Spring 2020

Reading and Composition (R&C)

On the Road: Quests, Trips, and Inner Journeys
R1A : English Composition through French Literature in Translation (Section 2)
Spring 2020
S. Rogghe
Readings:

Books:

Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica ISBN-13: 978-0140440850

Jack Kerouac, On the Road ISBN-13: 978-0143105466

Course Reader:

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (selections)
Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (selections)

Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (selections)

Baudelaire, “The Artificial Paradises”

Rimbaud, selected poems

Jim Morrison, Wilderness & The American Night (selections)

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Course Description:

From errant knights, visionary poets, and compulsive travelers to psychedelic rock musicians, this course will examine the phenomenon of “the journey” throughout various literary representations. More than a linear route from A to B, this course will focus on those journeys that have no set destination, those whose goal is perpetually just beyond reach, or those that wander to the “edge of the night.”

In the first part of the course, we will look at depictions of “The Hero’s Journey” in texts from Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the second part, we will read two novels, different in tone, that consider the journey’s transformative potential. In the last part of the course, we will look at inner journeys in relation to the notion of “Voyance,” first developed by the 19th-century visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud, and taken up by figures such as Jim Morrison and Aldous Huxley during the counterculture of the 1960s.

Through a close reading of texts ranging from Antiquity to the present, as well as by drawing parallels and making comparisons between these different texts, this course will sharpen critical reading skills as well as promote clear, argumentative writing. To this goal, there will be a variety of writing exercises and essays in response to the texts read.

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

Restless Souls
R1B : English Composition through French Literature in Translation (Section 2)
Spring 2020
T. Sanders

No homo: same-sex sexuality and identity
R1B : English Composition through French Literature in Translation (Section 3)
Spring 2020
T. Blakeney
Readings:

André Gide, The Immoralist

Jean Genet, Journal of a Thief

Hervé Guibert, The Compassion Protocol

Call Me By Your Name

Love, Simon

Social media posts (TikTok and YouTube)

Course Description:

In this course, we will explore forms of same-sex sexuality that do not fall easily under the banner of homosexual or gay identity. Recent years have seen claims of the “pansexual revolution” among millennials, according to which sexual identity categories have come to have less and less meaning. We will start in the current moment, and then go back in time to see the ways in which individuals with same-sex attraction have given a name to their sexuality in a way that does not always fit easily within the homo/hetero binary. The texts we read will be varied, from social media and films to novels and poetry.

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

The City
R1A : English Composition through French Literature in Translation (Section 1)
Spring 2020
V. Bergstrom
Readings/Media:

Readings may include:

Balzac, Old Goriot

Baudelaire, Parisian Scenes and Le Spleen de Paris

Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies (excerpts)

Rabinow, French Modern (excerpts)

Viewings may include:

Impressionist painting, early photography and film

Marker, The Lovely Month of May and La jetée

Varda, Daguerréotypes

Course Description:

In this course, we will be exploring representations of urban space in French and Francophone literature and film. We will be exploring two major movements to remake the city of Paris: the Haussmannian modernization of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century and the response to a housing crisis in the 1950s and 60s. Through novels (Balzac), poetry (Baudelaire), and film (Marker, Varda), we will consider the role culture plays during periods of radical social upheaval, and how these diverse genres marshal their particular resources to represent the process and repercussions of urban change. We will also consider the way features of Parisian architecture and city planning get reproduced in French post/colonial cities.

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

Undergraduate Courses 

Immigration in France: The Arabic Paris
24 : Freshman Seminar (Section 1)
Spring 2020
S. Tlatli
Readings/Films:

Course Reader

Course Description:

This course is designed to give a new perspective on the city of Paris when it is considered through the perspective of its immigration history. It is, as well, an introduction to the history of North African immigration in France in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. We will first focus on the main historical events that rendered the massive North African immigration possible and sometimes unavoidable, because of French colonialism. We will then pay close attention to the various cultural ways in which the city of Paris has been shaped and transformed by immigration, throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. We will consider the ways in which the city of Paris has been somehow redefined by its North African immigrant population by examining cultural documents, such as films, music, food and literature.

Additional information:

Course taught in ENGLISH. No knowledge of French is needed.

Priority enrollment for Freshmen.

