Spring 2017

Reading and Composition (R&C)

Love, Friendship and the Political
R1A (Section 1) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation

Spring 2017
Class No: 15270
Instructor: Instructor: T. Sanders

I. REQUIRED TEXTS:

Writing Analytically, David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen

The Princesse of Cleves, Madame de Lafayette

Letters from a Peruvian Woman, Françoise de Graffigny

The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Course reader:

The Symposium (excerpts), Plato

The Nicomachean Ethics (excerpts), Aristotle

Antigone, Sophocles

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (excepts), Rousseau

On Democracy in America (excerpts) Tocqueville

Aurélia, Nerval

II. COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Love and friendship seem so personal and intimate, but how can they be understood as political concepts? Can love or friendship establish political community? In what ways is love in particular viewed as a creative or destructive force? And does it produce and maintain social inequality? And how do our very notions of love and friendship structure our reflection on political concerns? In this course, we will read texts that explore these questions and others. We will also examine the ways in which literary texts confront political concerns through stories of love and friendship.

This course is an R1A, the first part of two courses intended to introduce students to literary analysis, critical reading, and analytical writing. Writing assignments will include posting to bCourses and formulating discussion questions as well as brainstorming, peer-editing, drafting, revising, and re-writing formal essays.

Additional Information:

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

Movin' On Up / Falling (Back) Into Place -- Social Mobility and the Figure of the Parvenue -- Glass Ceiling Edition

R1B (Section 3) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation

Spring 2017
Class No: 15275
Instructor: Z. Burris

I. REQUIRED TEXTS/FILMS:

Flaubert, Madame Bovary. 1856

Méliès, Cinderella (film). 1899

Renoir, Nana (film). 1926

Schumer, “On Being New Money.” 2016

Shaw, Pygmalion. 1913

Thackeray, Vanity Fair. 1847

Zola, Nana (excerpts). 1880

II. COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Literature has long been a space within which an author can examine dynamics of social class and upward mobility. From rags-to-riches fairy tales, through the twists and turns on the road to self-discovery in the picaresque or bildungsroman, to modern novels, plays, and screens big and small, readers (/viewers) have been exposed to countless figures – likeable, detestable, inspirational, successful or ultimately doomed – who have suggested that it is possible to come from nothing and yet reach dizzying heights.

The texts examined in this course will show that the processes of climbing the social ladder are, in fact, much more complicated than a mere act of will suggested by the American adage of “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.” Many of the characters in the works we will read will be familiar to students, as they have come to represent (perhaps because of their appearance in famous works by famous authors, those “classics” of Western Literature) the social success that can be achieved through talent, hard work, networking, deception, dreaming, and scheming. From Cinderella to Becky Sharp, from Julien Sorel to Jay Gatsby to the Rastignac who to this day lends his name to the French expression for an ambitious social climber, this course will examine (and revel in!) their dazzling triumphs on the social scene – and analyze their sometimes inevitable fall back into obscurity.

NOTE(!):

A VERSION OF THIS COURSE, WITH READINGS THAT ADDRESSED WORKS CENTERED ON MALE PROTAGONISTS, WAS GIVEN IN THE FRENCH DEPARTMENT AS AN R1A IN FALL 2016. THIS NEW, R1B OFFERING IS BEING PROPOSED AS A COMPLIMENT TO THE EARLIER COURSE : THIS SPRING, STUDENTS WILL HAVE THE PLEASURE OF FOLLOWING THE RISE OF INTELLIGENT, SELF-ASSURED (OR SCHEMING AND MANIPULITAVE?!) FEMALE CHARACTERS…

This class will introduce students to approaching textual material critically, and will stress the idea of writing as a process through a variety of assignments and revisions geared to guide the development and clear expression of coherent argumentation.

Additional information:

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

Museums and Elsewhere
R1B (Section 4) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation

Spring 2017
Class No: 15276
Instructor: M. Evans

Museums and Elsewhere; Collections, Exhibitions, and Public Space in French Film and Literature.

