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Previous Graduate Seminars

Course Atlas

French Graduate Seminars Spring 2010

FREN 775: D'un Maupassant l'autre

Content: "Que serait-il arrivé, écrit Pierre Bayard, si, en élaborant la psychanalyse, Freud avait tenu compte de l'œuvre de Maupassant, son contemporain ? Sa théorie n'aurait-elle pas été marquée davantage par le modèle de la psychose ? N'aurait-il pas accordé une attention plus grande à la question de l'identité, au détriment de celle de la sexualité ?" Telles sont quelques-unes des questions qui travailleront la lecture que nous ferons, ce semestre, de l'œuvre de Maupassant.

Texts: Textes étudiés, en édition "Folio" : Les Contes de la bécasse, Les Sœurs Rondoli, Mont-Oriol, Le Horla, Pierre et Jean, Fort comme la mort.

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FREN 775: On Not Dealing: Bernard-Marie Koltès
Same as CPLT 751

Content: Bernard-Marie Koltès preferred the language of the deal to the language of feelings.
Why? What does the language of the deal outline that the language of feelings covers up?
As we shall see, Koltès uses the notion of the deal to problematize the very possibility of
an exchange, to bring out the non-relation that subtends our so-called relationships. We
will trace this problematic in Dans la solitude des champs de coton, Sallinger, and
Roberto Zucco. Students will also be asked to attend the performance of Le jour des
meurtres dans l’histoire d’Hamlet that will be given next semester by Seven Stages. The
course will be taught in English.

Texts: TBA

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FREN 780: Derrida
Same as CPLT 751 and PHIL 789

Content: In this course we shall attempt to reconstruct the general movement of Derrida's thought from early to late. In the first part of the course, we shall concentrate on texts from the 60s and 70s, with the aim of understanding fundamental Derridean notions such as différance, écriture, dissémination and trace, and assessing his polemical exchanges with Foucault,Lacan and Searle. In the second part, we shall look at some more recent work bearing on questions of ethics, politics and religion. Although the class aims at a reasonably philosophical (rather than, say,'literary') understanding of Derrida, it also assumes that Derrida¹s thinking is not philosophy is any usual sense. No prior knowledge of Derrida is necessary.
Readings will be available in both French and English, and the class will take place in English.

Texts: TBA

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FREN 780: Subjectivity and Truth: Autobiography, Fate, Loss, and Literary Writing
Same as CPLT 751, ENG 789 and ILA 790

Content: “Death,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.” In a different context, Paul de Man writes: “And to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to repeat—that is to say, the endless prosopopeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice...”

The course will be reflecting on literary writing as bearing testimony to our lives, our losses, and our destinies, thus addressing why we write and why we read. How, in creating a literary signature, do we (indirectly or directly) give an account of ourselves, in literature and criticism alike?

Texts: Studied texts will span, deliberately, across different literary genres, and will be selected from the following: Poems by Percy B Shelley, William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud; Plays by Shakespeare (Hamlet), Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband), Bertolt Brecht (Life of Galileo); Novels by Mary Shelley (Frankenstein). Autobiographical Memoirs by Jean–Jacques Rousseau (Confessions), Henry David Thoreau (Walden), Oscar Wilde (De Profundis), Plato (Apology). Critical works by Walter Benjamin (“The Storyteller”), Michel Foucault, Barbara Johnson, and Paul de Man.

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FREN 780: Post War French Writing: Blanchot, Bataille, Levinas
Same as CPLT 751

Content : TBA

Texts: TBA

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Fall 2009

Spring 2009

Fall 2008

Spring 2008

Fall 2007