Graduate Courses

Studies in 19th-Century Literature: Art, Fetishism and the Feminine- Apter/Nochlin
Studies in Renaissance Literature: Poetry and Poetics - Beaujour
Studies in 19th-Century Literature: Le Roman de Formation - Bernard
Topics in Francophone Literature - Djebar
Corneille and Racine - Doubrovsky
Studies in Literary History: Origins of Modernity - Gaillard
Studies in Contemporary Literature: Situating Bataille - Hollier

Words and Music in Medieval Song (in English, readings in French) - Vitz/Roesner
Advanced Grammar - Bernard
Écrits francophones - Djebar
The Renaissance - Beaujour
Classicism - Elmarsafy
18th-Century Theatre - Deneys-Tunney
Baudelaire - Sieburth
Dada/Surrealism - Hollier
Studies in Genres and Modes: Theatre - Bishop
Autofiction - Doubrovsky
Comparative Poetics - Beaujour
Guided Individualized Reading

The Cinema Culture of France (in English) - Affron
Approaches to French Culture - Beaujour
Textual Analysis - Regalado
Francophone Theatre - Miller
Le récit médiéval - Regalado
Corneille - Doubrovsky
Trente ans de théorie littéraire, 1945-1975 - Gaillard
18th-Century Novel - Roger
Zola and his time - Hollier
Proust - Nicole
Rabelais - Beaujour
Guided Individualized Reading

The Culture of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem - Vitz
Montaigne - Beaujour
Les Femmes-écrivaines de l’Ancien Régime - Goldwyn
Le Roman Libertin - Deneys-Tunney
The Revolution of 1848: Literature and History (in English) - Sieburth/Berenson
Sartre (in English) - Hollier
Le Nouveau Roman - Bishop/Robbe-Grillet
Contemporary Poetry - Nicole
The Caribbean Novel - Dash
Translation: Thème et Version - Campbell
The Deleuzian Century: Theory, Art and Politics in and through the Work of Gilles Deleuze - Apter

Textual Analysis - Regalado
Introduction to Medieval Literature - Vitz
Le rire et le comique - Hersant
Racine - Biet
Marivaux - Deneys-Tunney
Révolte et révolution: de Vigny à Anatole France - Bernard
The Interwar Novel - Beaujour
Maghreb: Écritures de femmes au sud de la Méditerranée - Djebar
From Stylistics to Cultural Studies, Theory after 1945 (in English) - Elmarsafy
Approaches to French Culture - Gerson

Studies in Genres and Modes: Poetry - Nicole
Advanced Workshop in Contemporary French - Campbell
Medieval Theatre - Regalado
Prose Writers of the 16th Century - Zezula
Manners and Morals in Early Modern French Literature - Elmarsafy
Penser la famille au XIXème siècle - Bernard
Political Culture and the Making of Modern France, 1770-1890 - Gerson
Stasis: Théorie du roman et critique de la narrativité (in English) - Hollier
Autobiography as novel: the birth of a genre (in English) - Doubrovsky
Studies in Francophone Civilization - Djebar

Recent topics: Medieval Literature and the Oral Tradition (Vitz); the Bible in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Vitz).

Studies in Literature of the Renaissance G45.2390 Variable content course.

Recent topics: Theatre (Beaujour), Poetics (Beaujour), Baroque and Pre-Classical Literature (Zezula).

Advanced Workshop in Contemporary French G45.1004 Variable content course. Campbell.

(See below for those courses which are part of the section titled Representative Course Descriptions)

Medieval Theater - Regalado

Our study of medieval French theater includes all the essential plays from the 12th-13th centuries and selections from the large 15th-century repertory, the merry farces, sotties, dramatic monologues, the grave moralités that represent the drama of individual salvation, the great mystères that dramatize the feasts of the liturgical calendar.

We will also read accounts that show the intensely theatrical character of public life in the Middle Ages: royal fêtes nobles and entrée processions stage political power and ideologies; tournaments are costumed in fictions of Arthurian romance and courtly allegory; folkloric ritual parades of Carnival and charivari reveal the beliefs and structure of medieval culture.

