Spring 2019

Reading and Composition (R&C)

The Fantastic, The Uncanny, and The Real
R1A (Section 1) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation
Spring 2019
T. Sanders
Texts/Films/Media:

Texts:

Writing Analytically, 8th edition; Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy
Course Reader:

Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” & “The Black Cat”

Mérimée, “The Venus of Ille”

Nerval, Aurélia

Maupassant, “The Horla”

Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space”

James, The Turn of the Screw

Todorov, “Definition of the Fantastic”

Freud, “The Uncanny”

Film & Television:

The Twilight Zone, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”

Clouzot, Diabolique

Hitchcock, Psycho

Kubrick, The Shining

Resnais/Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad

Recommended

Stunk & White, Elements of Style, 4th edition

Course Description:

In this course, we will encounter written and visual texts whose unreliable narration, unsettling narratives, and enigmatic endings elicit such feelings as hesitation, unease, and bewilderment. Moreover, if the characters in these stories find themselves questioning their experience of “reality,” we as readers find ourselves confronted with the task of constructing a coherent narrative—and meaning—of our own. We will work with the short story, the novella, the short novel, television, and film. We will examine the realms of gothic, horror, fantasy, and noir, as well as the supernatural, the surreal, and the weird. We will conclude the course with an introduction to the French new novel (nouveau roman). Finally, we will reflect critically on the function of these literary genres and modes.

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, 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

Made or Readymade? Found Objects in French Literature, Art and Film
R1B (Section 1) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation
Spring 2019
V. Bergstrom
Texts/Media:

Course Description:

In this course, we will investigate the fact and fiction of “found objects” in literary and visual works. Through the epistolary novel (a novel written in the form of letters), we will consider why and to what effect authors frame their works as the work of others (the fiction of the found). Through French art of the early twentieth century, we will consider how everyday objects (newspaper, bicycle wheel, thermometer) make their way into painting and sculpture, and transform the notion of artistic medium. Finally, we will consider conventional and idiosyncratic uses of archival images and found footage in narrative, documentary, and experimental film. Guiding questions of this course will include: how does a framing device shape our approach to literary materials? how do found materials mingle with non-found (i.e. created) materials in literary and visual contexts? what kinds of (aesthetic, political, philosophical) meanings emerge from the juxtaposition of the made and the found?

This course focuses on literary and visual analysis and the composition of well-argued essays, building upon the skills learned in R1A. We will also be discussing how to conduct scholarly research on literary and historical topics, and how to use scholarly sources in academic writing. The writing process will be broken down into manageable components, including extensive rewriting and feedback, and we will practice different academic genres including the abstract, the annotated bibliography, and the research paper.

Additional Information:

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

Black Matter(s): Representing Blackness(es) Across Space, Time and Bodies
R1A (Section 2) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation
Spring 2019
C. Stofle
Texts/Media

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Aimé Césaire; Black Docker, Ousmane Sembène; Slave Old Man, Patrick Chamoiseau; The Sellout, Paul Beatty; more details in Course Description.

Course Description:

This course will critically examine various strategies deployed by authors and filmmakers to reassign power, beauty and intellectual autonomy to Black bodies. Films, essays and writings from the Francophone (French, Caribbean and Sub-Saharan African) canon will be put in conversation with American works to tease out global issues of representations and self-representations. Together we will explore the thin boundary between objectification/exoticization and praise, particularly in the case of feminine depiction; we will interrogate various iterations of violence performed unto and by Black bodies and their signification; and we will ask how non-classic forms of representation (for instance, comedies or horror films) contribute to new ways of conceptualizing race for a broad public.

Additional Information:

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

What are words for? Linguistics and Style in Literature
R1B (Section 2) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation
Spring 2019
E. Ritchey
Texts/Media:

see description.

Course Description:

As readers, we often look for meaning in texts by studying aspects like plot and character. In this course, we will study how writers use linguistic resources to create meaning. Our exploration will draw on the field of linguistics and on the literary study of stylistics. By making the language itself our focus, we will consider three major elements in the construction of texts: sound, form, and words. How is spoken language portrayed on the page? How do structure and pattern create meaning? How does vocabulary contribute to the world of the text?

Students will complement close readings with secondary research in order to write cogent analyses of literary texts. In this course, we are interested not only in written representations of language, but also in the oral codes of film, television, and music. The works that we will examine include a selection of short poetry, the novels So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and the play The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco.

