FREN 6090a, French for Reading  Nichole Gleisner

Fundamental grammar structures and basic vocabulary are acquired through the reading of texts in various fields (primarily humanities and social sciences, and others as determined by student interest). Intended for students who either need a reading knowledge of French for research purposes or are preparing for French reading examinations and who have had no (or minimal) prior study of French. No preregistration required. Conducted in English. Does not satisfy the language requirement.
W 9:25am-11:20am

FREN 6700b / ITAL 6570b / LING 5640b / SPAN 5000b, Principles of Language Teaching and Learning  Staff

Introduction to the basic principles of second-language acquisition theory, focusing on current perspectives from applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Topics include language teaching methodology, communicative and task-based approaches, learner variables, intercultural competence, and models of assessment.
HTBA

FREN 8120b / MDVL 6112b, The Old French Fable and Fabliaux  Ralph Bloch

A study of Marie de France’s 103 animal tales and some of the anonymous “Ysopets” as well as of the 170 comic verse tales whose veins of satire, parody, comedy of language, situation, character, and farce are at the root of the European comic tradition. We read the fables and the fabliaux against the background of twelfth- and thirteenth-century social, religious, and literary culture. Fables to be read in the bilingual (Old French and English) edition of Harriet Speigel and fabliaux in the recently published bilingual edition, with translations by Ned Dubin. Conducted in English.
T 9:25am-11:20am

FREN 8150a / ENGL 6525a / ITAL 8550a, Medieval Lyric  Ardis Butterfield and Heather Webb

Medieval lyric is famously mobile, whether we consider the ways it was composed and performed, or the ways in which it was transcribed or recorded, or the paths it took around the Mediterranean. This course explores the trajectories of medieval lyrics from a variety of perspectives. We journey from Al-Andalus to Occitania, to Sicily, to Tuscany, to Umbria, to Paris, to Calais, and across the Channel to East Anglia and London. Authors include Arnaut Daniel, Thibaut de Navarre, Gace Brulé, Jean Renart, Adam de la Halle, Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Jacopone da Todi, Giacomo da Lentini, Machaut, Deschamps, and many anonymous and understudied, but inventive English songs and short poems. Focusing on a selection of lyrics each week (with translations provided where appropriate), we range widely through such topics as the idea of voice, the relation between lyric and narrative, poetry and music, and song and translation, guided by the central issues of place, encounter, and (often gendered) power dynamics. Key questions include: Is there a theory of lyric in the Middle Ages? What can contemporary thinking and writing about lyric teach us about verse surviving from 600–800 years ago? What can medieval lyric contribute to contemporary debates about lyric? Our materials include lyrics that were recorded not only on parchment and paper but also on walls and in stained glass, on tombs, in tapestries, and on domestic objects, clothing, drinking cups, and rings. Through manuscripts, objects, words, images, and music we aim to uncover a sense of the inventive freedom at work in the lyric forms of the past.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

FREN 8420a / EMST 5365, Sexuality Studies in the French Renaissance  Dominique Brancher

In the words of the anthropologist Maurice Godelier, “sexuality is always something other than itself” (a biological phenomenon), and it is sexuality’s social and discursive constructions that we study in this seminar, through a large sample of texts from different genres. By crossing the approaches of gender studies, the history of emotions, and historical anthropology and literary analysis, we look at the abundant speech of sex that characterizes the Renaissance, where prohibition has had the value of incentive, as Michel Foucault has so clearly shown. Readings in erotic/pornographic poetry (Ronsard, Jodelle, Théophile de Viau), travel literature (Cholières), self-portraiture (Montaigne), chronicles and anecdotes (Brantôme, Pierre de l’Estoile), medical literature (Joubert, Paré, Duval), and short stories (Cent nouvelles nouvelles). Conducted in French.
Th 9:25am-11:20am

FREN 8750a / CPLT 9004a / FILM 6170a / FREN 875 / GMAN 6004a / SPAN 6205a, Psychoanalysis: Key Conceptual Differences between Freud and Lacan I  Moira Fradinger

This is the first section of a year-long seminar (second section: CPLT 914) designed to introduce the discipline of psychoanalysis through primary sources, mainly from the Freudian and Lacanian corpuses but including late twentieth-century commentators and contemporary interdisciplinary conversations. We rigorously examine key psychoanalytic concepts that students have heard about but never had the chance to study. Students gain proficiency in what has been called “the language of psychoanalysis,” as well as tools for critical practice in disciplines such as literary criticism, political theory, film studies, gender studies, theory of ideology, psychology medical humanities, etc. We study concepts such as the unconscious, identification, the drive, repetition, the imaginary, fantasy, the symbolic, the real, and jouissance. A central goal of the seminar is to disambiguate Freud's corpus from Lacan's reinvention of it. We do not come to the “rescue” of Freud. We revisit essays that are relevant for contemporary conversations within the international psychoanalytic community. We include only a handful of materials from the Anglophone schools of psychoanalysis developed in England and the US. This section pays special attention to Freud's “three” (the ego, superego, and id) in comparison to Lacan's “three” (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real). CPLT 914 devotes, depending on the interests expressed by the group, the last six weeks to special psychoanalytic topics such as sexuation, perversion, psychosis, anti-asylum movements, conversations between psychoanalysis and neurosciences and artificial intelligence, the current pharmacological model of mental health, and/or to specific uses of psychoanalysis in disciplines such as film theory, political philosophy, and the critique of ideology. Apart from Freud and Lacan, we will read work by Georges Canguilhem, Roman Jakobson, Victor Tausk, Émile Benveniste, Valentin Volosinov, Guy Le Gaufey, Jean Laplanche, Étienne Balibar, Roberto Esposito, Wilfred Bion, Félix Guattari, Markos Zafiropoulos, Franco Bifo Berardi, Barbara Cassin, Renata Salecl, Maurice Godelier, Alenka Zupančič, Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, Eric Kandel, and Lera Boroditsky among others. No previous knowledge of psychoanalysis is needed. Starting out from basic questions, we study how psychoanalysis, arguably, changed the way we think of human subjectivity. Graduate students from all departments and schools on campus are welcome. The final assignment is due by the end of the spring term and need not necessarily take the form of a twenty-page paper. Taught in English. Materials can be provided to cover the linguistic range of the group.
T 4pm-5:55pm