Through our survey of medieval drama, we will address questions fundamental to all of medieval literature: the emergence of written texts from an oral performance tradition (leading to popular printed editions for readers by the end of the 15th century); the spiritual representation of human life and history in moralités and mystères; the symbolic political transformation of court and urban space by processional theater; the elaboration of dramas around political and religious issues as well as around language play and character types.

Through readings in critical theory of dramatic texts, we will also undertake sustained inquiry into the functions of dramatic language; the representation of space, time, and character; language as play and as an instrument of deceit; the discursive status of dramatic dialogue; and practices of staging and performance.

The Medieval Epic - Vitz

This course will take up essential features and the historical development of the chanson de geste, but it will also have a number of primary theoretical, thematic, generic, and historical concerns: the application (and applicability) of Reception Theory to the medieval epic; oral/written tradition theory; the role of the epic in the diffusion of religious and spiritual values; epic cycle formation; and relations between epic and other genres (such as romance).

Works to be studied include the Chanson de Roland (in its various versions); Le Voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem, and major works from the cycle of Guillaume d'Orange (Le Couronnement de Louis, Le Charroi de Nîmes, La Prise d'Orange, Aliscans, Le Moniage Guillaume). Some works will be read in toto, others in part, a few (where issues of plot rather than style or texture are of central concern) in modern translation.

Rabelais - Beaujour

The primary objective of this course is to offer critical insights into a series of texts which many modern readers as well as scholars find "probably the most difficult in all French literature"--Pantagruel, Gargantua, the Third Book, the Fourth Book, the first chapters of the Fifth Book. The course focusses on two major topics: (a) Rabelais' debt to the Middle Ages and his relation to the intellectual currents of his time; (b) the author's narrative technique, stylistic creativity, logophilia, and the wide range of "languages," "voices" or "registers" discernible in his writing. In addition to these topics, the course discusses the complexities of modern Rabelais scholarship and analyzes the views of critics such as Keller, Glauser, Paris, Bakhtin, Beaujour, Gray, Rigolot, Larmat, and others who differ sharply from the earlier generation of scholars (Lefranc, Plattard, Boulenger, Febvre, Screech, Marichal) in their respective approaches to the study of Rabelais.

Topics in Literary History: The Renaissance - Zezula

Recent years have witnessed a major development in the approach to literary studies: the emergence of "new literary history" or "historical poetics" which began to come into its own in the late 1970s. While the traditional history of literature focuses primarily on describing, evaluating, and classifying literary phenomena in terms of their nature, significance and order of appearance, historical poetics seeks to define the system in which these phenomena function and which, though coherent, is subject to historical and generic variabilities.

As each of these approaches to literary history has its merits, the objective of this course is to examine literature of the French Renaissance from both perspectives. The "traditional" perspective will offer students a panoramic view of French literature from the late Middle Ages through the early Baroque, tracing its prominent features and creative peaks. The "new" perspective will investigate the correlation between literary discourse of the Renaissance era and literary discourse in general or, strictly speaking, between literature and literariness.

La Fiction Narrative au 17e Siècle - Goldwyn

Genre sans canons, considéré comme nocif et subversif, décrié par les doctes critiques et les moralistes, la fiction narrative au 17e siècle restera pendant longtemps un continent inconnu. Cependant les vingt dernières années ont suscité un intérêt tout particulier pour le genre le plus pratiqué et le plus goûté au 17e siècle. Ce défrichage récent a contribué à l'étude de l'histoire des mentalités et aux travaux narratologiques qui éclaireront notre lecture.

Libre de contraintes et de règles imposées par l'antiquité, la production romanesque est extrêmement abondante, riche et variée. Ce genre expérimental, voué à son propre devenir, se cherche et se métamorphose. Au début du 17e siècle, il est rattaché à la forme la plus hiérarchisée du parnasse classique, c'est-à-dire à l'épopée; puis il s'abritera plus tard derrière l'autorité de l'Histoire et ne cessera d'évoluer. Nous en suivrons les mutations et le parcours; roman pastoral, héroïco-précieux, comique, utopique, anti-roman, nouvelle historique, galante, et mémoires pseudo-historiques.

