Fall 2019

Reading and Composition (R&C)

Fiber Optics: Textile Practice in French Literature and Art
R1A (Section 1) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation
Fall 2019
V. Bergstrom
Readings/Films:

Readings may include:

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Marie de France, “Guigemar”

Madame de Graffigny, Letters of a Peruvian Woman

Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés…

Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood

Julia Bryan Wilson, Frayed (excerpts)

The Textile Reader (excerpts)

Viewing list (works by):

Louise Bourgeois

Sonia Delaunay

Hannah Höch

Chris Marker

Annette Messager

Agnès Varda

Course Description:

In this course, we will be investigating the place of textile practice in French literature and art. In the first half of the course, we will read texts in which practices of weaving, stitching, knitting and knotting feature prominently. In the visual arts, we will focus on how textile work gets situated within and in exclusion from fine art contexts. Taking full account of the gendered and often racially-charged intersection of “arts and crafts” and fine art (domestic sphere vs. worldly sphere, indigenous practices as aesthetic objects), we will trace the relevance of the fiber arts to representations of female simplicity/complexity and to the material horizons for expression and recognition for women and racialized Others.

In addition to this thematic work, the second half of the course will transform our awareness of textile practices into reading strategies that will help us analyze texts and films whose complex structures can be productively approached through ideas of weaving, patching, pleating, etc.

This course is designed to fulfill the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement. The primary goal of this course is to develop students’ reading and writing skills through a series of assignments that will provide them with the opportunity to formulate observations made in class discussions into coherent argumentative essays. Emphasis will be placed on the refinement of effective sentence, paragraph, and thesis formation, keeping in mind the notion of writing as a process.

Additional Information:

Attendance is mandatory the first two weeks of classes. This includes all enrolled and wait listed students. Students who do not attend all classes during the first two weeks may be dropped. Students attempting to add this class during weeks 1 and 2 who did not attend the first day will be expected to add themselves to the wait list and attend all class meetings thereafter. If space permits, they may be enrolled from the wait list.

French R1A satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition Requirement. Classes are conducted in ENGLISH

Revolutionary Women
R1B (Section 1) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation
Fall 2019
T. Sanders
Readings/Films:

Required

Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791)

Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)

Isabelle de Charrière, Three Women (1797)

Sophie Cottin, Claire d’Albe (1799)

Germaine de Staël, Corinne, or Italy (1807)

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

Claire de Duras, Ourika (1823)

George Sand, Indiana (1832)

Recommended

Writing Analytically, 8th edition

Course Description:

In this course, we will read female writers whose works forcefully articulate the concerns of women during a time of revolution. The iconic Storming of the Bastille took place on July 14, 1789, yet suffrage would not extend to French women until 1944. In fact, although women played a decisive role in the fall of the Ancien Régime, the following years saw startling setbacks for women, culminating in the establishment of the Napoleonic Code in 1804, which affirmed and strengthened the legal right of men to control the lives of women. As these events unfolded, a number of remarkable women took to the pen and wrote eloquently to their moment, pleading not only for their own rights, but also for the abolition of slavery. Moreover, they challenged social and literary conventions and intervened thoughtfully in the key political, philosophical, and aesthetic debates that would shape modern Europe. We will explore the literary genres, modes, and movements in which they operated, including the conte philosophique, the sentimental tradition, epistolarity, travel literature, Gothic aesthetics, and Romanticism; and we will reflect critically on their relation to history and politics.

RIB is intended to introduce students to, and develop their skills in‚ research-based literary analysis. To this end, we will work on interpreting literature; producing close readings; developing solid literary arguments; understanding literary and critical theory; conducting and presenting outside research; and analyzing and critiquing theoretical work in class discussions and written assignments.

Additional Information:

Attendance is mandatory the first two weeks of classes. This includes all enrolled and wait listed students. Students who do not attend all classes during the first two weeks may be dropped. Students attempting to add this class during weeks 1 and 2 who did not attend the first day will be expected to add themselves to the wait list and attend all class meetings thereafter. If space permits, they may be enrolled from the wait list.

