In order to better understand the assumptions and implications of important tendencies of contemporary literary,
political, and cultural theory, this course will study a selection of political essays and literary texts by two
of the most visible and influential French writers of the post-World War II period: Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert
Camus. Through discussions of the political and literary debates surrounding their work and by following the
evolution of their political positions and approaches to literature from the mid 1940s to the early 1960s (from
the liberation of France and the beginning of the Cold War to the end of the Algerian War and the beginning of the
postcolonial period), the course will study how the question "what is literature?" holds a key place in the work
of these two writers and theorists and also in that of many of the most influential theorists of the
postmodern/postcolonial period(s) - even or especially in the work of a number of theorists who would appear to be
explicitly anti-Sartrean or anti-Camusian. The course will also investigate the ways different kinds of literary
texts formulate political questions and their complicated relations to the political theories they are associated
with, derived from, or intended to illustrate. The course will focus on the relation of the political and the
literary in general and attempt to shed light on how the question "what is the literary?" comes to be linked to
the question "what is the political?"(Carroll)
Beginning in the 19th century, France conquered a large empire spanning from Asia to Africa as well as the
Americas. The main objective of this course is to analyze the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism in
North Africa with a stronger emphasis on the French-Algerian war of independence (1954-62). This class should
allow us to better understand the impact of colonization and decolonization in the construction of a postcolonial
Maghrebian identity . We will address throughout the quarter the following questions: the impact of the colonial
experience on the construction of a postcolonial identity, the political implication of the language struggle
(Arabic versus French), the place of women as well as the role of Islam in the
creation of the new national identity... In addition to key postcolonial and poststructuralist essays, we will
discuss Nedjma by Kateb Yacine, L'Amour, la Fantasia by Assia Djebar, La Mémoire Tatouée and Le
Livre du Sang by Khatibi, Le Désert sans Détour and Qui se souvient de la mer? by Mohammed Dib as
well as Le Désert by Albert Memmi. (Barbé)
Close readings of Baudelairian texts, chosen from the rich variety of the work in terms of several concerns. The
chief concern will be the autobiographical in Baudelaire, by which is meant not only writing concerned with the
self and self-production, but also with what engages or threatens the I as its other. ("Un moi insatiable du
non-moi," Baudelaire defines Monsieur G., his exemplary painter of modern life.) Related themes will be the dandy
and the artificial paradise, along with rhetorical concerns such as irony and allegory, which pit an expressive
language of the self against a language where the I's autonomy is in question, and translation, which entails the
setting of a foreign text into one's own language.
(Burt)
The purpose of this course is to examine the critical impact different interpretations of Freud's psychoanalytic
theory have had on contemporary theory broadly speaking. We will begin by considering two major works by Freud The Interpretation of Dreams and Civilization and Its Discontents and discussing some of the issues
and also dilemmas they posed for subsequent thinkers. In the second part of the course we will examine the role
played by Lacan's interpretation of The Interpretation of Dreams in shaping the principal theses of his
major essay, "L'Instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient," and then consider the alternative interpretations of
Freud's work that shaped the theoretical positions of some of Lacan's major critics: Lyotard, Derrida, and
Foucault. The work of some additional contemporary theorists who have been in dialogue with Lacan and with
psychoanalysis generally -Zizek, Butler, and Balibar- will also be discussed. In each case, we will be concerned
with the implications of the texts on our reading list not only with regard to psychoanalytic theory in the
narrower, "psychological" sense, but also with respect to literature, language, and culture. (Gearhart)
The sixteenth-century in France is haunted by its past, the immediate French past from which it attempts to free
itself and the ancient, classical past to which it seeks to relate itself. In order to reinvent itself as
modernity and affirm its originality, the French Renaissance needed both to forget its own history and to
reconstitute and remember a new history. But the creative effort to replace an indigenous, recent past with a
foreign and remote one created a profound sense of loss and a deep feeling of belatedness. The rupture from which
the era drew its energy and inspiration also undermined its confidence and compromised its enthusiasm.
This course will examine the complex representation of the past in representative works of prose and poetry from
the French 16th-century. Literary readings will include Du Bellay's Deffense et Illustration and his Antiquitez de
Rome, selected poems of Ronsard, essays of Montaigne drawn from Book III, and "Misères" from
D'Aubigné's Les Tragiques. Critical readings will be drawn from Nietzsche, Derrida, De Man, and Balibar.