French Moralists: Montaigne to Vauvenargues - Affron

This seminar will examine the moral essay in early modern France, concentrating on authors of the seventeenth century: Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère. The definition and constitution of this genre will itself be a topic of the seminar. We will also consider the kind of language and assumptions used to discuss ethical issues in the early modern period, contrasting them with the language of modern ethical philosophy. The notion of virtue, for example, is common among the moralists, but is less frequently used today. We will also examine the different sources, both Classical and Christian, for some of the terms and distinctions used by the moralists. The evolution of the notion of self-interest and utility will be a central topic, as will the treatment of the passions, and the differential evaluation of reason and passion, especially sympathy. The changing ideal of the honnête homme will be discussed. In addition to considering the content of the moralists' writings, we will also treat the form of their work, looking for reasons why maxims, letters, essays, dialogues, satires, and fables are all sometimes classified as moralist writings.

Les Lumières - Deneys-Tunney

Les "Lumières" constituent-elles une ligne de partage entre un "avant" (le Classicisme) et un "après" (le Romantisme, la Modernité)? C'est à cette question--qui se joue autant au niveau de la représentation (de la guerre menée contre la représentation classique et ses tropes dans le roman et l'utopie du 18ème siècle), qu'au niveau de la réécriture d'une histoire à l'aide du mythe d'une "origine" et d'une "nature"--que nous tenterons de répondre.

À partir d'une étude de la métaphore de la lumière--du savoir comme vision--nous étudierons le champs sémantique qui s'organise à partir d'elle autour des termes de raison, sensibilité, bonheur,...et ombre! Nous incluerons dans notre étude les lectures de Kant, Hegel, Marx, et, plus près de nous, d'Adorno et Habermas, qui ont contribué à l'élaboration du concept "d'Aufklarung" dont nous sommes aujourd'hui les héritiers.

Eighteenth-Century Literature: Theater - Deneys-Tunney

The new theoretical aesthetic of the 18th century will be examined in relation to major Enlightenment themes and changes in sensibilité. In addition to works of Marivaux and Beaumarchais, we will study the transformation of classical dramaturgy in a comedy by Lesage and a tragedy by Voltaire, as well as the rise of new forms such as comédie larmoyante and various types of drame by Diderot, Sedaine, and Mercier. We will also consider lesser known dramatic genres, the théâtre de la foire, the parades, the comédie de société, and the vaudeville. The period is also remarkable for the number of women who wrote for the theater and managed to have their works performed. Plays by Mme de Graffigny and Olympe de Gouges will be included in the discussion. Recent studies on the semiology of the theater will guide our analyses.

Exoticism - Sieburth

The course will explore the various ways in which literary texts of the late 18th and 19th centuries deploy fictions of the exotic Other. The semester will be divided into several reading units:|

--Diderot, Supplément au voyage de Bougainville; Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Paul et Virginie; Chateaubriand, Atala. The intersection of 18th-century colonialism, Enlightenment anthropology, and Utopian fantasy in the creation of a critical (yet ultimately dysfunctional) space of the exotic.
--Balzac, La Fille aux yeux d'or and "Une Passion dans le désert," Hugo, Les Orientales. The dialectic of master and (harem) slave as a metaphor for the politics, economics, and erotics of romantic Orientalism.
--Flaubert, Voyage en Orient and Salammbô; selections from Leconte de Lisle's Poèmes barbares. Bourgeois and barbarian in the esthetics of Le Parnasse. Flaubertian disorientations.
--Selected poetry of Baudelaire. Exoticism and anamnesis. The Baudelairean "ailleurs." Baudelaire and blackness. The poetics of loss.
--Merimée, Carmen, Lokis, Djoûmane. Returns of the repressed. Exoticism and the fantastic.
--Loti, Aziyadé. Nostalgia for the Other in the era of neo-imperialism. Going native: Loti in drag. Exoticist kitsch as a version of pastoral.
--Segalen, Essai sur l'exotisme, René Leys, Stèles. Towards an esthetics of the "diverse."