“It belongs in a museum!” – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, dir. Steven Spielberg

“I don’t like museums much,” wrote the French poet Paul Valéry in 1923, “There are some admirable ones, but none is delightful…a strange organized disorder spreads out before me. I am seized by a holy dread. My gait becomes religious. Soon I no longer know what I came to do in this waxen solitude, redolent of the temple and the salon, the cemetery and school…all this is inhuman.” Not every poet shares Valéry’s visceral reaction to the museum space; but he’s one of many modern authors who’ve had something to say about these institutions. This course will focus on the way museums and collections have been and continue to be represented in literary and cinematic texts throughout the twentieth century and the manners in which authors, filmmakers, and artists adopt or resist the ways how memories, histories, and aesthetic attachments get whirled up in the politics and socialites of museums. We read a variety of different authors (predominately French and Francophone) to approach the question of how the arrangement of objects (be the natural or cultural) within the interior museum spaces changes or challenges the ways authors relate to the world outside.

In addition to literary and film screenings, the course will take an introductory approach to research in Museum Studies, an interdisciplinary field of research that illuminates the historical, political and aesthetic problems posed by the rather modern practice of collecting objects in public and private institutions. Students should expect to engage with questions concerning the accessibility of museum collections, curatorial practices, and the troubling role European colonial history has had in the institutional history of the museum, modern and otherwise. These critical readings will be designed to give us of I sense of the overarching interdisciplinary conversations we can bring to bear on our primary readings.

Once we establish a suitable day and time, students should also be ready to attend three field trips in addition to regular class meetings. We shall visit BAM, the Lawrence Hall of Sciences, and the Berkeley Botanical Gardens.

A course reader will be available by the beginning of the semester and students should expect to purchase 3-4 books available at University Press Books on Bancroft Avenue. Authors and texts will included: Chris Marker’s Les Statues meurent aussi, Maguerite Duras & Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, Georges Perec’s Ellis Island, Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, Proust, Colette, Varda. All reading, writing, and discussion will be done in English.

Additional information:

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

French Perspectives on the United States, Encounters in Literature, Philosophy and Film
R1B (Section 1 or 2) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation

Spring 2017
Class No: 15273, 15274
Instructor: M. Koerner

I. REQUIRED TEXTS:

Simone de Beauvoir, America Day By Day

Jean Baudrillard, America

Course Reader

III. COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Seeing New York, perceiving again suddenly this vivid contrast that exists everywhere but which was blotted out of my eyes by familiar forms of it, that was for me a kind of second revelation; the class struggle still exists, it exists more intensely.

– Michel Foucault 1971

This reading and composition course focuses on the relationship between French and American culture through a survey of nineteenth and twentieth-century French writers and filmmakers who have made this relationship a central theme of their work. Over the course of the semester, we will analyze texts written by French writers travelling in the United States, short critical essays and works of literary criticism, as well as documentaries and feature films. How have ideas about “America” and “American Literature” circulated, both positively and negatively, among French thinkers, social critics and artists? How has the notion of the “American Dream” as well as that of the “American Nightmare” been interpreted from afar? In exploring the relationship between France and the United States, we will pay special attention to issues of class, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality in order to better inform our understanding of the way American culture has appeared within French thought.

Writing assignments will focus on the close analysis of texts and images, strengthening critical skills for thinking comparatively and historically, and producing compelling research questions for further inquiry and investigation. In addition to in-class writing exercises students should expect to write three short response essays (2-3 pages), an extended analysis of one literary text or film (4-5 pages), and a final research paper (8-10 pages).

Texts and films to be studied include:

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (excerpts); Charles Baudelaire, New Notes on Edgar Poe; Simone de Beauvoir, America Day By Day; Jean-Luc Godard, Made in the U.S.A.; Agnes Varda, Black Panthers; Michel Foucault, “Attica;” The Prison Information Group, Intolérable (excerpts); Jean Genet Declared Enemy (excerpts); Gilles Deleuze, “Whitman;” Jean Baudrillard, America

Additional information:

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

Upper-Division Courses 

Writing in French, 3 sections
102

Spring 2017
Class No: 15307, 15308, 15309
Instructor: N. Timmons; D. Blocker; R. Shuh

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:

Completion of French 4 at Berkeley or the equivalent. Students who have taken the equivalent of a third-year college level French course elsewhere may also enroll in French 102; Additional placement questions may be directed to the course instructor.