French R1B satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition Requirement. Classes are conducted in ENGLISH

Social / Form: Representing the Social
R1B (Section 2) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation
Fall 2019
T. Blakeney
Readings/Films:

Jane Austen, Emma

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

Colette, The Pure and the Impure

Rouch and Morin, Chronicle of a Summer

Chris Marker, Le Joli Mai

Agnès Varda, The Gleaners and I

The Real Housewives of New York

Course Description:

This course will explore the ways in which various aesthetic forms since the 19th century have become spaces for understanding the social world. We will begin with the nineteenth century “novel of manners” (Jane Austen’s Emma), exploring the status of the novel as a source of knowledge in distinction to philosophy and history. We will then trace the heritage of the novel of manners across the 20th century, through the modernist novel (Proust), journalistic writing (Colette), documentary (Rouch and Morin, Marker, Varda), and reality television in the present day (The Real Housewives). In each case, we will ask how the specificity of the form of these texts makes certain aspects of the social world visible and renders others invisible, and what information about the social world aesthetic forms are able to convey that other modes of understanding the social (statistics, for example) miss.

Additional Information:

Attendance is mandatory the first two weeks of classes. This includes all enrolled and wait listed students. Students who do not attend all classes during the first two weeks may be dropped. Students attempting to add this class during weeks 1 and 2 who did not attend the first day will be expected to add themselves to the wait list and attend all class meetings thereafter. If space permits, they may be enrolled from the wait list.

French R1B satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition Requirement. Classes are conducted in ENGLISH

"This is the end, beautiful friend:" War as an internal and external battlefield
R1B (Section 3) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation
Fall 2019
S. Rogghe
Readings/Films:

Books:

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness ISBN-10: 0141441674

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front ISBN-10: 9780449213940

Course reader including excerpts from:

Freud & Einstein, Why War?

Rousseau, essays on war

Victor Hugo, Address to the Paris Peace Conference

Victor Hugo, The Terrible Year (poems)

Tolstoy, selections from War & Peace

Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

Rimbaud, Poems 1972

Apollinaire, Calligrammes

Breton, The Disdainful Confession

Breton & Soupault, The Magnetic Fields

Jacques Vaché, War Letters

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Jim Morrison, The American Night

(plus relevant critical essays)

Film:

Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now

Course Description:

“Spiritual combat is as fierce as the battles of men,” wrote the nineteen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud, having witnessed the Franco-Prussian war up close in 1871. This phrase suggests a correlation between the external side of war and an inner, psychological struggle on the level of both the individual and the collective. Through a variety of literary and theoretical texts, this course will examine the phenomenon of war in its “spiritual” or psychological dimension, reflecting on whether war is an intrinsic part of human civilization, or whether it mirrors a darker aspect within ourselves. In particular, we will look at three historical junctures: the response of poets such as Victor Hugo and Arthur Rimbaud to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, World War I and its relation to surrealism and the exploration of the unconscious in the 1920s, and, finally, the psychedelic reaction to the Vietnam War during the counterculture of the 1960s. In addition to situating these wars within their socio-historic contexts, we will discuss topics such as derealization, violence and aesthetics, and mass psychology. While most of the material is not of a graphic or explicit nature, there will be a few graphic depictions of violence in the film we will watch, which I will signal to the class for those who would rather skip these.

Because this is a writing course, student writing will be examined and dissected in group discussions and in smaller peer review groups, as a way to provide constructive feedback and learn from each other’s writing. In addition, we will also address methods for doing critical research, including exercises devoted to library resources and bibliographical information.

Additional Information:

Attendance is mandatory the first two weeks of classes. This includes all enrolled and wait listed students. Students who do not attend all classes during the first two weeks may be dropped. Students attempting to add this class during weeks 1 and 2 who did not attend the first day will be expected to add themselves to the wait list and attend all class meetings thereafter. If space permits, they may be enrolled from the wait list.

French R1B satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition Requirement. Classes are conducted in ENGLISH

Homeless in the City of Lights
R1A (Section 3) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation
Fall 2019
P. Lyons
Readings/Films:

Balzac : Colonel Chabert (1832)

Baudelaire : The Flowers of Evil (1857), Paris Spleen (1869)

Driss Chraibi: The Butts (1955)

Virginie Despentes: Vernon Subutex I (2015)

Jean Renoir – Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932)

Leos Carax – The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)

Sylvain George – Paris is a Moveable Feast – A Film in 18 Waves (2017)

Course Description:

In this course we will be engaging with poetry, novels, and films that explore different forms of homelessness in Paris ranging historically from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. We will critically assess the definitions and portrayals of homelessness that the works considered offer us, as well as those that they problematize or restructure. How are various figurations of homelessness bound to structures of power and governmentality? How does the law, for instance, dictate who is homeless, and who is ‘homed?’ What about architecture? Discourses surrounding race, gender, and nationality? To begin answering these questions, we will situate the artworks under consideration within their social and historical conditions of emergence. This will help us to better understand how literature and film allow us to critically reposition ourselves with regards to the often normalized conditions of the sans-abris.