19th-Century Theatre - Affron

The focus of the course will be divided between the theatre as socio-historical phenomenon and as genre(s) in stylistic flux. The greatest emphasis will be given to the hybrid modes most characteristic of Romanticism and the post-Romantic period, le drame and le mélodrame, modes that have continued to flourish through the 20th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, the theatre, along with other genres, submitted to generic hybridization and accommodated itself to forms of expression previously associated with poetry, prose fiction, music, and the visual arts. Particular attention will be paid to the implications of the rupturing of genre through the ways in which the spectator reads/receives the text.

The most lasting manifestation of 19th century theatre, le théâtre lyrique, will be the subject of the second part of the course. The impact of opera on public taste and on literary culture will be examined through the works themselves and their recycling in poetry, prose, and theory. Among the types, operas, and composers to be discussed are: Italian bel canto (Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti) and its French transformation; Meyerbeer, Halévy and le grand opéra (Les Huguenots, La Juive); Verdi and Wagner in Paris (Les Vêpres siciliennes, Tannhäuser); Carmen and Manon.

19th-Century Historical Novel - Bernard

Le roman historique se conquiert dans les années 1820-1850, en même temps que le roman (réaliste) et que l'historiographie (scientifique), et dans le sillage des grands bouleversements du début du siècle, qui obligent les nouvelles générations à repenser leurs origines, leurs savoirs, leur littérature.
Le roman historique est une histoire (fiction) qui traite de l'Histoire (passée), par la médiation de l'Histoire (discours), en réponse à une inquiétude sur l'Histoire (contemporaine). Les problèmes soulevés par ce statut complexe seront abordés par le biasis des oeuvres suivants: Vigny, Cinq-Mars; Mérimée, Chronique du règne de Charles IX; Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris; Gautier, Le Roman de la momie.

Poetry and Theory of Poetry in the 20th Century - Nicole

Valéry, les surréalistes, Francis Ponge: à travers ces trois ensembles d'oeuvres, la crise de la poésie, annoncée par Mallarmé, s'affirme en diverses ruptures du champ poétique où finit par s'estomper l'opposition traditionnelle de la poésie et de la prose. Proposant une lecture approfondie de ces oeuvres, le cours a pour but d'interroger ces mutations dans leurs divers aspects. Héritier de Mallarmé, Valéry adhère à sa conception de la poésie comme langage dans le langage, mais, dans la Poétique qu'il remet à l'honneur, insiste sur la "technique" à peu près au même moment où les surréalistes découvrent dans l'écriture automatique le fonctionnement même de la pensée. L'oeuvre de Francis Ponge, de son côté, s'inaugure dans une "encyclopédie" de définitions nouvelles. Parallèlement à l'étude des textes, le cours se propose de préciser ces trois structurations du poétique successivement défini comme "Poétique" (Valéry), "écriture" (Breton) et "rhétorique" chez Ponge.

Contemporary Theater - Bishop

This course examines the development of French theater since the beginning of the century, from its early reactions to the outmoded conventions of late 19th-century realism to the "flight from naturalism" that has marked it during most of the 20th century. The first weeks deal with the anti-realistic thrust of the leading directors in the early part of the century: Lugné-Poë, Copeau, Dullin, Baty, Jouvet, and Pitoëff, illustrated by plays such as Jarry's Ubu roi, Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tirésias, and works by Cocteau. Claudel will be viewed as a towering but isolated figure. The major figure of the inter-war years, Giraudoux, is studied in several plays. More modern forms of theater will be examined in works by Anouilh, Montherlant, and Sartre, showing the growing trend to pessimistic and absurdist theater and reflecting a tragic view of the human condition.

The major emphasis in the second half of the course will be on the "new" theater, which begins roughly in 1950 and includes the "theater of the absurd" with Ionesco, Beckett, Adamov, and Arrabal, as well as Genet and theater linked to the aesthetics of the "nouveau roman" in the works of Sarraute and Duras. Finally, the course addresses the trend to political theater and collective creation through the Théâtre du Soleil's 1789 and examines the rediscovery of realism illustrated by Tilly. The influence of Artaud as well as major foreign influences will be discussed. Videotapes of performances will be shown in conjunction with readings.