Surfing the French New Wave
24 : Freshman Seminar (Section 2)
Spring 2020
N. Paige
Readings/Films:

See Description.

Course Description:

The French New Wave is perhaps the most emblematic moment in modern cinema, one that continues to inspire filmmakers from Los Angeles to Teheran to Hong Kong. This seminar will give students the opportunity to explore a dozen or so movies from this extraordinary flowering of filmmaking talent in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Films discussed include works by Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Rohmer, and Resnais, just to name a few. We will also be reading some important short essays from the period that will help bring the films’ preoccupations into focus. Students will be able to stream subtitled versions of the films on their own schedules.

Additional Information:

Course taught in ENGLISH. No knowledge of French is needed. Students will be able to stream subtitled versions of the films on their own schedules.

Priority enrollment for Freshmen.

Les Miserables and Madame Bovary
40 : The French Novel (in Translation) in Historical Context
Spring 2020
M. Lucey
TEXTS/FILMS:

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, translated by Christine Donougher (New York: Penguin Books, 2015). ISBN 978-0-14-310756-9

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). ISBN 978-0-14-310649-4

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856-1857) and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) would probably be on a lot of people’s lists of the “Best Novels of All Time.” Published only a few years apart, they have both had a huge impact on readers and writers around the world, and have been adapted for radio, for the stage, for television, and for the cinema. The initial publication of each was a momentous event in its own way: Madame Bovary was put on trial as an offence to public decency shortly after it appeared; a huge publicity campaign surrounded the publication of Les Misérables, which appeared while its author was in political exile and was an immediate bestseller. Both novels were, in some ways, reactions of revolt by the authors against the world they saw around them. The differences between the novels are perhaps as remarkable as any similarities there might be.

Our goal will be to understand the aesthetic and social ambitions of these two great novels, to read them carefully, and to explore the ways they intervened into their contemporary world. We will spend some time understanding why Hugo was writing from exile, why Madame Bovary was put on trial. Students will have the chance to do a bit of collaborative research into one of the two authors.

We will study the two novels in parallel, reaching the end of both in the last week of classes. Moving back and forth between the novels on a regular basis will allow us to experience in some detail all the stylistic and ideological ways in which the novels diverge from each other. Les Misérables might be called a romantic novel of social protest, whereas Madame Bovary is often thought of as one of the earliest examples of a modernist novel. Les Misérables is prone to long digressions in which the narration stops so that the narrator can explain things (sometimes only distantly related to the novel) to us. Madame Bovary has a relatively tight narrative economy and sometimes seems almost to have no narrator at all.

The startling differences between the narrative techniques of the novels (omniscient narrator vs. free indirect discourse) will be one major concern of ours, and we will examine how the techniques used in the two novels help determine their belonging to two different literary families. We will also investigate the way these two novels deal with a number of issues that are pressing in our own time: the consequences of income disparity, prison reform and police violence, sexual violence against women, and the aspirations of women for a variety of kinds of social and sexual freedom, questions about how best to achieve social reform, questions about the place of art and literature in the world, and questions about what a more just world might look like.

Additional Information:

This course satisfies the College of Letters and Science breadth requirement in Arts and Literature or Historical Studies. No knowledge of French required. Course conducted in ENGLISH

Arts of the Border: Refugee Itineraries and Identities
43B : Aspects of French Culture
Spring 2020
D. Sanyal
Readings/Films:

Texts: Marie NDiaye: Three Strong Women, Moshin Hamid: Exit West, Joyce Carol Oates: “Illegal Alien,” select short stories from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, selected poetry.

Films: Lioret’s Welcome, excerpts of Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, Tura and Crouzillat’s The Messsengers, Sidibé, Wagner and Siebert’s Those Who Jump, Audiard’s Dheepan.

Course Description:

This course explores the paths taken by refugees and their accounts of identity and experience at Europe’s borders. Contemporary films, literature and other artistic materials will help us map perilous migrations across land and sea into Europe. We will pay particular attention to how borders keep out, contain, detain and deport illegalized bodies, but also how these borders are negotiated, resisted or evaded by migrants. We’ll pay attention to the forms of identity that emerge or are put into crisis by surveillance, clandestine passage, detention, encampment, deportation or asylum.

