 supplement to the base stipend. Awards are given solely on the basis of merit and are renewed annually contingent upon satisfactory academic performance.

Departmental Fellowships
The French department awards four or five fellowships to first year students. These departmental fellowships cover full tuition ($30,800 in 2007-2008) and provide an annual stipend ($16,000 in 2007-2008). Renewal of these awards is guaranteed for five years for students making good progress toward the Ph.D. In addition, every candidate in the program is encouraged to have the experience of an exposure to French intellectual and cultural life. To this effect, students will continue to receive their annual full fellowship if they choose to study in Paris during the fourth or fifth year. Every effort is made to provide teaching assistantships for the sixth year.

Anne Amari Perry Award
Two awards of $2,500 each are given each year to outstanding students in French who are writing their dissertations.

The Thomas M. Hines French Studies Scholarship At the end of each academic year, the French Graduate faculty may select one first-year graduate student whom it deems to have done outstanding work during his or her first year to receive this award of $2,500.

Visiting Scholars

Distinguished professors from outside the university are invited on a regular basis to give lectures and/or seminars. Visitors in recent years have included:

Seminars
Georges Benkrassa, Universite de Paris VII
Christophe Bident, Universite de Paris VII
Frank Lestrigant, Universite de Paris IV
Serge Margel, Universite de Geneve
Kevin Newmark, Boston College

Recent Lectures
Tom Conley, Harvard University
Cynthia Chase, Cornell University
James Creech, Miami University of Ohio
Michael Dash, NYU
Souleymane Diagne, Northwestern Univesity
Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California
Elisabeth Ladenson, Columbia University
D. A. Miller, UC Berkeley
Pascal Quignard, French author
Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania
Mireille Rosello, Northwestern University
Patrick Wald-Lasowski

Research Facilities
Emory's library resources, located in several facilities, contain more than 2.4 million volumes; 2.5 million microforms, including more than 60,000 reels of microfilm; and a growing inventory of electronic and non-print materials. The libraries maintain more than 24,000 subscriptions to serials and periodicals. Students of French will find most of their research materials in the Robert W. Woodruff Library. State of the art language classrooms are now available for classes in Rooms 875 and 975, Woodruff Stack Tower. Also located in Woodruff are student carrels and dissertation studies. At the beginning of each academic year, a two-hour orientation on the use of specialized reference materials for French is given by a university librarian. Entering students are required to attend.

Graduate Faculty
Full Professors

Geoffrey Bennington
Philippe Bonnefis
Dalia Judovitz
Carol Herron Lustig

Associate Professors

Candace Lang
Valérie Loichot
Elissa Marder
Claire Nouvet

Assistant Professors
Jacob Vance

RECENT COURSES

Although courses are not generally repeated on a regular basis by the faculty, the following course list should give an idea of the kinds of courses the department offers. For the current course offering, visit the course atlas page. For a complete list of the graduate courses offered in the past six years, visit the previous graduate seminars page.

Ecriture et parfum: la question de l'odeur. Exclue de la sphère des connaissances, sans dignité conceptuelle, incapable, à ce qu'il paraît, de s'élever à l'excellence d'une signification théorique et abstraite, l'odeur, à 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 question de l'odeur, telle est mon hypothèse en tout cas, l'un de ses enjeux les plus secrets. (Bonnefis)

Virtual Bodies: Anatomy, Technology, Metaphysics. This course examines the progressive virtualization and technologization of the body from the seventeenth into the twentieth century. It documents 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 sexual difference, the body in the age of mechanical reproduction, the inhuman, constitute major points of reference. Readings from Montaigne, Descartes, De la Mettrie, Sade, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, as well as critical readings by Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Heidegger, Lyotard, etc. (Judovitz)

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 late thinkers. 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)

The Plantation Americas. This course will explore how the Plantation machine produced repeating patterns in different parts of the Americas. We 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 genealogy, inversions of the naming process; challenged 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, Edwidge Danticat, Michael Dash, William Faulkner, Edouard Glissant, Toni Morrison, Saint-John Perse, among others. (Loichot)

La pensée de Roland Barthes. Roland Barthes, though generally classified as a literary critic, 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 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)

Baudelaire and His Readers. 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, Blan-chot, 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)

The Art of Love. 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, translating, reiterating, breaking and conjoining. This art of writing will be shown to constitute an act of love in its own right. (Nouvet)

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. Emphasis is placed on teaching foreign languages in the communicative classroom setting, and topics include the major skill areas of listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar, and culture. Discussions will also focus on issues in testing, error correction and the use of technology in the classroom. (Herron)

The Metanovel. 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)

The Invention of Passions in the 17th Century. This course examines 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 then consider the re-embodiments of the passions and affective expression in the context of classical aesthetics. Primary works include selections from d'Urfe, Guilleragues, Descartes, Racine, Pascal, and La Rochefoucauld, accompanied by theoretical readings from Foucault, Benjamin, Shefer, Marin, De Certeau, Bryson, etc. (Judovitz)