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.

Discourses of Love in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
103B : Language and Culture

Spring 2017
Class No: 15310
Instructor: D. Hult

Readings:

Readings will include a series of brief narrative texts from the Middle Ages (lais of Marie de France, fabliaux [comic tales, often quite ribald], various novellas and short stories, and dialogued works such as Alain Chartier’s Belle Dame sans Mercy), as well as two early modern novels, the Lettres portugaises and Prévost’s Manon Lescaut.

Course Description:

Since the beginnings of French literature, authors and poets have been fascinated by the human and spiritual dimensions of love, sometimes conflicting relations between emotional attachment and carnality, between human love and love of God, between private desires and the constraints of society, between fidelity in marriage and the temptations of adultery. Through reading and discussion of a broad variety of works extending from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, we will attempt to sort out some of the major aspects of this seemingly inexhaustible theme while at the same time seeing how different eras and authors diverged in their treatment of it.

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:

Knowledge of Old French not required; readings in modern French translation. This course satisfies 1 French Major course requirement in the “Elective” category. This course also satisfies 1 Historical Period Requirement in the French major. Priority enrollment for declared French majors. Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature.

Molière
117A : Seventeenth-Century Literature

Spring 2017
Class No: 15312
Instructor: N. Paige

Readings:

Les Précieuses ridicules

Tartuffe

Le Misanthrope

Dom Juan

Le Bourgeois gentilhomme

L’Avare

Course Description:

The career of Molière, the inventor of modern character-based comedy, is as fascinating from a cultural point of view as it is from a literary one. Born into a prosperous bourgeois family, Molière left the well-trodden path to respectability for the uncertain prospects of the stage—only to become one of the very top playwrights of his day, cannily marketing both his image and that of Louis XIV. This class will provide an introduction to some of his masterpieces, both from a generic point of view (how does Molière manipulate and transform the conventions of comedy?) and in the context of his professional life (how do his comedies cultivate the audiences responsible for Molière’s livelihood?). A number of films connected with Molière’s life and work will supplement the reading of plays and secondary material.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional Information:

This course satisfies one “Literature/Genre” or one “Elective” course requirement in the French major; satisfies one Historical Period requirement in French major. Satisfies L & S breadth requirement in Arts and Literature. Priority enrollment for declared French majors.

Ecrire “l’histoire du présent”: Balzac
119A : Nineteenth-Century Literature

Spring 2017
Class No: 31512
Instructor: S. Guerlac

Readings:

Lectures: plusieurs récits de Balzac tels que “La Femme Abandonnée,” La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote, Le Colonel Chabert, “Le Bal de Sceaux,” “Sarrasine,” La Peau de Chagrin et quelques essais critiques de Roland Barthes, “L’effet de réel”, S/Z.

Course Description:

Balzac se donne la tâche de faire l’histoire de son époque à travers la fiction, dans l’oeuvre monumentale qu’il appelle, faisant allusion à Dante, La Comédie Humaine. Selon lui, ce qui importe pour faire l’histoire de manière authentique c’est “l’étude des moeurs” et l’analyse des “types” sociaux.

Dans ce cours nous allons lire Balzac en examinant le rapport dialectique entre l’histoire et la fiction à`cette période critique de l’histoire qui voit la montée de la classe bourgeoise. (il s’agit de l’Empire , de la Restauration et de la Monarchie de Juillet). Est-ce que les fictions sont à l’oeuvre dans l’histoire? Est-ce que la fiction peut nous offrir une perspective historique plus “vraie,” ou plus authentique, que l’histoire proprement dite? Des perspectives “historiques” vont enrichir notre étude des textes littéraires de Balzac qui interrogera aussi ce que les fictions de Balzac, peuvent contribuer à notre appréciation de cetter période historique . En faisant l’analyse de la notion de “type “ nous aborderons aussi l’idée de la caricature, et les oeuvres de l’artiste Daumier.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional Information:

This course satisfies one “Literature/Genre” or one “Elective” course requirement in the French major; Satisfies L & S breadth requirement in Arts and Literature. Priority enrollment for declared French majors.