Additional Information:

Attendance is mandatory the first two weeks of classes. This includes all enrolled and wait listed students. Students who do not attend all classes during the first two weeks may be dropped. Students attempting to add this class during weeks 1 and 2 who did not attend the first day will be expected to add themselves to the wait list and attend all class meetings thereafter. If space permits, they may be enrolled from the wait list.

French R1A satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition Requirement. Classes are conducted in ENGLISH

Undergraduate Courses 

Slow Reading Dangerous Liaisons
24 : Freshman Seminar
Fall 2019
N. Paige
Readings/Films:

See Description.

Course Description:

Innocence, pleasure, pride, entrapment; consent, revenge, desire, repression; hypocrisy, deceit, aggression, force; persuasion, faith, virtue, nobility; corruption, manipulation, sex, love: all this and much, much more in one of world literature’s most diabolically intelligent novels, Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, written in the years right before the French Revolution. In addition to reading the novel (in English), we’ll also be viewing some of the work’s numerous film adaptations. Optional meetings will be arranged for students who would like to work on some passages in the original French.

Additional Information:

Course taught in ENGLISH. No knowledge of French is needed. Optional meetings will be arranged for students who would like to work on some passages in the original French.

Priority enrollment for Freshmen.

Professor Paige teaches mainly classes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature and culture, with special interest in the history of the novel.

Citizenship and Identity in France
43B : Aspects of French Culture
Fall 2019
S. Maslan
Readings/Films:

Readings will range from enlightenment philosophers to contemporary fiction. We will watch films from the 1930s through the present.

Course Description:

What does it mean to be a citizen? One quick answer is to say that a citizen is a person who is is recognized as belonging to a State, as having rights and protections, as being a member of a political and social order. But even this quick definition raises more questions than it answers. In our age of globalisation, of refugee crises, of Brexit, of HB1 visas, and of border walls, how we decide if someone “belongs”? Questions about citizenship and immigration are not only questions about rights, they are also, inevitably, questions about national identity. Who “we” are is shaped by our beliefs about and actions toward those whose status is precarious, liminal, or, seemingly, non-existant.

In this course we will study French ideas about citizenship and belonging, about participation and protection, from the early modern period through the present. France sees itself as the birthplace of human rights and as a refuge for those fleeing persecution. But these beliefs have been tested throughout French history by internal tensions and external crises. We will study the ways in which France today tries to reconcile its often opposing cultural and political imperatives.

We will study fiction, philosophy, and politcs from the eighteenth century through the twenty-first. We will study ideas about cosmopolitanism and universalism. We will study some crucial historical moments: the Dreyfus affair, the refugee influx of the 1930s, and the Algerian war. We will study the most recent examples in which France faces challenges as it seeks to integrate new identities, new practices, new modes of belonging within French citizenship. We will pay attention to the politics of recent elections, the prolonged state of emergency, the “burkini,” and more. We will think about the ways in which France experiences the tensions and transformations of our times differently from the ways the United States does.

Additional Information:

Course taught in English; knowledge of French not required. This course satisfies the College of Letters and Science breadth requirement in Historical Studies or Social and Behavioral Studies.

The Cultural History of Paris
80
Fall 2019
N. Paige
Readings/Films:

Zola, The Kill (trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Modern Library); Luc Sante, The Other Paris (optional); Course Reader.

Course Description:

This class will offer students an in-depth exploration of the urban artifact that is Paris. That is, rather than attending to a selection of events having transpired in Paris over its history, we will be proceeding “forensically,” peeling back what is visible to today’s observer in order to uncover the competing ambitions, economic pressures, and ideologies that have produced one of the most visited cities in the world.

Students can expect to gain knowledge of the city’s built environment and how and why it looks like it does. We will be reading a variety of texts (novels, plays, and memoirs or parts thereof; poems; ephemeral pieces; selections from historical and sociological studies), viewing a number of films, and looking at a lot of visual works (paintings, engravings, maps). A brief data science unit studying recent trends in gentrification will complete our semester.