These readings and discussions will feed into the composition of several analytical papers over the course of the semester, along with other writing exercises designed to develop critical thinking, research, composition, editing, and presentation skills.

Additional Information:

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

Strange Contemporaries -- Interrograting the Present in the Contemporary Novel
R1A (Section 3) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation
Spring 2019
M. Evans
Texts/Media:

Annie Ernaux – The Years
Mathias Enard – Street of Thieves
Antoine Volodine – Bardo or not Bardo
Renee Gladman – Event Factory
Davi Kopenawa – The Falling Sky
Abdourahman Waberi – Transit
Selected Poetry by Juliana Spahr, Cole Swensen, and Susan Howe

Films by Jem Cohen, Sylvain George, Kelly Reichardt, and Agnes Varda.

Students can also expect to read a number of short texts from various corners of the humanities and social sciences that introduce the interdisciplinary problematics of defining the contemporary. Authors will include: Marc Augé, Pascale Casanova, Michel Foucault, Edouard Glissant, Bruno Latour, Peter Osborne, Georges Perec, Paul Rabinow, Hito Steyerl, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

Course Description:

How is it we come to know the contemporary world? What makes our now distinct from the world or worlds of yesterday? What ways of thinking, modes of studying, manners of living together or in conflict with one another reflect whatever it is we recognize as today’s reality? And how is it we come to accept or resist it? In this course we’ll look at a series of recent novels and films that reflect these questions: texts that probe the distinctions (economic, gendered, racial, religious, linguistic, and aesthetic) that make our experience of the world at times legible, at others obscure. Our focus will primarily fall on French works in translation, we will however consider a number of English language texts, with an open mind to what relevance of categories such as national languages, translation, and genre bear in today’s world.

Additional Information:

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

A History of Heterosexuality
R1B (Section 3) : English Composition through French Literature in Translation
Spring 2019
T. Blakeney
Texts/Media:

see Description.

Course Description:

Since the end of the 19th century, heterosexuality has presented itself in Western culture as “natural,” as a given — this is the phenomenon that scholars have called heteronormativity. And yet historians of sexuality have in recent years become increasingly interested in the ways in which heterosexuality, like homosexuality, has a history. What happens when we see heterosexuality not as a natural given but try to become attentive to the ways in which it is socially constructed? How has heterosexuality changed throughout the twentieth century? And how might the experience of heterosexuality be different according to one’s gender? What kind of archive is required to do “the history of heterosexuality”? This class seeks to explore this history in a concrete way, to introduce students to some of the key concepts of queer theory and the history of sexuality, and to give students the tools to analyze a wide variety of media.

We will analyze novels, philosophical texts, and films, all authored by women, that explore how heterosexuality and heterosexual marriage is experienced differently by women (Colette’s Wheat in Bloom, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, and Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour). We will seek to understand how heterosexuality is constructed through the masculine lens of some of the key films of the French New Wave (Contempt, Masculin Féminin, Jules et Jim, and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). And we will look at how heterosexuality is constructed in a wide variety of cultural objects and media, including visual art, propagandistic posters, erotic photographs and magazines, advice columns, popular film, reality television, and social media.

Additional Information:

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

Undergraduate Courses 

Les Miserables and Madame Bovary
40 : The French Novel (in Translation) in Historical Context
Spring 2019
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 offense 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. We will also spend some time understanding something about the legacy of each of these works (both in terms of literary history and in popular culture), and we will work collectively to evaluate a number of ways they have been adapted to other cultural forms.

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

Paris: A Historical Anatomy of the World's Most Romantic City
43B : Aspects of French Culture
Spring 2019
N. Paige
Texts/Films:

See Description.

Course Description:

This class will offer students an in-depth exploration of the urban artifact that is Paris — from its parks, cafés, and boulevards to its monuments, its Métro, and even its sewers. While these features are iconic and — apart from the sewers! — “beautiful,” one of our aims will be to understand, historically, the costs of such beauty. Who paid for Paris, and why? And what of the many who, in successive transformations, have been priced out?

The visible features of the City of Lights will thus be approached “forensically,” as we peek beneath the glamour to reveal the economic, demographic, and ideological pressures that have produced the most visited city in the world. We will be looking at photos, films, and paintings, and reading some literary works (usually in excerpt). Primary as well as secondary historical sources will be studied. And the course will include a data science module that will give a hands-on statistical look at the city and its history (no coding experience necessary). All course materials and lectures in English.