Plays will be analyzed from a variety of points of view: thematics; dramatic technique; as expressions (generally metaphoric) of contemporary realities and concerns; as language. Attention will be paid throughout to theories of theater, theatrical conventions, the language of theater, the audience-stage relationship.

De l'Autobiographie à l'Autofiction - Doubrovsky

On a depuis longtemps défini et étudié le genre romanesque, les lois de son fonctionnement, ses mutations récentes. On a aussi soigneusement répertorié et analysé le champ de l'autobiographie, "la biographie d'une personne faite par elle-même" (J. Starobinski). A la limite des deux genres, on connaît le "roman autobiographique," où, sous le couvert d'une situation et de personnages fictifs, l'auteur nous livre des "faits" de sa propre vie.

Or, phénomène de société autant que phénomène littéraire, après sa "mort" officiellement décrétée par vingt ans d'idéologie structuraliste, l'"auteur" fait soudain en personne un fracassant retour. Mais, curieusement, dans des textes qui ne sont ni romans ni autobiographies ni romans autobiographiques, au sens classique, et qui sont aussi, bien sûr, tout cela ensemble. Ces textes, certains les ont nommés des "indécidables" (J. Lecarme); pour ma part, j'ai proposé le terme d'"autofiction." Disons qu'il s'agit d'une nouvelle forme du discours sur soi, qui brouille les pistes et joue avec les règles habituelles de l'énonciation. Plaisir pervers, chez l'écrivain, d'un nouvel exhibitionnisme adapté à notre société-spectacle, strip-tease médiatique du Moi? Peut-être. Mais sans doute, plus profondément, le fameux "sujet" humain, décentré, déplacé, fragmenté par un demi-siècle de réflexion philosophique, ne sait plus très bien comment raconter son "histoire."

Beckett - Bishop

Beckett's work will be studied as one of the quintessential contemporary expressions of the human condition and as a fundamental calling into question of language itself. The powerful images of Beckett's fiction and drama will be viewed as grim metaphors of existence, but the tenacity of the Beckettian narrator to continue to speak/write despite all odds may be considered as a positive affirmation. The tension inherent in Beckett's writing is best seen in the following quotation from the first of "Three Dialogues" (with Georges Duthuit): "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."

This "obligation to express" will be seen as one of the major constants in Beckett's work. Attention will be given to the first-person narrativity of this fiction and to the theatrical conventions underlying the dramatic pieces.

The course will concentrate on Beckett's great period of creativity in the 1950s and on the most recent works, from 1970 until his death in 1989, with several texts from the intervening 1960s. Videotapes of performances will be shown, as well as Beckett's one cinematic venture, FILM.

La Négritude et ses antécédents - Kande

Concept, idéologie politique et mouvement littéraire, la Négritude s'est définie et s'est effacée dans un climat de polémique. Les enjeux étaient de taille puisqu'il s'agissait de réinscrire le monde pan-noir dans l'histoire, les arts et les lettres--révolution copernicienne qui a suscité autant d'enthousiasme que de réponses critiques. Ce mouvement, qui occupe une place considérable dans l'histoire intellectuelle du 20ème siècle, s'est développé à Paris entre les années 30 et 60, mais en étroite relation avec d'autres communautés, celle des écrivains et artistes de la Harlem Renaissance par exemple. Impulsé par ses trois "pères fondateurs," Césaire, Damas, et Senghor, le mouvement a servi de point d'ancrage, de tremplin et d'arène pour nombre d'écrivains et d'artistes africains, antillais, africains-américains et malgaches de la période. La publication de leurs oeuvres dans des anthologies, celle de L. S. Senghor et celle de L. Kesteloot en particulier, a contribué à établir l'existence d'une littérature "négro-africaine de langue française," d'interroger la spécificité de son esthétique et de son engagement avec l'histoire et le langage. La Négritude a été appuyée--parfois même théorisée--par l'avant-garde intellectuelle française, dont Breton, Leiris, et Sartre.

Ce cours explorera trois phases de la Négritude:

-histoire des antécédents, invention des origines, textes fondateurs,
-institutionalisation de la Négritude autour de la maison d'éditon Présence Africaine (l'heure lyrique et essayiste),
-la génération post-Négritude et la gestion d'un héritage.
Parmi les auteurs traités seront: Stanislas Adotevi, Maryse Condé, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, V. Y. Mudimbe, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Yambo Ouologuem, Tchicaya U Tam'si.