Francis Ponge, Aujourd'hui. 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 qu'elles étaient ses questions. Et opacifiée d'autant plus qu'elle servit en outre de terrain de manoeuvres à toutes les sciences humaines! Le moment est-il arrivé de revenir à Ponge ou d'y venir 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…. Textes: Le Parti pris des choses, Pièces, Méthodes, Comment une figue de paroles et pourquoi? (Bonnefis)

Imagined Others, Reconstructed Self. This course examines how the colonizer reifies the oppressed by imposing a constructed image upon them, and how the decolonized reconstruct their identity in the aftermath of colonization, using strategies such as food, naming, geography, etc. Readings from bell hooks, Bhabha, Césaire, Djebar, Fanon, Glissant, Hegel, Kincaid, Saïd, and Spivak. (Loichot)

Les Discours du désir et du savoir: Montesquieu, Prévost, Sade, Balzac. A study of the discourses of desire and knowledge as they relate to social, political, and philosophical fictions. Readings from Manon Lescault, Lettres persanes, Les Etudes philosophiques. (Harari)

Sex in the 19th Century. 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)

The Aesthetics of the Visible. This course examines the construction of the "visible" from a philosophical, artistic and social perspective. Starting with Merleau-Ponty's reflections on painting and vision, we will discuss how painting references the body and the senses. Rather than treating the "visible" as a "given", we will examine how artworks construct visual reference, according to pictorial conventions and specific ideologies of spectatorship. The representation of the body as topic and material pigment, the nude as pictorial genre, questions of pictorial production and reproduction, and the development of conceptual art will be at issue. Readings will include Merleau-Ponty, Blumemberg, Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, Bryson, Mulvey, Berger, Bourdieu, Krauss, Didi-Huberman, etc. along with artworks by La Tour, Géricault, Courbet, Manet, Soutine, Bacon, Duchamp, and Wilson. (Judovitz)

Medieval Alterity - The Romance of the Rose. This course is designed to be an introduction to medieval literature and medieval criticism. After examining the critical debate that the notion of medieval alterity has elicited (What specific features of the medieval text are used to define it as "other"? What kind of critical approach is this otherness made to justify? What is the relation between the medieval "other" and "modernity"?), we will read major medieval texts in conjunction with some of the most influential interpretations that they have provoked. Each text will therefore be accompanied with a critical apparatus where diverse and often conflictual critical viewpoints will be represented. Whenever possible, close-readings of the text will be confronted with one another. Readings from La vie de Saint Alexis; Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain ou le chevalier au lion; Marie de France, Lais; Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies; Villon, Le Testament. (Nouvet)

Littérature, peinture, photographie: l'exemple de Claude Simon. Faire en sorte que le verbe se fasse chair, telle est en somme l'unique raison que Claude Simon a d'écrire. Contre tous les pièges de la sublimation que nous tendent les images qui s'échangent autour de nous, qui se monnaient et font papier-monnaie. Une bonne page, en ce sens, fait le contraire d'un billet de banque: quelque chose d'in-échangeable et de non-convertible. Tous les billets de mille que l'on voudra, toutes les saintes familles, "symbolisant travaux et vertus sous les aspects de personnages éternellement géorgiques", ne vaudront jamais Les Géorgiques. Qui ne veut comprendre cela s'expose à ne rien comprendre à Claude Simon. Du moins est-ce afin d'en faire l'épreuve que l'on se propose de relire Histoire, mais aussi La Route des Flandres, La Bataille de Pharsale, Les Géorgiques, et L'Acacia. (Bonnefis)

Guilty Consciences. What is guilt? And how is it intimately associated with the impulse to narrate? These are 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 transgressions by considering the manner in which guilt is either theorized or exorcised in a variety of texts. Readings from 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; L'Etre et le néant (selections); Robbe-Grillet, Le Miroir qui revient. (Lang)

Abélard et Héloïse: le mal des lettres. 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. Readings from Abélard and Héloïse, Correspon-dance; Augustine, De Magistro; Derrida, La Carte postale; Paul, Epistles. (Nouvet)

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, Kristeva, André Green, Adam Phillips, Poe, Sophocles, Proust, Balzac, Woolf and Duras. (Marder)

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)

Problems of Representation in the Sixteenth Century. This course examines the emergence of humanism in France in the first half of the sixteenth century and traces a set of theological and aesthetic problems relating to literary representation through to the Essais of Michel de Montaigne. Attention shall be paid to the ways in which twentieth-century critical theory has shaped our understanding of sixteenth-century French literature and its theological contexts. (Vance)

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Director of Graduate Studies Department of French & Italian Emory University Atlanta, GA 30322 Phone: (404) 727-6431 Fax: (404) 727-4579 See also our Web page at: http://www.french.emory.edu

Department of French and Italian, Emory University, 537 Kilgo Circle, Callaway N405, Atlanta, GA 30322