Additional Information:

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

Writing in French, 2 sections
102
Spring 2019
D. Blocker, V. Rodic
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. Satisfies the College of Letters and Science breadth requirement in International Studies.

Class and Gender on the French Stage
103B : Language and Culture
Spring 2019
S. Maslan
Readings/Films:

Authors include, but are not limited to: Molière; Beaumarchais; Jean Genet. We will watch performances on video, as well as read the texts.

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. Authors include, but are not limited to: Molière; Beaumarchais; Jean Genet.

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. 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. Course may be taken by students concurrently enrolled in French 102.

Continuity and Change in Thirteenth-Century French Literature
112A : Medieval French Literature
Spring 2019
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 consent of instructor.

Additional information:

Knowledge of Old French not required; readings in modern French translation. This course satisfies 1 French Major course requirement in the “Literature/Genre” category or 1 French Major course requirement in the “Elective” category. This course also satisfies 1 Historical Period Requirement in the French major. Satisfies one course requirement in the French minor. Priority enrollment for declared French majors and minors.

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

L’écriture à l’état d’urgence: Appels, manifestes et discours du 20ème et du 21ème siècle
120B : Twentieth Century Literature
Spring 2019
E. Colon
Texts/Films: (Les textes au programme seront mis à votre disposition sur le site bcourses de notre cours)

Tristan Tzara, Manifeste Dada

André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme

Internationale Situationniste, Manifeste ; La misère en milieu étudiant

Aimé Césaire, Discours sur la Négritude, En guise de manifeste

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman

Maurice Blanchot et alii, Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie

Simone de Beauvoir et alii, Manifeste des 343

Collectif Qui fait la France, Manifeste

Édouard Glissant, Éloge de la Créolité, Traité du Tout-monde

Collectif, “Nous n’enseignerons plus que le masculin l’emporte sur le féminin”

Étienne Balibar, Pour un droit international de l’hospitalité

Course Description:

Dans ce cours, nous retracerons l’histoire de la littérature et de la culture française et francophone du 20ème siècle à partir d’un mode d’écriture particulier, le mode manifestaire, à travers lequel écrivain.e.s et intellectuel.le.s ont défini les mouvements littéraires majeurs de la modernité (Dadaïsme, Surréalisme, Nouveau Roman, Situationnisme, Négritude…) et sont intervenu.e.s face aux questions les plus critiques de leur temps (la guerre d’Algérie, le droit des femmes à disposer de leur corps, la misère en milieu étudiant, la place du colonialisme dans la société contemporaine, les inégalités de genre encodées dans la grammaire française, la « crise des migrants »…). Nous verrons aussi ce qu’il reste du manifeste littéraire à l’époque contemporaine, alors que le mot et la notion même d’avant-garde ont eu tendance à s’effacer.

Au cours de nos lectures et de nos discussions, nous contextualiserons les textes étudiés au sein de leurs conditions d’émergence et les analyserons en détail pour explorer les questions suivantes : qu’arrive-t-il à la langue lorsqu’elle se place en état d’urgence ? Qu’est-ce qui constitue une urgence historique, sociale ou artistique ? Comment l’écriture manifestaire adapte-t-elle ses stratégies poétiques et rhétoriques à son programme, à la cible de sa critique, à sa lecture des forces en présence, à sa cause, à son public ? Comment ces textes négocient-ils la tension qui leur est constitutive entre rupture et continuité, entre la déclaration de la nouveauté et la compréhension du passé ? L’objectif de ce cours est de vous introduire aux mouvements littéraires et politiques majeurs des 20ème et 21ème siècles, tout en vous amenant à réfléchir à la manifestation littéraire, c’est-à-dire à la nécessité de rendre explicites les relations entre les formes littéraires et les projets esthétiques et/ou politiques qu’elles travaillent.

À ce titre, vous écrirez aussi collectivement un manifeste au cours du semestre. Les textes au programme seront mis à votre disposition sur le site bcourses de notre cours.

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 in the French minor. Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature and International Studies.