We’ll also consider the importance of “storytelling” for organizing histories and selves in ways that are audible and visible to the state. How is the refugee currently imagined? How relevant is history (e.g. slavery or colonialism) for thinking about refugees today? What are the possibilities and limits of humanitarian approaches to refugees? Of human rights approaches to refugees? Most important for this class, how might art transform ways of thinking about refugee identities, protections and rights? These questions will be pursued through films and other visual media such as VR, short stories, poems and a novel.

Additional Information:

Course taught in English; knowledge of French not required.

Reading and Writing Skills in French (3 sections)
102
Spring 2020
D. Blocker, V. Rodic, M. McLaughlin
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 and schedule a placement exam with the French Undergraduate Advising Office to confirm enrollment.

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 French 102 course requirement in French major and French minor.

Class and Gender on the French Stage
103B : Language and Culture
Spring 2020
S. Maslan
Readings/Films:

more details forthcoming, please check back!

Course Description:

How did the French see class and gender difference performed on the stage? In the theater, after all, where everyone is playing a part, what does it mean that a lowly actress might play the part of a queen? What happens when, onstage, a slave and a master exchange costume and position? What about cross-dressing? How did plays create and negotiate gender roles? How were actors and actesses (who came from the lower classes up until the 20th century), regarded by the public? When was “celebrity” invented? What did it mean to ordinary people in the audience to see actors and characters violate the norms and expectations of class and gender hierarchy? Did theater turn the social world upside down? Did it provide a safety valve to let pent up social pressures escape?

In this class we will study about 5 plays together. We will start with Molière and work our way up to the twentieth century. We will watch performances on video, as well as read the texts.

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 1 “Historical Period” requirement in French major.

Medieval French Literature
112A
Spring 2020
D. Hult
Readings:

The Chanson de Roland, ed. Short (ISBN 978-2-253-05341-4); Tristan et Iseut, ed. Walter (ISBN 978-2-253-05085-7); Chretien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la Charrette (ISBN 978-2-253-05401-6), Le Chevalier au Lion (ISBN 978-2-253-06652-1) and Kibler, Intro to Old French.

Course Description:
The subject of this course is the most creative period of medieval literature, in which the epic still flourished but courtliness and the romance were born. Among the topics will be oral tradition, the chanson de geste, the troubadours of southern France and the rise of courtliness, the women troubadours, the values of courtly society, the invention of romantic love, adultery and faithfulness, the transmission of Celtic themes in the matière de Bretagne, the legends of King Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Iseut, as well as medieval manuscripts (including a session viewing manuscripts in the Bancroft Library). Most of the texts will be read in modern French, but instruction in the Old French language will be an important component of the class and key passages will be read in their original linguistic form.

Prerequisites:
French 102 or equivalent.

Additional information:

Knowledge of Old French not required; readings in modern French translation. This course satisfies 1 French Major course requirement in the “Literature” category or 1 French Major course requirement in the Elective category. This course satisfies 1 Historical Period Requirement in the French major. Satisfies one course requirement in French Minor.

Guerres, Revoltes, Litteratures. Minuit dans le 20eme siecle
120A : Twentieth-Century Literature
Spring 2020
E. Colon
Readings:

Vercors, Le silence de la mer (1942)

Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot (1952)

Henri Alleg, La question (1958)

Monique Wittig, Le corps lesbien (1973)

Robert Linhart, L’établi (1978)

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, La salle de bain (1984)

Marie NDiaye, Papa doit manger (2003)

Course Description:

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

We will mainly focus on writers published by Les Éditions de Minuit, using this famous publishing house as a guide through the history of the 20th and 21st centuries. 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.” 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” to consider what becomes of formal innovation, anti-imperialist struggles and political writing in the postmodern and postcolonial era, 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 one course in the French minor.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
126 : Senior Seminar
Spring 2020
S. Maslan
Readings/Films:

Readings include: Les Confessions (part 1); Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité; Emile (excerpts); Discours sur l’origine des langues.