Additional Information:

Course taught in English; knowledge of French not required. This course satisfies the College of Letters and Science breadth requirement in Historical Studies

Writing in French, 3 sections
102
Fall 2019
R. Shuh, D. Sanyal, E. Colon
Readings:

Course Reader; other readings as assigned by Instructor

Course Description:

This course introduces students to different modes of proposing and furthering a point of view or argument (whether in a critical essay, through dramatic metaphor, or in plays or short stories). To this end, we read passages from a variety of works, such as critical essays, novels, and plays, in order to study their use of language, their structure, and their tactics of persuasion. Through readings on problems of language and the visual arts, we explore the ways in which words and images structure thought, communication and interactions of individuals and societies. Great attention is paid, both through the readings and through extensive written work, to questions of interpretation as well as to the logical and coherent development of reading and writing skills leading to correct and effective expression in French.

Prerequisites:

French 102 is open to students with a B- grade or above in French 4 at UC Berkeley. Students who have taken the equivalent of a third-year college-level French course elsewhere may enroll in French 102, and should contact the French Undergraduate Advising Office regarding French placement procedures by email at frendept@berkeley.edu.

Additional information:

French 102 is the sole prerequisite to all UCB French courses numbered 103 and above. Course open to non-native speakers of French only. Course conducted in French. Satisfies Letters and Science breadth requirement in International Studies.

French Colonialism; The Creation of the French Empire
103A : Language and Culture
Fall 2019
S. Tlatli
Readings/Films:

Nous baserons nos discussions sur des textes littéraires, historiques et sociologiques ainsi que sur un ensemble de films. Les auteurs que nous étudierons sont les suivants: Alexis de Tocqueville, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Memmi et Frantz Fanon. Un “reader” est disponible à “Copy Central”

Course Description:

L’objectif de ce cours est l’analyse d’un corpus textuel qui expose l’évolution de la question coloniale en France, depuis la création de l’empire, pendant le dix-neuvième siècle, jusqu’aux débats récents du vingt-et-unième siècle sur le post-colonialisme. Sur le plan historique, nous décrirons la naissance de l’empire français ainsi que ses conséquences dans la société et la politique française contemporaine.

Au nombre des questions que nous discuterons, on peut noter: la propagande coloniale, l’engagement des écrivains et des philosophes dans la lute contre le colonialisme. L’impact considérable de l’utilisation systématique de la torture pendant les guerres de décolonisation, ainsi que le statut de la femme dans l’univers colonial.

Prerequisites:

Students must have either previously completed French 102 or its equivalent, or be concurrently enrolled in French 102. For additional placement information please see Placement Guidelines.

Additional information:

Satisfies 1 “Elective” requirement in the French major. Satisfies course requirement in French Minor.

Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature or International Studies. Course may be taken by students concurrently enrolled in French 102.

Moliere and his time
117B : Seventeenth-Century Literature
Fall 2019
D. Blocker
Readings/Films:

Plays: Les Précieuses ridicules (1659), excerpts from La Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes and L’Impromptu de Versailles (1663), Le Misanthrope (1666), L’Avare (1668), George Dandin (1668), Le Tartuffe (1669), Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671) and Le Malade Imaginaire (1673).

Films: Ariane Mnouchkine, Molière (1978) and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, staged by Vincent Dumestre and Le Poème Harmonique (2008).

Course Description:

Molière was France’s most prominent comical actor, playwright and stage director during the Classical Age and his plays remain central to the French imaginary to this day. This class provides an introduction to Molière’s works and times. We study a selection of his plays, ranging from his Italianate farces and the comédies-ballets (or musicals) he produced for the Court, to the high-flying social critiques he wrote and staged for his Parisian audiences. We also explore Molière’s role in the social and political institution of the theater at a time when playwriting and acting were first codified and legitimized. We give particular attention, in this respect, to Molière’s relationship to the Sun King, Louis XIV, and to the ways in which the King’s patronage impacted Molière’s theater.

We also enquire into the history of early modern performance, studying both how Molière’s texts were pronounced and acted out, and how they might have been staged, in his time. Modern filmic reconstitutions, from Ariane Mnouchkine to Vincent Dumestre, serve as a point of departure for this investigation into the history of performance. Finally, we examine the canonization of Molière’s oeuvre, by studying examples of the publication of his works in modern times, as well as a selection of contemporary stagings, taken from the website of the French INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel).

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional Information:

No prior knowledge of early modern French literature is necessary. This course satisfies one “Literature/Genre” or one “Elective” course requirement in the French major; satisfies one Historical Period requirement in French major. Satisfies 1 course requirement in French minor.