Modern Theatre
124A
Spring 2019
S. Guerlac
Readings/Films:

See Description

Course Description:

By some estimates France has more than 200 theatres in Paris alone. In this class we will examine French theatre in the 20th and 21st centuries. Theatre is a composite form; it involves text and performance, visual and sound experiences, and, increasingly, multimedia. Contemporary theatre involves not only new texts, but also new ideas concerning mise en scene and performance; it can include reinventions of celebrated plays from the past. In this class we will examine various movements — theatre of the absurd, avant-garde theatre, engaged theatre — as well as various sites of performance — different types of theatrical spaces — from the Comédie Française to the Festival at Avignon and its various theatres large and small.

We will consider how film and social media have both challenged theatre as an institution and have nourished it, as well as ways in which theatre is deployed to engage with social issues. We will study texts and, wherever possible, films or YouTubes of performances. When it comes to very current work, we will also consider interviews in which directors talk about their projects or present “teasers” of performances to come.

We will examine works by Alfred Jarry, Anouilh, Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Genet, Artaud, Duras, and Sarraute among others, and consider the theatre projects of very contemporary artists such as Mohamed El Khatibi, Aurélie Ruby, Christiane Jahay, and Wadji Mouawad (Incendies, 2003).

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

Victor Hugo: Writer and Activist
126 : Senior Seminar
Spring 2019
S. Guerlac
Victor Hugo’s life spanned almost the entire 19th century, a period of radical social transformation. He became a successful poet under the Restoration King at a very young age and then proceeded to transform French poetry and his own political and social ideas. He wrote plays, novels, and essays that launched the movement of literary Romanticism. He succeeded both as a popular writer and a fine art writer. But he was not only an artist. He was also an activist. He spoke out in favor of social justice and women’s rights, and against slavery, the death penalty, and the oppression of the poor. He also spoke out against the emperor Napoleon III, who took power after the revolution of 1848 by a coup d’état. For this he was punished with twenty years of exile, which he spent in the Channel Islands, returning to France only after it was proclaimed a Republic.

In this seminar we will study Hugo’s literary works (prose, drama, and poetry) in relation to his evolving social concerns and the changes underway in French culture. We will read his poetry and trace its evolution as his social commitments intensified. We will read works that galvanized the Romantic challenge to classical esthetics: La Préface de Cromwell, the play Hernani (which created a scandal) and the poem “Réponse à un acte d’Accusation.” We will view film excerpts of two of his celebrated novels, Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre Dame de Paris). We will also examine how Hugo treats the death penalty (and incarceration generally) in both fictional works and militant essays, and how he uses poetry to convey ferocious anger at a tyrant. Victor Hugo has a lot to teach us about engaging passionately and uncompromisingly with the world around us both as artists and as activists.

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 College of Letters and Science breadth in Arts and Literature or International Studies. Senior standing recommended, but not required.

Second Language Acquisition in French
138 : French for Teaching and Related Careers
Spring 2019
R. Kern
Readings:

Lightbown and Spada, How Languages are Learned, Fourth Edition. Oxford UP, 2013; French 138 readings on bspace.

Course Description:

This course will introduce students to the field of second language acquisition, considering specific issues in learning and teaching French. What is “grammar” and how does it relate to our everyday use of language? What is the significance of language errors? How do “spoken” and “written” norms differ? What roles do a student’s native language, as well as motivation, memory, and personality play in the learning of a foreign language? How do social factors affect language learning? What is the nature of the relationship between language and culture, and how can culture be taught through language?

We will study theoretical models of second language acquisition, as well as a variety of approaches to the teaching of French as a foreign language. Students will learn how to observe and analyze teaching and will get practice in preparing and teaching a micro-lesson.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional information:

This course satisfies 1 “Elective” course requirement in the French Major. Satisfies one course requirement in the French minor. Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in International Studies.

Francophone Journeys
151A : Francophone Literature
Spring 2019
K. Britto
Texts/Films:

See Description

Course Description:

In this course, we will read a number of texts produced by writers with ties to the Caribbean, West Africa, and North Africa, as well as to France. Each of these texts stages a journey of some kind—one-way or round trip, real or imagined, in or out of various colonial, postcolonial, and metropolitan locations. As we discuss these narratives of displacement, we will pay particular attention to the dynamics of power that structure the movement of colonial and postcolonial subjects, as well as the coming into contact of different cultures, languages, religions, and histories.