Course Description:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is perhaps the most controversial and contradictory figure in the history of French literature and culture. He was a moralist who wrote of his compulsion to expose himself to female passers-by, a misogynist who dreamed of being spanked by his love objects and who created a huge female audience for his works, a theoretician of democracy who was homeless and stateless. Rousseau’s contradictions were enormously productive: he invented modern autobiography; he was the foremost novelist of his day—he wrote what was the runaway best-seller of the century and he came to epitomize and to disseminate a new culture of emotion and sensibility that spread throughout Europe and that lasted well into the nineteenth century.

But while Rousseau was the father of Romanticism, he was also the most rigorous political analyst of the Enlightenment. He posed the most fundamental and radical questions: why is there inequality among human beings? How can states and societies be ordered so that people are free and equal? Why do some command and some obey? What is the self and how is it formed? How should children be educated? These questions, along with the life and personality of Rousseau, inspired the French revolutionaries. Was he a crank? Was he the original theorist of totalitarianism, as some have claimed, was he the founder of modern democracy, as others have argued? Our seminar will be devoted to exploring these questions and more as we study one of the greatest writers and thinkers in the French tradition.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional Information:

This course satisfies 1 “Literature/Genre” or 1 “Elective” course requirement in the French major. Satisfies one course requirement in French Minor. Satisfies 1 “Historical Period” requirement in French major. Senior standing recommended, but not required.

"Spaces of Memory"
139 : Creative Writing in French
Spring 2020
R. Shuh
Readings:

Course Reader: will include readings connected to the specific themes and tasks at hand. These excerpts will likely include passages from Rousseau, Proust, Colette, Montaigne, Duras, Ernaux and Edouard Louis among others.

Course Description:

Borrowing from historian Pierre Nora’s idea of “lieux de mémoire” (privileged spaces for the construction of collective memory), we will undertake a creative exploration of writing our individual inventory of spaces of memory. Just as Nora’s way of looking at French history works from the meaning of spaces, broadly conceived, we will bypass chronological narrative and the autobiographical storyline in order to engage in a kind of individual mapmaking.

The exploration of spaces of memory will take us through elements of the creative writing process and we will work on the craft of writing via pastiche, targeted exercises, free writing, rewriting and editing. Students will engage in a practice of daily composition to gain fluency and ease in writing creatively in French. Collaborative activities will include discussing drafts with other students. At the end of the semester, students will assemble a collection of their “lieux de mémoire” and contribute to a class anthology.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional information:

This course satisfies one “Elective” course requirement in the French major. Satisfies one course requirement in French minor. Students completing minor in Creative Writing should consult with minor adviser regarding course approval for Creative Writing minor.

Translation Methodology and Practice
148
Spring 2020
M. McLaughlin
Readings:

Hervey, Sándor and Ian Higgins, (2002) Thinking French Translation

Course Description:

The discipline known as ‘translation studies’ is a relatively new field and yet it has much to offer the practicing translator. This course brings together aspects of translation theory and translation methodology in order to develop our skills as translators. During the course we will translate both from French into English and from English into French, paying particular attention to the linguistic differences between the two languages that pose problems for translators. One of the main methodological questions addressed by the course is how the practice of translation varies according to genre: from the translation of poetry, through scientific translation to subtitles and dubbing, as well as translation and new media.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional Information:

This course satisfies 1 “Culture” or 1 “Elective” course requirement in the French Major. Satisfies one course requirement in the French Minor. Course conducted in French.

The Arts of Gender (1949-2019)
150B : Women in French Literature
Spring 2020
E. Colon
Readings:

The full list of materials studied with be provided to students at the beginning of the semester. Theorists, writers, filmmakers and artists will likely include: Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Luc Godard, Monique Wittig, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Anne Garréta, Nina Bouraoui, Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, Christine and the Queens, Virginie Despentes, Paul Preciado, Céline Sciamma.

Course Description:

In this course, we will attend to the sustained conversation that has taken place, from the postwar period onward, between the successive waves of feminisms, the theorization of gender, and aesthetic/cultural production. We will read key texts in feminist theory and queer studies, study novels and autobiography, and analyze films, videos and songs by well-known French and Francophone critiques, writers, filmmakers and artists to explore how literature and film have intervened in the debates, questions and struggles that have participated in shaping the way “gender differences” and “gender inequalities” are approached today.