Wars, Revolts, Literatures. "Minuit" in the 20th Century
120B : Twentieth-Century Literature

Spring 2017
Class No: 31513
Instructor: E. Colon

Readings:

Vercors, Le silence de la mer (1942)

Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot (1952)

Henri Alleg, La question (1958)

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (1963)

Monique Wittig, Les guerillères (1969)

Robert Linhart, L’établi (1978)

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, La salle de bain (1985)

Antoine Volodine, Le nom des singes (1994)

Marie NDiaye, Papa doit manger (2003)

Course Description:

This course will explore the relationships between aesthetic innovations and political writing from the 1940s onwards. Throughout the course of the semester, we will read literary works (novels, narratives, theater plays) by some of the most important French writers of the 20th and 21st century, watch a few film excerpts, and bring these novels and films into dialogue with the main artistic movements and political conflicts that have shaped the second part of the century, in particular WW2 and its aftermaths, the Algerian War and May ‘68.

We will mainly focus on writers published by Les Éditions de Minuit, between the 1940s and 2012, using this famous publishing house as a guide through the history of the 20th century. We will start when “Minuit” was clandestinely founded, in 1941, in the midst of the Resistance. We will read the first novel Minuit ever published (Vercors’s Le silence de la mer, later adapted for film by Melville), and follow the publishing house through its golden age—the 1950s, when its director Jérôme Lindon started publishing Beckett’s “absurdist theater” and the “nouveaux romanciers” (Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Duras). We will then move to the 1960s and the 1970s—a time of social transformations in France and for Minuit—and read novels and “documents” that directly engaged with the political events and issues of their time, such as torture during the Algerian war (Alleg), the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (Wittig) and radical leftist militanism (Linhart).

We will end with contemporary novels and plays written by the most recent generation of “Minuit authors” and writers who at some point transited through by Minuit (Echenoz, Toussaint, Volodine, NDiaye) and consider what becomes of formal innovation, anti-imperialist struggles and political writing when wars, revolutions and vanguard movements have seemingly disappeared altogether from the French contemporary landscape.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or consent of Instructor.

Additional Information:

This course satisfies 1 “Literature/Genre” or 1 “Elective” course requirement in the French major. Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature; Priority enrollment for declared French majors.

Flaubert's Modernity Then and Now
126 : Senior Seminar

Spring 2017
Class No: 31514
Instructor: D. Sanyal

Readings:

Madame Bovary, L’Education Sentimentale, Salammbô, Trois contes, Bouvard et Pécuchet, Le Dictionnaire des idées recues

Course Description:

In this seminar, we will read the works of classic 19th-century French author Gustave Flaubert. We will attempt to grasp what was considered ‘modern’ about Flaubert’s novels. Was it his innovative style, his experiments with form and perspective, his ambition to write un livre sur rien? Was it his ability to convey the unfulfillable desires of life in the modern city under capitalism (Madame Bovary was put on trial for obscenity)? To capture the disillusionment of a generation that lived through the 1848 revolution? To conjure the Orient as an escape from the banality of bourgeois existence? As we read deeply into this canonical oeuvre and situate it within its cultural setting, we will at the same time speculate on the ways in which Flaubert remains our contemporary in the 21st -century. With the help of theoretical writings on and around this monumental oeuvre, we will tease out the ways in which it illuminates the workings of subjectivity, ideology and violence in our own historical horizon.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional Information:

This course satisfies 1 “Literature/Genre” or 1 “Elective” course requirement in the French major. Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature. Senior standing recommended, but not required.

An Introduction to the Films of the French New Wave
140D : French Literature in English Translation

Spring 2017
Class No: 31515
Instructor: N. Paige

Readings:

A reader will include both classic essays from the period and modern historical and critical work.

Course Description:

Though by many accounts a mere four-year phenomenon, the French New Wave is arguably the most emblematic movement in the history of modern cinema, one that continues to inspire filmmakers from Los Angeles to Teheran to Hong Kong. This class provides a comprehensive overview of the movement and its major films, with attention to the cultural and theoretical factors that help explain this extraordinary flowering of filmmaking talent in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Lectures, in English, will cover topics such as: “cinephilia” and auteur theory; technological innovations and the transformation of urban experience; post-war social upheavals and the rise of consumerism; the “ontology” of the image and film as documentary; time, narrative, and the ideology of form. Movies screened will be subtitled and will include works by Truffaut, Godard, Varda, Demy, Rohmer, Eustache, and others. Readings will include classic essays from the priod as well as modern historical and critical work. Please note that except for students with a demonstrated schedule conflict, the weekly group screenings are mandatory.