The Epic Voice - Zezula

As one of the earliest and most enduring forms of narrative discourse, epic literature has elicited a great deal of critical attention in recent years. While many problems concerning the epic remain unresolved, there is a general consensus among modern scholars that each cultural era extends the epic register in accordance with its own aesthetic perceptions and needs, creating new epic concepts, discourse, stories, and modes of diffusion. In order to comprehend the protean nature of the epic, this course traces its development in the Renaissance, the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, to the present, through the prism of current theoretical perspectives.

The topics to be discussed include: generic characteristics of epic story and discourse; "classical" and "popular" epic models; the emergence of epic literature in the Middle Ages; early chansons de geste: La Chanson de Roland; Le Couronnement Lois; Le Voyage de Charlemagne; epic cycles; epic elements in the courtly novel; prose adaptation of the chansons de geste; revival of epic literature in the Renaissance; Ronsard's Franciade; D'Aubigné's Les Tragiques; epic literature in the 17th and 18th centuries; Voltaire's La Pucelle and La Henriade; André Chenier; epics of the early and mid-19th century; Vigny's Le Déluge and Eloa; Lamarine's Jocelyn; Chateaubriand's Les Martyrs; Hugo's La Légende des siècles; mystical, mythological, philosophical and science-fiction epics in the 20th century.

La Topographie ou le Génie du Lieu - Beaujour

Dans ce séminaire, nous étudierons des textes modernes qui échappent en gros aux catégories du récit poétique à personnages (épopée, drame, roman) et du discours argumentatif à visée persuasive (éloquence, philosophie, sciences humaines). Que sont ces textes? Comment sont-ils engendrés? Quelle est leur fonction? Que disent-ils du statut de l'écriture contemporaine et de son rapport au passé culturel, à la mémoire, à la tradition rhétorique et en particulier, à la notion de lieu?

Topos, locus, lieu: au sens propre, le lieu peut appartenir à l'espace réel, à la mémoire, à l'imaginaire. Pays, ville, village, rue, maison, jardin, chambre, où se situent des images et un système symbolique que le texte topique décrit et explore.

Au sens figuré: topos, locus, lieu. Ces mots désignent les procédures de l'invention rhétorique, qui procurent des arguments, légitimes ou fallacieux.

Comparative Poetics - Beaujour

In order to gain a better understanding of the underlying concepts and of the limits of Western poetics (theories of literary text production and reception in our culture, from Plato and Aristotle to the present), it would seem advisable to look at our poetics from the outside, from the point of view of non-Western cultures, both literate and non-literate. The approach is fraught with many difficulties that range from the empirical to the epistemological. These difficulties will not be overlooked: on the contrary, analyzing them may turn out to be the most fruitful aspect of our approach.

For practical reasons, our comparison will only encompass (in a manner of speaking) ancient Greek, Chinese, Kaluli (New Guinea) and West African poetics.

This is not intended as a course on ethnopoetics, in any strict, anthropological sense of the word. It is, rather, an attempt to use recent findings of ethnopoetics and Chinese scholarship in order to sketch a framework for a theoretical study of poetics, and especially of Western poetics.

Studies in Genres and Modes: Theater and the Drama - Bishop

The aim of this course is to lead the student to an understanding of theater as a form of dramatic and literary expression. With reference specifically, but not exclusively, to French theater, the course will deal with the following problems and concepts:

1. the conventions of theater--Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, and the fourth-wall convention, anti-Realism, Expressionism, participatory theater, post-Modernism, Performance theater, New Realism;
2. the modes of expression--theater as performance: the production, director, actor, theatrical space and time;
3. reading theater--theater as text; stage directions; prefaces and manifestos;
4. critical approaches--literary and theater history; semiology of performance; viewer response; narratology; stylistics, etc.
5. the language of theater--stylized and realistic modes; non-verbal theater; the uses of silence; the theater of cruelty;
6. the concept of the avant-garde--the interaction between the traditional and the experimental;
7. the public--theater for whom? different publics for different times; the search for a "popular" theater; involving the audience.