Satisfies L & S breadth requirement in Arts and Literature or International Studies.

French Theater: From its Founding through the Theater of the Absurd
121B : Literary Themes, Genres, Structures
Fall 2019
S. Maslan
Readings/Films:

Readings include plays by Corneille, Racine, Molière, Marivaux, Beaumarchais, Anouilh, Beckett.

Course Description:

Theater differs from all other forms of literature. It emerges from words scratched on paper, but it exists as living speech, as bodily presence, as material spectacle, and as a shared sensorial and emotional experience. In this class, we will study French theater from its founding by the neo-classical dramatists Corneille, Molière, and Racine throughout the great eighteenth-century comic dramatists, and finish with plays from the 1930s and the post-war period that took up the existential crises posed by fascism and war.

In addition to reading plays, we will study theaters as physical, built structures that create relations among actors and audience members. We will consider modes of acting as well as the status of actors and of theater troupes. We will ponder the nature of dramatic authorship: are plays necessarily understood as collaborative, or should we focus on the individual creation of the dramatic author? Themes will include relations among the family, power, and the state; gender, sexuality and the stage; the representable and the unrepresentable — can violence, can religion, be represented on the French stage?

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional information:

Satisfies 1 “Literature/Genre” or one “Elective” requirement in the French major. Satisfies course requirement in French Minor. This course also satisfies 1 Historical Period Requirement in the French major.

Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature or International Studies.

Francophone Crime Fiction
141 : French Studies in International Context
Fall 2019
K. Britto
Readings/Films:

Authors considered will include Ousmane Sembène, Driss Chraïbi, Patrick Chamoiseau, Didier Daeninckx, Yasmina Khadra, and Alain Mabanckou. Readings and discussions in English.

Class Description:

In recent decades, many postcolonial authors writing in French have produced novels that engage with a variety of sub-genres within the field of crime fiction, including the “hardboiled” detective novel, the roman noir, and the serial killer novel. What might account for this literary turn toward the dystopian, toward texts constructed around mysteries and often marked by shocking descriptions of extreme violence? In what ways do the genres of crime fiction allow writers to engage with long and complex colonial and post-colonial histories, and to address issues of social, political, and economic injustice? How do postcolonial writers push the generic boundaries of crime fiction, and to what ends? In this class, we will discuss these questions through a consideration of a variety of novels and films with links to France, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean. A comparative approach will allow us to understand postcolonial texts alongside and against earlier narratives of crime.

Additional Information:

All reading, writing and discussion are in English. This course satisfies “Outside Elective” course requirement in the French major. This course satisfies requirements for the French Minor by exception, Fall 2019.

This course also satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature or International Studies.

Introduction to French Linguistics
146A
Fall 2019
M. McLaughlin
Readings:

There are no required texts, only the following recommended texts.

Ayres-Bennett, Wendy and Janice Carruthers with Rosalind Temple (2001) Problems and Perspectives: Studies in the Modern French Language, Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.
Battye, Adrian, Marie-Anne Hintze and Paul Rowlett (2000) The French Language Today: A Linguistic Introduction, London – New York: Routledge.
Fagyal, Zsuzsanna, Douglas Kibbee and Fred Jenkins (2006) French: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Léon, Pierre et Parth Bhatt (2005) Structure du français moderne: introduction à l’analyse linguistique, Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc.
Walter, Henriette (1988) Le français dans tous les sens, Paris: Robert Laffont.
Class Description:

This course provides an introduction to the linguistic analysis of Modern French. You will develop the basic skills of linguistic analysis in order to understand how the French language works. We consider four different levels: the phonology (sounds), the morphology (internal structure of words), the syntax (ordering of elements within the phrase) and the lexis (vocabulary). The course places considerable emphasis not just on the system but also on places where there is variation: we will consider, for example, why the negative particle ne is often dropped in spoken French, why some speakers use on instead of nous and how speakers decide between tu and vous in a given context. We use real linguistic data as much as possible, so you will find yourself analyzing transcripts of conversations, excerpts from films or short scientific texts.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional Information:

This course satisfies 1 “Culture” or 1 “Elective” requirement in the French major. Satisfies 1 required course for the French minor. By exception, Fall 2019: Satisfies Phonetics requirement in French major.

Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Social and Behavioral Sciences or International Studies.