Prerequisites:

Open to all students. Course taught in English.

Additional information:

No knowledge of French is required. All lectures and discussions in English. This course satisfies 1 “Elective” course requirement in the French major if written work is done in French. If written work is done in English, this course can satisfy 1 “Outside Elective” course requirement in the French major, with prior approval of French Undergraduate Major Adviser.

Satisfies the College of Letters and Science breadth requirement in Arts & Literature.

Students wishing to take this course to satisfy major requirements in the English or Film major should consult with their undergraduate major adviser.

mandatory weekly screenings — day and time TBA

Portraying Women During Colonial Times
151B : Francophone Literature

Spring 2017
Class No: 31516
Instructor: S. Tlatli

Required texts:

Reader

Course Description:

Dans ce cours, nous nous interrogerons sur le rôle essentiel des femmes pendant la colonisation française selon une double perspective: littéraire et cinématographique. Nous insisterons en particulier sur la manière dont la femme devient un enjeu important de la colonisation et de la décolonisation à partir du texte de Fanon “L’Algérie se dévoile”. Nous analyserons ensuite l’imaginaire de la femme coloniale à travers les essais et les récits de Fatima Mernissi, Assia djebar et Leila Sebbar. Nous nous attacherons également à la manière dont la participation des femmes a éte perçue dans le cinéma et les arts visuels à partir d’une discussion du texte de Malek Alloula: “Le harem colonial”, ainsi que des films suivants: “La Bataille d’Alger” de Pontecorvo, “Chronique des années de braise” de Lakhdar Hamina, “La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua” d’Assia djebar et les “Silences du Palais” de Moufida Tlatli.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional Information:

Satisfies one “Culture” or one “Elective” course requirement in the French Major. Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth requirement in Arts and Literature. Priority enrollment for declared French majors.

Revolution and Terror (1793-1794)
161B : A Year in French History

Spring 2017
Class No: 31517
Instructor: S. Maslan

Readings:

Course Description:

For many of us, the grisly image of the guillotine stands for the French Revolution itself. But the guillotine cannot begin to answer the question “what was so revolutionary about the French Revolution?” Why do so many historians consider the French Revolution to be the decisive rupture with the past and the origin of our political present? The French Revolution was the first time that ordinary people played a central role on the stage of history. We will study the Revolution’s upending of political structures (the end of the monarchy and the creation of the first modern mass Republic) as well as its invention of new cultural and social forms. We will study the Revolution’s effects on the family, religion, art, and even on language. We will try to understand what the Terror was through our study of primary texts, images, and secondary readings.

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 College of Letters and Science breadth in Social and Behavioral Sciences or Historical Studies. Priority enrollment for declared French majors.

Slavery and Colonialism in the French Eighteenth Century
171B : A Concept in French Cultural History

Spring 2017
Class No: 31518
Instructor: S. Maslan

Readings:

Readings will include: Prévost, L’Histoire d’une grecque moderne; Voltaire, Le Dictionnaire philosophique; Voltaire, Candide; Raynal, L’Histoire politique et philosophique des deux Indes; Chamfort, Le Marchand de Smyrne; Diderot, Le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, Duras, Ourika.

Course Description:

The eighteenth century, the era that produced the French and the American Revolutions, was an age of global commerce and exchange. Much of that commerce centered on the slave trade and the new world colonies. This course will study fictional and non-fictional texts that represented and examined the practices and meanings of slavery and colonialism. We will study the way French writers explored the moral, political, emotional, ethical, and economic conflicts slavery and colonialism produced. We will trace the ways in which literary texts sought to convey the “otherness” of the subjects of slavery and colonialism and the literary consequences of such representations. We will also read letters and memoirs of those who participated in or witnessed French colonial and slave societies.