Studies in Genres and Modes: Poetry - Nicole

This course aims at enabling students to perform sophisticated readings and close analysis of the poetic text through systematic exposure to linguistic and literary concepts relevant to this practice.

Two major issues will be treated:

1. The "technique" of versification. Here, using illustrative texts, the course will expose the linguistic bases of versification, the special prosodic and rhythmic characteristics of French verse, the rules that apply to the fixed forms.
2. The challenge to poetic conventions and conceptions, beginning in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. With the increased use of free verse and the prose poem, the very nature of poetry is called into question. The course here defines the new features of the poetic text: typographic disposition, absence of punctuation, a new syntax. In addition, traditional rhetorical strategies, such as simile, metaphor, image, are transformed and become generative of the poetic text.

Studies in Genres and Modes: Prose Fiction - Bernard

Conceived as a problematic of narrative modes, this course is designed to convey to the student sophisticated knowledge and the most current means for acceding to the narrative text.

Narrative theory is the area of literary criticism in which the greatest development has taken place in the last sixty years, since the pioneering works of Russian Formalists. The theoretical readings are organized chronologically, but topically, yet convey a sense of this development. Readings will be drawn from several recent anthologies in addition to individual articles and chapters in critical works that contain formalist and narratological criticism (primarily French) as well as Anglo-American New (and newer) Criticism, German and American reader-response criticism, and various theories on the function of fiction, and particularly the novel, in human culture.

The course considers the following areas and topics:

1. Theoretical and methodological issues: the nature of narrative, as distinguished from poetry and drama; modes and genres; representation and persuasion.
2. The formal components of narrative: narrative structure and narrative sequence; functions and characters; rhythm and order; time and space; narration and description; narrator and narratee; point of view.
3. Dynamic models of narrative: reader-response approaches; narrative "desire."
4. The function of narrative in human communication and culture: representation and ideology; dialogism; gender.

Cinema Culture of France - Affron

The course is designed to introduce the student to some of the major issues that define the cinema culture of France, from the beginning of talking films through the New Wave.

Three principal areas will be examined:

1. The place of cinema in the French critical canon.
General questions of representation, narrative, spectatorship, and auteurship (among others), questions central to the study of literature, have been treated by many major critics in terms of cinema. The specific textuality of cinema, its photographic matrix, and the conditions of its reception have made it a provocative object of critical discourse, informing a wide variety of methodologies and, also, illuminated by them, with particular pertinence to semiotics and psychocriticism. Bazin, Barthes, and Metz are among the critics whose works will be discussed.

2. The corpus of French cinema.
While it is impossible to treat comprehensively the subject in the duration of a single semester, the required viewing will give a good introduction to some of the most influential filmmakers and to representative styles, as well as to major currents in the history of French cinema. The extensive video collection of the department will be utilized.

3. Reading the cinematic text.
Particular attention will be given to providing students with the critical and technical vocabularies necessary for the analysis of cinematic texts.

Approaches to French Culture - Gerson

Courses taught by Visiting Professors

G45.2475
Racine - Christian Biet

G45.2890
Georges Bataille, fiction et théorie - Lucette Finas

G45.2690
Studies in 19th-Century Literature: Décadence - Françoise Gaillard

G45.3898
Phenomenology and Literature - Jacques Garelli

G45.2390
Topics in Renaissance Literature: Le rire et le comique - Yves Hersant

G45.2860
La littérature pastorale (16e-18e siècles) - Yves Hersant

G45.1110
Histoire culturelle de la France depuis 1944 - Pascal Ory

G45.3699
Seminar in 19th-Century Literature: Writing the City, Paris -
Christopher Prendergast

G45.1113
Ouvriers et ouvrières dans la société - Christophe Prochasson

G45.2731
Le Nouveau Roman - Alain Robbe-Grillet

G45.2571
Voltaire et ses siècles - Philippe Roger

G45.2590
Sensibilité, amour et libertinage - Philippe Roger

G45.2790
L'imaginaire littéraire aux Antilles - Ronnie Scharfman