Introduction to French Cinema
170 : French Films
Fall 2019
M. Sidhu
Readings:

Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, Histoire du cinéma français, 3e édition (Armand Colin)

Course Description:

This class explores the rich history of French cinema in terms of larger issues in French culture, society, and politics. We will examine some of the major movements in French film style from poetic realism to the Nouvelle Vague. We will also read works of French film theory, which ask how film is a distinctive medium of expression and can take up issues of gender, class, and race.

In addition to considerations of film history and theory, this class provides an introduction to the study of the moving image. We will learn how to analyze a film closely through examining how image, sound, and editing work together to produce meaning. This course is a prerequisite for French 177 and 178, though students who have taken French 177 or 178 may take this course.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or consent of instructor. Film Studies students should consult the instructor about French language preparation and prerequisites.

Additional information:

Satisfies one “Culture” or one “Elective” course requirement in the French Major. Satisfies one course in the French Minor. Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature or International Studies. There will be occasional mandatory on-site film screenings Wednesdays 4-6 in some weeks, with streaming options available in other weeks.

The French Court under Louis XIV: Myths, Realities, Representations
171B : A Concept in French Cultural History
Fall 2019
D. Blocker
Readings/Films:

Texts : Mme de Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves ; Molière, George Dandin ; Jean-Baptiste Lully and Philippe Quinault, Cadmus & Hermione, Jean Racine, Esther ; Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (excerpts); Jean de La Fontaine, Fables (excerpts).
Films : Roberto Rosellini, La Prise du pouvoir par Louis XIV (1966) ; Patricia Mazui, Saint-Cyr (2000) ; Cadmus & Hermione, by Vincent Dumestre and the Poème Harmonique, Alpha (2008).

Course Description:

Today, popular culture sometimes fantasizes over the intricacies of court rituals or marvels over the lavishness of court festivities. There is also much fascination for the amorous intrigues believed to have taken place in Versailles. The reign of Louis XIV, during which the French court became a way for the King to better establish his authority over his nobility, while publicizing his power across France and beyond, is even often portrayed as the political high point of the Old Régime. Yet many courtiers did not see things this way under Louis XIV. Rather, they viewed the court as a dangerous place, where their fortunes could be done and undone in an instant. They also denounced the court as morally corrupt, and even suggested that it encouraged a form of monarchical government which threatened their freedoms, just as much as the welfare of their country.

This class explores the French court under Louis XIV by confronting historical documents and a number of the most famous literary representations of the court produced in the 17th century with the writings of today’s historians of court culture. We also analyze the representations of the court articulated in three cinematic productions, one of them being a historical reconstruction of a 17th century performance. The class aims to better understand the social and political practices, as well the spiritual beliefs and aesthetic values, which characterized court life, while also inquiring into the various ways in which court culture has been accounted for since the 17th century.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or consent of instructor.

Additional information:

This course satisfies one “Culture” or one “Elective” requirement in the French major. Course also satisfies one Historical Period Requirement in French Major. Satisfies one course requirement in French minor.

Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Social and Behavioral Sciences or Historical Studies or International Studies.

The Contemporary "Banlieues" in Literature and Film
180D : French Civilization
Fall 2019
E. Colon
Readings/Films:

Eugène Atget, Album zonier

Blaise Cendrars et Robert Doisneau, La banlieue de Paris

Jean-Luc Godard, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle

Mathieu Kassovitz, La Haine

Yamina Benguigui, 9/3 Mémoire d’un territoire

Marie NDiaye, Rosie Carpe

Faïza Guène, Kiffe kiffe demain

Philippe Vasset, Un livre blanc

Céline Sciamma, Bande de filles

Course Description:

In this course, we will focus on French contemporary culture from the vantage point of the Parisian “banlieues,” the spaces of social marginalization and creativity surrounding the historical city-center. Drawing on critical discourses ranging from sociology to architecture, space theory, postcolonial studies and political theory, we will study literary texts, films and photographic works representing the banlieues to investigate a set of complex transitions and phenomena that participate in shaping the French social landscape today. How, indeed, can literature and film help us critically investigate, among other critical issues, the different and sometimes clashing layers of history traversing the banlieues (including the memories of industrial labor, of colonialism, of migrations); the encounter of the relationships between city-planning, governance, and social unrest; the inscription, onto space, of notions of belonging, citizenship and democracy; the impact of race and gender on movements in space and between spaces? These questions will guide our exploration of the creative gestures, political and aesthetic, that have emerged in the banlieues in the last few decades. Students will be introduced to key notions in literary and film analysis, while being encouraged to relate their analysis of cultural objects to the social history of the banlieues.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or consent of instructor.