Discussion will address attitudes towards history and the function of cultural memory as well as the play and
place of imitation and originality as elements of literary practice. (Regosin)
Capital punishment was a major subject of debate in France during the first half of the 19th-century. Interest in
the issue spread from the philosophical and political spheres, to which it was traditionally confined, to
literature, producing an unprecedented diversity of discourses that ranged from epistolary writings and memoirs to
theatre and fiction. The purpose of this course is to investigate this phenomenon by studying different juxtaposed
discourses. Ultimately, our aim is to better understand how literature expressed political and social concerns
when describing, for instance, public executions as a shameful spectacle or imagining the last thoughts of a
condemned man. Is the role of literature in some way unique, and is there something much bigger at stake behind
this sudden yet strong interest in capital punishment? We will begin by examining the political, legal and
constitutional aspects of the death penalty as discussed by political philosophers of the period such as Constant,
de Maistre and Guizot. We will then read short key literary texts that present either explicitly or
surreptitiously the question of the death penalty. Authors studied may include Hugo, Balzac, Nodier, Janin, Vigny
and Petrus Borel. Some out-of-print material will either be available on-line or in photocopies. (Hamilton)
This course, in an interdisciplinary investigation into the history, practices the kinds of visual spectacles in
fin-de-siécle Paris. Structured along three main types of spectacles: spectacles of the feminine, the
criminal and the colonial, the course will examine these tropes in both popular forms of entertainment (universal
expos, photography, early cinema) and scientific culture (histories of criminology, psychology, ethnography).
Readings will be from a variety disciplines and in French and English. Students will also be asked to screen
short films of the time period on their own. (Fornabai)
According to Samuel Huntington, the end of the cold war paradoxically marked the beginning of a new form of
conflict: the so-called "clash of civilization." The main goal of this course is to challenge Samuel
Huntington's thesis by showing how the Mediterranean space is not doomed to remain a zone of fracture, a wall
separating Western and Muslim civilizations. We will mostly focus on historians, philosophers and writers who are
trying to restore a dialogue, a mediation between both sides of the Mediterranean. Here is a list of themes that
we will address throughout the seminar: transnationalism, the borders of Europe and the Maghreb,
judeo-muslim-christian mediation, "francophonie mineure" versus "francophonie politique," ranslation between
cultures and idioms. We will read key essays written by Huntington, Pirenne, Braudel, Derrida and Balibar as well
as novels by Djebar, Yacine, Memmi, and Khatibi. (Barbé)
From an historical standpoint, the purpose of this course is to reconsider the Enlightenment concept of nature
both as the centerpiece of an emerging liberal ideology and as a theoretical arm in the struggle against tyranny
and political absolutism. From a more contemporary and theoretical standpoint, its purpose is to consider the role
played in postmodern critical thought by Enlightenment theories of the passions, pleasure, sensibility, and
aesthetic judgment spawned by the interest in "nature." During the course of the quarter these different theories
will be drawn on to raise questions about the potential role of art and literature in resisting power and creating
"republican" communities. The reading list will include texts by Kant, Lyotard, Rousseau, Derrida, and Diderot.
(Gearhart)
This course focuses on a crucial period in French-African cultural relations, from the first decade of the
twentieth century, when African tribal objects found their way into the homes of Parisian artists and writers to
the late thirties when colonial subjects (from Africa but also the Caribbean) began to "write back," to produce
persuasive works in response to the influence of French literature and art. We begin with cubist writers and
painters and the circulation of African tribal objects that occurred at the opening of the new millenium. Next, we
look at the way non-Western approaches to material reality inspired the surrealists to locate and examine "the
sacred way of life." We study the European representation of Africa in Leo Frobenius's influential ethnographies
as well as the staging of Africa at the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris. A detour through the first French
ethnographic expedition to Africa in 1931-33 (Mission Dakar-Djibouti) brings us into contact with Michel Leiris
and his questioning of the European self. Finally, we turn to works by Aimé Césaire (Martinique),
Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), and René Depestre (Haiti) to gain a sense of how Francophone
colonial poetry responded to the primitivist fantasies of the French avant-garde. This course is an attempt to
provide a dialectical understanding of the violent but also fruitful contact between French and Francophone
modernisms. (Noland)
This course focuses on the relationships between writing and self to raise questions about textuality and
self-portraiture, self-fashioning, and self-knowledge; inter-textuality and tradition; memory and history. We
will read theoretical and critical texts in conjunction with selected essays and address issues that are literary,
cultural, historical, philosophical, and anthropological. (Regosin)
This course will study the problematic role of memory in a selection of twentieth-century French novels (and
perhaps films). Beginning with an investigation of the critical place of memory in contemporary French
historiography (especially evident in Pierre Nora's multi-volume collection, Les lieux de mémoire,
and the work of Henry Rousso), we will read Proust's Le temps retrouvé, Claude Simon's La route
des Flandres, and Jorge Semprun's Le Grand voyage, as well as view and analyze Alain Resnais's and
Marguerite Duras's film, Hiroshima mon amour. We will focus especially on the different ways World Wars I
and II are "remembered" in these very different works of fiction. If there is interest in pursuing the
cinematographic side of memory, other films by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker could also be shown and discussed.
I am especially interested in how different forms of literature (and film) challenge and complicate historical
certainties and how literature (and film) can have a constitutive role in the development of what could be called
a critical cultural memory. (Carroll)