Throughout the semester, we will work through the following questions: what is the function of language in general, and literary language in particular, in the naturalization of categories such as the feminine, or femininity? How can we think through literature and film’s capacity to interrupt or reproduce, to weaken or reinforce, gender roles and representations? Under which conditions are (literary) language and (cinematic) images reifying gender? How have novels and self-writing contributed to elucidate the complex and changing relationships between gender, race and class? How can art be used as a site of untheorized gender experimentations? The texts and films studied will be placed in dialogue with feminist theory and queer critique within their social context of emergence (the post-war period, decolonization, the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, islamophobia in postcolonial France, the migrant crisis, in particular). Comparisons between the French/Francophone contexts and other cultural areas will be encouraged.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional Information:

Satisfies 1 “Culture” or 1 “Elective” course requirement in the French Major. Satisfies 1 course requirement in French minor.

1962: Algeria and France
161A : A Year in French History
Spring 2020
S. Tlatli
Readings:

Course Reader

Course Description:

Dans ce cours, nous explorerons en profondeur l’importance de la guerre d’Algérie (1954-1962) de manière à établir cette guerre dans son continuum historique: dans l’histoire de la colonisation française. Nous analyserons donc toutes les péripéties de cette guerre qui ont donné lieu à de grandes transformations de la vie politique française, tel le passage de la quatrième à la cinquième république: un changement de gouvernement. Nous analyserons l’impact de cette guerre sur des écrivains majeurs tels que Feraoun, Dib et Camus. Dans un deuxième moment, nous analyserons les répercussions de la guerre d’Algérie comme une clé pour interpréter la société et la politique française contemporaine. La question thématique que nous explorerons est celle de la continuité entre le passé colonial de la France et la vie politique contemporaine.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional information:

This course satisfies one “Culture” or one “Elective” requirement in the French major. Satisfies one course requirement in French minor.

Graduate Courses

The Learned Academics of Early Modern France, Italy and Spain and the Emergence of New Understandings of Language and Literature (1500-1800)
C203 : Comparative Studies in Romance Literatures and Cultures
Spring 2020
D. Blocker
Readings:

TBD

Course Description:

This seminar comparatively investigates the major learned academies of early modern France, Italy and Spain (1500-1800), focusing specifically on their contributions to the development and study of vernacular languages, as well as as on their efforts to define and disseminate new understandings of what we now call “literature”.

Early modern academies were institutions assembling a group of individuals desirous to engage in practices of learning, outside of a university setting. Some of these sodalities were heavily institutionalized, others were informal. Some were large, public and mostly subservient to political or religious power. Others were small, private and subversive. Their discussions focused on anything from music to physics or theology. But, in many of them, inquiries on language, rhetoric and poetics (i.e. “literary theory”) constituted a central preoccupation. Given these interests, and the fact that many of these institutions received princely protection, learned academies also played an important in the development of the early modern state — and in that of representations of nationhood more generally. Yet, academic networks, discourses and ideas also spread rapidly across borders, especially in the south of Europe, contributing to the rapid internationalization of new understandings of both language and literature.

In this seminar, we will investigate the social, political and institutional history several of the most important of these academic institutions by reading both primary and secondary sources, with the aim of better understanding both their social practices and their intellectual productions. In the process, students will be introduced to the study of rare books and manuscripts produced within these institutions. In particular, we will ask how examining the materiality of these academic productions could help us better understand why and how linguistics and literary criticism began to emerge in the early modern period. We will also discuss the question of the extent to which the discursive practices and scholarly paradigms originally developed within early modern academies might continue to shape linguistic, literary and cultural studies to this day.

This seminar is designed for graduate students in the Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL) doctoral program. It is however also suitable for students in the D. E. in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (REMS), especially those interested in social history, the history of the book and manuscript studies, literary history, the history of science and the history of ideas.

Additional Information:

Knowledge of at least one Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish) is preferable but not compulsory. English will be the main language of the secondary readings, but students in the RLL track will be expected to work through a variety of both primary and secondary sources in French, Italian and Spanish. Specific reading arrangements can be made for students not enrolled in the RLL track. If you are not sure whether this seminar would work well for you or would like to discuss special reading arrangements and/or the possibility of auditing the class, please contact the instructor at dblocker@berkeley.edu.

Also listed as Italian Studies C203 and Spanish C203.