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 College of Letters and Science breadth in Social and Behavioral Sciences or Historical Studies. Priority enrollment for declared French majors.

Women Directors
178B : Studies in French Film

Spring 2017
Class No: 31519
Instructor: D. Young

Readings/Films:

See Description. Alongside a weekly film screening, we will read works of literature, film theory, and feminist theory.

Course Description:

The history of cinema is usually narrated as a history of Great Men — from the Lumière brothers to Jean-Luc Godard to Quentin Tarantino. But some of the most original and enduring works of French-language cinema have been authored by women. In this course, we will study films from various times and locations by Germaine Dulac, Agnès Varda, Claire Denis, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Catherine Breillat, Céline Sciamma, Faiza Ambah, and others, examining their distinctive contributions to the aesthetics and politics of cinema. These films offer a point of entry to a range of topics of contemporary interest — including gender relations, the family, sexuality, historical memory, colonialism, and religion — and span genres from experimental, to documentary, to narrative fiction. Alongside these topics, we will ask: in a collaborative medium like the cinema, what is an author? Is the so-called politique des auteurs (“auteur theory”) that has come to dominate accounts of French film history inherently masculinist? Is “women’s cinema” a coherent category, or do differences of gender and sexuality, as well as race, religion and culture present a challenge to even its strategic mobilization? Alongside a weekly film screening, we will read works of literature, film theory, and feminist theory. Taught in French, though non-French majors may be able to submit written work in English (consult with instructor).

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent; French 170 or equivalent is recommended, or consent of instructor. Taught in French, though non-French majors may be able to submit written work in English (consult with instructor). Film studies students should consult with instructor about language prerequisites

Additional Information:

This course satisfies 1 “Culture” or 1 “Elective” course requirement in the French major. This course also satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature. Priority enrollment for declared French majors.

weekly screening: Thursdays, 5-7, 188 Dwinelle

The Modernity of "The Everyday"
180D : French Civilization

Spring 2017
Class No: 31521
Instructor: S. Guerlac

Readings:

Readings will include works by authors such as Guillaume Apolinaire, Francis Ponge, Raymond Queneau, Georges Pérec, Annie Ernaux, Marc Augé, François Maspéro, Sandrine Bessora, Henri Lefèvre, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, and Georges Bataille.

Course Description:

After centuries of concern with the heroic, the tragic, the exceptional, and of expecting art to transcend life, the modern period opens with a concern for evoking the richness of the Everyday and an attempt to make art and life converge. The poet Apollinaire gives us the sights and sounds of the big city. André Breton makes art of found objects. The poet Francis Ponge tries to put ordinary objects into words. This turns out to be more challenging than one might expect. The notion of the Everyday becomes a philosophical problem for some thinkers and a political issue for others. We will examine the problem of the Everyday (le quotidien) in the work of philosophers (Henri Lefèbvre, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot) historians (Michel de Certeau) and the pleasures of the ordinary and the everyday in the work of poets, writers, photographers (Atget in particular) and artists (Sophie Calle).

Prerequisites:

French 102 or consent of instructor.

Additional Information:

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

Graduate Courses

Late Medieval Fictions of Love
210A : Studies in Medieval Literature

Spring 2017
Class No: 31522
Instructor: D. Hult

Readings:

Readings will include: Guillaume de Lorris, Le Roman de la Rose; Richard de Fournival, Le Bestiaire d’Amour; Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre du Voir Dit; Alain Chartier, La Belle Dame sans Mercy; Christine de Pizan, Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame; René d’Anjou, Le Livre du Cœur d’Amour Épris.

Course Description:

This seminar will focus on the tradition(s) of love narrative in the later French Middle Ages beginning with two important thirteenth-century works that set the tone for centuries to come by inscribing the lyric tradition within romance narrative: Guillaume de Lorris’s enormously influential, fragmentary Roman de la Rose; and Richard de Fournival’s intriguing Bestiary of Love, which inscribes the love quest within the hitherto didactic genre of animal lore, the bestiary. The balance of the semester will be devoted to noted authors of the fourteenth and fifteenth cenuries, including Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Christine de Pizan, Alain Chartier, Charles d’Orléans, and René d’Anjou. Although previous knowledge of Old French is not required, inasmuch as most texts will be read in original language editions with facing-page modern French translation, class discussions will frequently focus on the original text. Topics of discussion will include the question of the first-person narrative voice, the relations between lyric and romance, song and book, evolving notions of authorship, and the rhetoric of courtly love.