FREN 8800a, Le Poème en Prose  Thomas Connolly

This seminar looks at the development of the poème en prose from its beginnings as a response to the inadequacy of French verse forms, which were said to lend themselves poorly to the translation of ancient epic, to its emergence as an independent genre. What constitutes a prose poem and why do we need to distinguish it from prose, poetry, and even poetic prose? Readings include work by Fénelon, Parny, Baudelaire, Bertrand, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Nerval, Mallarmé, Jacob, Michaux, Ponge, and Char, as well as Hölderlin, Poe, and Rilke.
M 9:25am-11:20am

FREN 8990a / CPLT 8970a, Modernity  Maurice Samuels

The seminar studies literature and art from nineteenth-century France alongside theoretical and historical reflections to explore the significance of modernity. How did historical forces shape cultural trends? How did literature and art define what it means to be modern? Writers to be studied include Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola. Theorists include Benjamin, Durkheim, Foucault, Marx, Simmel, and Weber. We also examine the painting of Manet and his followers. Reading knowledge of French required.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

FREN 9003a / HIST 8171a, Gender, Sexuality, and Modernity in Comparative Perspective  Carolyn Dean and Omnia El Shakry

This graduate research seminar introduces us to the various lines of inquiry informing theories and histories of gender and sexuality. The course asks how historians and other scholars constitute gender and sexuality as objects of inquiry while addressing poststructuralist, feminist, postcolonial, and queer theory perspectives. The course aims to introduce students to the foundations of the field, beginning with sexology and psychoanalysis and its interpreters, and especially with Sigmund Freud’s and Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking work. Themes include psychoanalytic discourses and the construction of sexual subjects; colonialism, nationalism, and gender; bourgeois bodies and racial selves; sexualities; subalternity; religion, agency, and the feminist subject; and queering the modern. The emphasis is on a discursive understanding of gender and sexuality, while attending to diverse geographical regions.
T 9:25am-11:20am

FREN 9170a, France by Rail: Trains in French Literature, Film, and History  Morgane Cadieu

The seminar examines trains in literature, cinema, and theory, from the end of the nineteenth century and the first locomotives to the subway in contemporary Paris. The readings and discussions will focus on: the representation of French historical events through trains (industrialization, colonization, deportation, decolonization, immigration); the railroad as an anthropological tool; the aesthetics of trains; and the tracks as metaphors for determinism and free will. We visit the Beinecke collections and the Yale University Art Gallery. Corpus can include Augé, Chéreau, Delbo, Djemaï, Dongala, Ernaux, Renoir, Sebbar, Sembène, Verne, Wajsbrot, and Zola. Conducted in English. Reading knowledge of French is not a requirement.
W 4pm-5:55pm

FREN 9300b / JDST 6511b, War and Memory from WWII to the Algerian War: Archive, Fiction, Theory  Alice Kaplan

This seminar is divided into two units, the first focusing on the French memory of WWII and the Nazi occupation (1940–1945), and the second focusing on French and the Algerian memories of the Algerian War for Independence (1945/1954–1962). We read the now canonical works on war and memory generated by each event (Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l'oubli), measuring their arguments against works of fiction and film that take on the problem of war and memory through characters, setting, and narrative structure. By the end of the seminar, students are familiar with “a history of memory” that is distinct from social, political or even cultural history. Throughout the seminar we ask who is remembering and who is forgetting? Who are the memory keepers? We look for moments when gaps in national memory have been filled—or widened. Along the way, we study “memory sites” connected to the two events and we read/watch some of the most important authors and filmmakers who have shaped the memory of WWII and the Algerian War. By the end of the seminar, students have a working knowledge of: (1) the debates and methods generated by critical memory studies and (2) novels and films that have played a fundamental role in shaping memory. Conducted in English.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

FREN 9630b / AFST 963b, Radiant Matters/Nuclear Imperialism  Jill Jarvis

Beginning in 1960, the French military detonated seventeen aerial and subterranean nuclear bombs in what is now the Algerian Sahara. After 1966, the French military detonated 193 more atomic and hydrogen bombs on the living inhabitants of the occupied Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in the southern Pacific Ocean. Today, more than 70 percent of French energy supply is fueled by nuclear power that depends entirely on highly radioactive uranium extraction infrastructures located predominantly in African lands formerly colonized by France. The imperial radiance of France leaves an enduring toxic legacy whose impact is not yet known. Our planet is materially haunted on a cellular and atomic level by the slow violence of nuclear imperialism that nation-states train us not to perceive. With a particular but not exclusive focus on French nuclear imperialism and its archival silencings, this seminar considers how aesthetic works—novels, poems, photographs, film, public installation, collective archiving projects—help to render the obscured and pervasive violence of nuclear imperialism knowable and contestable. Preequisite: Reading knowledge of French is strongly recommended, as several of the texts are not available in English translation.
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

FREN 9700a or b, Directed Reading  Morgane Cadieu

By arrangement with faculty.
HTBA

FREN 9710a or b, Independent Research  Morgane Cadieu

“As previously approved”
HTBA