Additional Information:

Satisfies 1 “Culture” or 1 “Elective” requirement in the French major. Satisfies one course requirement in the French minor. Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature, or Historical Studies, or Social and Behavioral Sciences, or International Studies.

Perception of Islam in Contemporary France
183A : Configurations of Crisis
Fall 2019
S. Tlatli
Readings/Films:

Un “reader” est disponible à “Copy Central”

Course Description:

Dans ce cours nous explorerons le rôle de la religion et surtout de l’Islam dans la France contemporaine. Nous analyserons cette question en relation avec la question de l’identité nationale. Peut-on, dans la France contemporaine, être à la fois citoyen français et musulman? A partir de cette question fondamentale, nous discuterons de diverses exemples extraits de l’actualité française: Quel est le rôle de la religion dans la société française contemporaine qui se présente comme laïque? Quelle part constituent la guerre en Syrie et la radicalisation islamique, dans la perception française de la population musulmane? Quel a été l’impact des attaques terroristes de 2015 sur le débat idéologique et politique? Telles sont certaines des questions dont nous débattrons, en nous fondant sur des évènements historiques précis, mais aussi sur des analyses sociologiques, politiques et littéraires.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or consent of instructor.

Additional information:

This course satisfies 1 “Culture” or 1 “Elective” course requirement in the French major. Satisfies one course requirement in French minor. This course also satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Social and Behavioral Sciences or Historical Studies or International Studies.

Graduate Courses

Proseminar
200
Fall 2019
D. Sanyal
Course Description:

This course gives new graduate students a broad view of the French Department faculty, the courses they teach, and their fields of research. In addition, it will introduce students to some practical aspects of their graduate career, issues that pertain to specific fields of research, and questions currently being debated across the profession. All French Department graduate students are welcome to those meetings devoted to more general practical and intellectual topics. 1 unit.

Additional Information:

Course enrollment limited to new graduate students in French.

Translation Theory and Practice
205
Fall 2019
M. McLaughlin
Readings:

Required:

Venuti, Lawrence (ed.) (2017) Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogies, London – New York: Routledge.

Recommended:

Baker, Mona (2018) In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation, 3rd edn, London – New York: Routledge.

Hervey, Sándor and Ian Higgins (2002) Thinking French Translation, 2nd edn, London – New York: Routledge.

Munday, Jeremy (2016) Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications, 4th edn, London – New York: Routledge.

Course Description:

The aim of this seminar is to develop the materials for a set of courses on translation that will serve either as a summer minor in translation or as a graduate certificate in translation. It is anticipated that these courses will be taught in future summers at UC Berkeley. We will source and read materials for courses on Translation Theory, Translation Practice, and a Language-Specific Translation Practicum. You will also have the chance to work on developing elective courses in other areas such as Literary Translation, Community Interpreting, Machine Translation etc. This is not a standard research seminar. Instead, it will prepare you very directly to develop and teach courses in translation, an area that is notoriously under-served in institutions of higher education in North America.

Additional Information:

No knowledge of French is needed for this seminar, but you do need advanced knowledge of at least one language other than English. You do not need any prior training in translation.

Language and Technology
206
Fall 2019
R. Kern
Readings:

Richard Kern, Language, Literacy, and Technology (2019 paperback edition) ISBN-13: 978-1107642850

Barton, D., & Lee, C. (2013). Language Online: Investigating Digital Texts and Practices. New York: Routledge. ISBN-13: 978-0415524940

Course Description:

This seminar will explore language as an adaptive cultural practice, focusing on how language forms and use interact with various technological mediations. We will focus on what is currently happening with digitally-mediated language use, but will do so within an historical perspective, starting with the origins of writing. We will organize our exploration around three themes:

1) Language and technological change: How have the constraints and resources of various media over the history of writing (e.g., clay, stone, papyrus, print, electronic displays) interacted with language forms and language use?

2) Reading, writing, and technological change: How have material technologies of writing and social practices of literacy co-evolved historically? How does the emergence of new discourse practices and new genres in digitally-mediated communication affect our print-era definitions of reading and writing?

3) Education in an electronic age: In the context of digital media, what new interpretation/authoring practices develop, and how do people learn them? How are people socialized into electronic literacy practices and communities? What are the implications for the way knowledge is acquired, shared, and assessed?