Spirituality, Literature and Politics in Early Modern French (1550-1750)
245B : Early Modern Studies

Spring 2017
Class No: 31523
Instructor: D. Blocker

Readings:

Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les Tragiques (Misères et Jugement) ; Jean-Pierre Camus (a selection of his devotional short stories) ; Pierre Corneille, Polyeucte ; Molière, Tartuffe ; Pierre Nicole (Traité de la Comédie, excerpts), Blaise Pascal (excerpts of Les Provinciales and Les Pensées); Mme de La Fayette (La Princesse de Clèves), Jacques-Bégnine Bossuet (selected sermons), François Fénelon, Les Aventures de Télémaque and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, L’Émile (book IV).

Course Description:

In 1598, the Edict of Nantes puts an end to France’s wars of religion. In its wake, Catholicism is revivified, via the founding of a number of Counter-Reformation orders and movements, all competing to rekindle the Catholic faith. These attempts to re-evangelize France hinged on preaching, but were also increasingly dependent on printed works. They were aimed at a lay and even mundane readership, which was increasingly avid of literary works, such as plays, short stories and novels. This seminar examines how Counter-Reformation evangelism shaped France’s emerging literary market, studying how spirituality and literature were thereby configured as separate yet tightly connected practices. Many Counter-Reformation writers pointed to literature as mendacious and corruptive. Yet they exploited its rhetorical and poetical powers for their apologetic purposes, thus pioneering new forms of literature, both fictional and non-fictional. In a monarchy ruled by divine right, this interplay of literature and spirituality also worked to redefine the political contract, by creating a space to question and even redefine power itself.

We will read writers from a wide variety of religious and spiritual affiliations, including many of the most famous works of early modern French literature (please see above). We will also draw on a provocative body of interdisciplinary secondary works (Henri Brémond, Michel de Certeau, Louis Marin, Jacques Le Brun, etc). The class is taught in English and welcomes students from REMS and the Center on the History of Religion, as well as early modernists from all others departments in the humanities. Final papers can be turned in French or English.

Additional Information:

Texts will be discussed in class in their French originals, but most primary readings and many secondary readings can be done in English. If you would like to take this class but would need most readings to be in English please contact me by email at dblocker@berkeley.edu by January 3, 2017, so the necessary arrangements can be made.

Le Colonialisme -- Objet philisophique et littéraire
251 : Francophone Literature

Spring 2017
Class No: 15371
Instructor: S. Tlatli

Required Texts:

Reader

Course Description:

Dans ce séminaire, nos analyserons la manière dont le colonialisme a été pensé depuis Tocqueville jusqu’à Derrida. Nous analyserons la manière selon laquelle la nécessité de la colonisation, puis de la décolonisation, a été conceptualisée par des penseurs tels que Tocqueville, Sartre, Fanon, Lyotard et Derrida. Nous interrogerons en particulier ceci: en quoi, la question cruciale de la colonisation a-t-elle eu une influence conceptuelle sur la pensée politique de ces philosophes? Dans un deuxième temps, nous confronterons des écrits d’auteurs francophones, face aux questions posées par ces textes théoriques, en nous concentrant sur les textes de Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar et Nabile Farès en particulier.

Precarity and the (Post-)Modern City
265B : Modern Studies

Spring 2017
Class No: 31524
Instructor: E. Colon

Readings/Films:

The final list of literary texts and films will be announced soon. This list will most likely include a selection among the following writers and filmmakers such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Zola, Céline, Volodine and Razane for literature; Pialat, Pontecorvo, Godard, Mambéty, and Benguigui for film.

