Global Arc

This course is an intensive discussion-based seminar which offers an introduction to sociolinguistics, or the study of language as a social phenomenon. Through readings, films, and documentaries, we will explore contemporary debates related to language, culture, politics, identity, and ideology in the Francophone world. The course includes a series of guest speakers for the discussion of Francophone case studies. Past speakers were from Morocco, Québec, Louisiana, Republic of Benin, La Réunion, and the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.

Our aim is to examine how the "social" and the "economic" become intertwined. From Enlightenment narratives about the origins of civilization, whether philosophical, ethnographic, or fictional, by Swift, Rousseau, or Graffigny, we also consider history-writing by Voltaire and Gibbon. We read early economic and sociological thought by Malthus, Saint-Simon, Balzac, and Smith, and delve into the crystallization of broadly Marxist approaches to society and culture in Engels, Benjamin, and, of course, Marx. While the category of "literature" will be an important lens for our thinking, archival and historical approaches will also be stressed.

In the Anthropocene, humanity has become, for the first time, a geological agent transforming the conditions of life on earth, but this power itself gives rise to unprecedented challenges, from air pollution and floods to nuclear fallout and plagues, from agribusiness to petro-imperialism. Literature sheds a unique light on this global crisis, highlighting in each case the lived human experience, the distinct visions of nature, and the complex social conflicts involved. Readings include novels, plays, and journalism about oil extraction, megadams and nuclear fallout from France, Russia, India, Nigeria, Japan and the US.

What's the point of education? What should anyone truly learn, why, and how? Who gets to attend school? Is it a right, a privilege, a duty, an investment, or a form of discipline? Do schools level the playing field or entrench inequalities? Should they fashion workers, citizens, or individuals? Moving from France to the US, and from the Enlightenment to the present, we look at the vexed but crucial relationship between education and democracy in novels, films, essays, and philosophy, examining both the emancipatory and repressive potential of modern schooling. Topics include: Brown, class, meritocracy, testing, and alternative pedagogies.

Topics will range from single authors and major texts (for example, the Encyclopedie) to literary genres and questions of culture (preciosite, comedy and/or tragedy, historiography, epistolary writing, etc.). Prerequisite: FRE 207 or equivalent. Course conducted in French. Two 90-minute classes.

As fascism was rising in Europe in the 1930s, French writers, artists, and intellectuals expressed their opposition to this threat both in action, coalescing around militant groups with overt political positions, and in their work. This antifascist cultural mobilization was sustained throughout the decade and siphoned into different kinds of resistance action and creation during WWII. This highly interdisciplinary course explores works of literature, art, cinema, and photography that fought fascism with words and images before and during the war in France. Works will be situated within their historical context and framed by theory.

This course examines the complex role of gender and sexuality in Francophone Africa's literature and visual cultures. Framed primarily by postcolonial criticism, we will explore how Francophone African writers, filmmakers, and artists treat historical and contemporary issues connected to women and marginal sexualities' experiences, and how they appropriate vernacular/conventional modes of writing and filmmaking in their works. By reading critical writings alongside the novels and films, we will explore questions such as: How stories shape our understanding of gender roles? From whose perspective are they told? What do they exclude/repress?

Close readings of landmark novels from nineteenth-century France by Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Huysmans, Claire de Duras, and Constant. What course did the modern novel chart between realism and naturalism, romantic disenchantment and fin-de-siècle decadence, engaged art and aesthetic detachment, national history and private life? How did the novel reflect, shape, and map this revolutionary period in French history? Topics to be highlighted: formal innovation, realism, social critique, theories of the novel, the reading public, and print culture. Prerequisite: a 200-level French course or instructor's permission.

Topics will range from the oeuvre and context of a single author (for example, Balzac, Baudelaire, or Beckett) to specific cultural and literary problems (modernism and the avant-garde, history as literature, women's writing). Prerequisite: a 200-level French course or instructor's permission.

Albert Camus was one of the most acclaimed writers of the 20th century, and one of the most paradoxical. Reading his major narratives, plays, and essays, we will asses how the author found himself often at odds with his own thought and creativity, through his philosophy, politics, or the very act of writing. We will see how Camus, always in between, eternally on the move, can help us face (and revolt against) the nonsense of our world, from pandemics to terrorism, imperialism and totalitarianism, how we can question ourselves and relate to others, while still remembering to seek happiness and beauty.