Reading and Interpretation of Old French Texts
211A
Fall 2019
D. Hult
Readings:

La Chanson de Roland, ed. I. Short; Lais de Marie de France, ed. Harf-Lancner (ISBN 978-2-253-05271-X); Chrétien de Troyes; Tristan et Iseut, ed. P. Walter; Kibler, Introduction to Old French

Course Description:

Introduction to the study of medieval French language and literature of the 12th and 13th centuries. Through a careful analysis and critical interpretation of certain canonical works (La Chanson de Roland; Béroul and Thomas, Tristan; selected lais of Marie de France; selected romans of Chrétien de Troyes; Le Roman de la Rose) we will study Old French language and some main dialects; verse and prose composition; theories of the oral tradition; editorial problems; and the material aspects of the manuscript work (including some work on codicology and paleography). Class will be conducted in English.

The Nineteenth Century and Ways of Reading: Literature, Social History, Hermeneutics
250B : Nineteenth Century Literature
Fall 2019
M. Lucey
Readings:

Balzac, Le cousin Pons; Barbey d’Aurevilly, “La vengeance d’une femme”; Baudelaire, selected poems; Desbordes-Valmore, selected poems; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Sand, Le compagnon du tour de France, Zola, Le ventre de Paris

Course Description:

Pierre Bourdieu once commented that “the physical object that a book is only turns into a social object when it meets its other half, the incorporated half that is the reader or, more exactly, the social subject or the social agent endowed with the dispositions that prompt them to read and that give them the capacity to decipher it.” In this seminar we will be interested both in works as social objects and in the different capacities to decipher them that have developed over time (and that we are developing in ourselves). To that end, we will accompany our reading of nineteenth-century literary texts with a reading of thinkers who write critically about different kinds of interpretative acts (hermeneutical, anti-hermeneutical, and other) and about their histories. (Critical readings by Auerbach, Bourdieu, Chambers, Chartier, Jameson, Johnson, Lukács, Lyon-Caen, Rancière, Skinner, and others.)

Arts of the Self
265B : Modern Studies
Fall 2019
D. Young
Readings/Films:

See Description.

Course Description:

What is it to have (or be) a self? How do different media technologies (writing, photography, digital media) generate different forms of selfhood? Is what Freud called the “bodily ego” differently oriented in relation to its written and photographic supports? In the era of networks, algorithms, cognitive behavioral therapy, neuroscience, and neoliberal economics, what is left of the opaque and displaced self described by psychoanalysis?

In this course we will examine several historically-situated paradigms of selfhood, also asking how the experience of having a self gives rise to artistic practices in different media. We will read Foucault’s late seminars on governmentality and technologies of the self from antiquity to modernity, as well as Freud (The Ego and the Id) and some of his French commentators. We will then turn to recent work in continental philosophy and science studies on the brain, cognition, and neuroscience, as well as digital media theory (works by Catherine Malabou, Katherine Hayles, Steven Shaviro, Wendy Chun, Mark Hansen). Alongside this theoretical investigation, we will consider the aesthetic investigations of selfhood by authors, artists, and film-makers that might include Agnès Varda, Orlan, Sophie Calle, Roland Barthes, Ming Wong, Tracey Moffatt, Adrian Piper, Narcissister, Cindy Sherman, Lyle Ashton Harris, Ryan Trecartin, and Paul Preciado.

Additional Information:

Class discussions in English; all readings available in translation. Priority enrollment for students in doctoral degree programs.

Teaching French in College: First Year
301
Fall 2019
S. Chavdarian
Course Description:

This course (1) provides participants with an understanding of basic principles of first- and second-language acquisition and the theoretical underpinnings of commonly used language teaching methods, and (2) offers inservice training in teaching, in creating and adapting instructional materials, and in designing tests for use in the Lower Division Program in French. The two-hour weekly meetings consist of a one hour lecture/discussion and a one hour practicum. GSIs are also required to attend a pilot class, taught by Seda Chavdarian, on select dates and as indicated on the lesson plans. Enrollment in this course is required for GSIs in their first semester of teaching in the French Department.

Additional information:

Attendance at the appropriate session (301 for French 1; 302 for French 2) is required of all instructors teaching French 1 and 2 for the first time. GSIs are also required to attend a pilot class, taught by Seda Chavdarian, on select dates and as indicated on the lesson plans.