Late Medieval Fictions of Love
210A : Studies in Medieval Literature
Spring 2020
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. 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.

Additional Information:

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.

Early Modern Affect: From Passion to Sensibility
245A : Early Modern Studies
Spring 2020
N. Paige
Readings:

see description.

Course Description:

If the “affective” turn in the humanities can be seen (in part) as a reaction against conceptions of the aesthetic predicated on the disinterestedness of the ideal consumer of art, it’s also true that the disinterestedness associated with Kant was itself a turn away from a previously dominant understanding of art as precisely a cultivation of interest — with “interest” long meaning not mere curiosity but rather something on the order of heightened emotional involvement. This seminar takes as its subject early modern literature’s varying role in the production and regulation of emotion in its audience. Since we will be ranging over two centuries, one question we will return to is the extent to which we can separate Classical “passion” from Enlightenment “sensibility,” and how such a transition (if it exists) maps onto socio-political formations (court society, bourgeois domesticity) and contributes to the advent of a properly modern aesthetics. We’ll be reading widely in the history of emotions and aesthetics, and tackling the following texts: Corneille, Horace; Molière, Le Misanthrope; Racine, Bérénice; Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves; Diderot, Le fils naturel and La Religieuse; Rousseau, Julie; Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses.

Rewriting the Hexagon: Metropolitan Reflections in Francophone Literature
251 : Francophone Literature
Spring 2020
K. Britto
Texts:

See below.

Course Description:

For almost a century, francophone writers have been concerned with the various cultural, political, and economic dynamics that shape the experiences of colonial and postcolonial subjects who travel into and out of France. In this seminar, we will read and discuss several texts, dating from the 1930s onward, that foreground movement to (and from) the metropole. Over the course of the semester, we will consider a number of interrelated questions: how do these texts reflect the profound psychic ruptures and geographic displacements that shape colonial and postcolonial subjectivity? What sorts of challenges do they pose to narratives of French national and cultural identity? How do they transform concepts of “home” and “nation,” “citizen” and “foreigner,” “French” and “francophone”? What forms of agency (or lack thereof) underlie these metropolitan itineraries? How do the terms within which travel to France is imagined shift over time?

In addition to selected theoretical/critical works, readings are likely to include: Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal; Ousmane Socé, Mirages de Paris; Cheik Hamidou Kane, L’aventure ambigüe; Ousmane Sembène, “La noire de…”; Driss Chraïbi, Les boucs; Tahar Ben Jelloun, La réclusion solitaire; Azouz Begag, Le gone du Chaâba; Gisèle Pineau, L’exil selon Julia; Alain Mabanckou, Bleu blanc rouge; Fatou Diome, Le ventre de l’Atlantique; Bessora, 53cm

Literature and Anthropology
274 : Traditions of Critical Thought
Spring 2020
S. Tlatli
Texts:

Course Reader

Course Description:

The literary genre can often be considered from an anthropological point of view, whereas anthropological texts can very well be perceived through their literary mode of writing. In this seminar, we will seek to understand the blurring of distinctions between these two disciplines, that of literature and anthropology. This seminar is divided into two parts. In a first moment, we will devote our analysis to twentieth-century France, by exploring the dialog between anthropological knowledge and literary writing. This dialog is best exemplified in the works of Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille and Levy-Strauss. We will consider the meaning of notions such as sacrifice, religion, ritual and community, through an analysis of these author’s main body of work. In the second part of the seminar, we will turn toward the analysis of the relationship between literature and anthropology in post-colonial studies. Taking as a point of departure works by Edward Said and Achille Mbembé, we will analyze in depth conceptual terms such as exoticism, orientalism and otherness when they relate to the understanding of colonial and post-colonial societies

Teaching French in College -- Advanced First Year
302
Spring 2020
R. Kern
Readings:
Kern, Literacy and Language Teaching — Applied Linguistics

Course Description:

Provides an understanding of literacy-based language teaching and methods specific to the teaching of French 2, to help instructors effectively implement goals for the French language program at Berkeley. This course provides a forum for discussing theoretical and practical issues in language pedagogy, and experience in creating and adapting instructional materials and designing assessments for use in the UC Berkeley French language program. GSIs are also required to attend a pilot class, taught by Daniel Hoffmann, 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 2020
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.