Course Description:

In this “Modern Studies” seminar, we will trace the genealogy of a seemingly contemporary question—that of urban precarity—from the vantage point of its literary and cinematic figurations. To elaborate such genealogy of our precarious present, we will study films and read literary texts written between the 1850s and the 2000s that allow us to comprehend the major landmarks in a spatial history of precarity. To articulate the relations these works create between their aesthetic logics and the social instabilities to which they give form, /we will place them in critical dialogue with analyses coming from a variety of other disciplines: urban theory and town planning (Le Corbusier, Lefebvre, Harvey, Wright), colonial and post-colonial studies (Fanon, Mbembe), sociology (Wacquant, Bourdieu), critical theory (Balibar, Rancière, Butler, Agamben) and theories of labor (Moullier-Boutang, Castel). Central to our materials and discussions will be the social and figurative tensions between Paris and “its” banlieues, from the 19th century to the present moment. We will notably study these tensions through the dis/continuities we can identify between the governmental production of French banlieues and the colonial city (especially Algiers) in the 19th century, which will lead us to interrogate the status of the contemporary peripheries vis-à-vis the history of colonialism. By articulating these spaces as “precarious” we will finally explore their most recent iterations and study the political potentials opened up in sites such as the “Zones à Défendre” and the refugee camps. Across the semester, we will conceptualize the notion of “precarious spaces” in its spatial, economic, temporal, (bio)political and ecological dimensions, while also taking it as a locus for the encounter between aesthetic practices and major events in the history of urban planning and social movements (from the Commune to the 2005 uprisings in the banlieues).

Additional Information:

This seminar will be taught in English. Readings will be in French.

Proust, Speech Act Theory, and Language-in-Use
275A : Problems of Literary Theory

Spring 2017
Class No: 31525
Instructor: M. Lucey

Readings:

Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu

Course Description:

We will read simultaneously, in somewhat experimental fashion, from three different currents of writing. First, we will read long sections from Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu (dipping into all seven volumes at one point or another). We will be focusing on sections of the novel that have to do with the exchange of language. Second, we will read widely in and around what is called “Speech Act Theory,” a current within philosophy that has also been taken up in literary and cultural studies. (Readings from some of the following: Austin, Grice, Searle, Quine, Putnam, Hornsby, Langton, Brandom, Butler, Sedgwick.) Finally, we will pursue a set of readings related to the concept of language-in-use as developed in present-day linguistic anthropology. This will include some precursor texts in literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology. (Readings from some of the following: Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Peirce, Goffman, Jakobson, Silverstein, Ochs, Agha.) There is, we will find, a productive friction between the way language and language use are viewed in speech act theory and in linguistic anthropology, and we will be exploring how that friction can help us to see ways in which a novel like Proust’s explores what language is, and what it does when we use it. This may lead us to some speculations about what kind of an analytic instrument a novel itself can prove to be when it comes to understanding language-in-use.

Additional Information:

It is desirable that participants be able to read Proust in the original French, but others with an interest in the topic may enroll in the seminar as space allows.

Teaching French in College: Advanced First Year
302

Spring 2017
Class No: 15408
Instructor: S. Chavdarian

Readings:
Kern, Literacy and Language Teaching — Applied Linguistics

Course Description:

Provides an understanding of the teaching methods used in French 2, to help instructors effectively implement techniques specifically designed for the French language classroom at Berkeley. This course provides a forum for discussing issues in language pedagogy, and experience in creating and adapting instructional materials and designing tests for use in the UC Berkeley French language program. GSIs are also required to attend a pilot class, taught by Seda Chavdarian, on select dates and as indicated on the lesson plans.

Prerequisites: French 301

Additional information: This course is required for all GSIs teaching French 2 for the first time in the Berkeley French Department. This course is offered in the Spring semester only.

Teaching in French, Advanced Level
303

Spring 2017
Class No: 15409
Instructor: V. Rodic

Readings:

Course Reader

Course Description
Provides an understanding of the teaching methods used in French 3 and 4, to help instructors effectively implement techniques specifically designed for the French language classroom at Berkeley. French 303 provides a forum for discussing issues in language pedagogy, and experience in creating and adapting instructional materials and designing tests for use in the UC Berkeley French language program. Also provides training in webdesign and preparation for the job market. One two-hour meeting per week.

Prerequisites: French 301 and 302.

Additional information: This course is required for all GSIs teaching French 3 or 4 for the first time in the Berkeley French Department.