Readings will 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…”; Leïla Sebbar, Shérazade; Gisèle Pineau, L’exil selon Julia; Alain Mabanckou, Bleu blanc rouge.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional Information:

Satisfies one “Culture” or one “Elective” course requirement in the French Major. Satisfies one course requirement in the French minor. Satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth requirement in Arts and Literature or International Studies.

Revolution and Terror (1793-1794)
161B : A Year in French History
Spring 2019
S. Maslan
Readings:

Course Reader

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 equivalent.

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 Surrealist Movement in Literature, Painting and Films
172A : Literature and Psychoanalysis
Spring 2019
S. Tlatli
Texts/Films:

See Description

Course Description:

This course will discuss the artistic, political and literary aspects of French and international Surrealism from its first expression in the early 1920s to the aftermath of the Second World War. We will consider all the artistic components of this avant-garde movement. Our material will include textual sources such as prose, poetry and manifestos, but also films, photographs and paintings by Salvador Dali, Chirico, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent.

Additional Information:

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

Sex, Gender, and Desire
177A : History and Criticism of Film
Spring 2019
D. Young
Texts/Films:

See Description.

Course Description:

French cinema is a cinema of desire, from melodramas of heterosexuality in the pre- and postwar periods, to the rescripting of desire through a feminist lens in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the emergence of queer counter-currents. It is a cinema in which fantasies of masculinity and femininity intersect with myths of family, race, and nation, shaping (and sometimes challenging) cultural norms and ideals.

In this course, we will examine the historical contexts, politics, and aesthetics of French cinema’s century-long problematization of sex, gender, and desire. Our (mandatory) weekly film viewings will be accompanied by readings of both theoretical and literary texts. No prior experience with film analysis is necessary. Please note: the course touches on topics of a potentially sensitive nature and includes some sexually explicit materials, including scenes of (fictional) sexual violence. Indeed, one of our key questions is why images and narratives of transgression have played such a key role in French literature and cinema, and we will also ask how and why French film-makers in the 21st century have veered in the direction of an explicit treatment of non-normative sex, from Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999) to Abdellatif Kechiche’s La Vie d’Adèle (2013) and Alan Guidaudie’s L’inconnu du lac (2013).

Prerequisites:

French 102 or equivalent; 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. Satisfies one course requirement in the French minor. This course also satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth requirement in Arts and Literature or International Studies.

streaming links for the films will be provided by instructor.

L'Occupation nazie a travers la litterature et le cinema
183B : Configurations of Crisis
Spring 2019
D. Sanyal
Texts/Films:

See Description.

Course Description:

An inquiry into the history and memory of occupied France through a range of cultural production: novels, essays, poetry, theatre and cinema. We will focus on representations of the Occupation; the literature of Resistance; art under Nazi censorship; Vichy France and collaboration; war and the colonies; anti-Semitism, deportation and the Holocaust. Our explorations will seek to understand why France continues to be haunted by this “past that refuses to pass.”

Texts by Sartre, Camus, Vercors, Delbo, Némirovsky, Modiano and selected poets. Films by Resnais, Malle, Ophuls, Chabrol and Ousmane Sembène.

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 French minor. This course also satisfies College of Letters and Science breadth in Social and Behavioral Sciences or Historical Studies or International Studies.

French for Future Doctors and Scientists
198 : Directed Group Study (DeCal Course)
Spring 2019
H. Bhandal
Texts/Films

Course Reader

Course Description:

This 2-unit DeCal course serves to provide students with a broad knowledge of vocabulary in the medical and scientific fields. Students will not only expand their range of vocabulary, but they will also become more proficient in expressing themselves when utilizing these specialized terms. This course has been designed to prepare students interested in STEM to pursue careers that may require more specialized knowledge of French. Furthermore, taking this class will provide students with the foundation to prepare for the DFP Medical B2 exam. This course is conducted entirely in French.

Recommended Preparation:

Students should have a working knowledge of French (B- or above in French 3 or 4 years of high school French), and some background in the sciences. Students unsure of their preparation may consult with the instructor.

Additional Information:

This is a 2-unit course. Please select 2 units when enrolling in this course.

Graduate Courses

The Romance of the Rose and the Tradition of Medieval Allegory
210A : Studies in Medieval Literature
Spring 2019
D. Hult
Texts:

See Description

Course Description:

This course will combine a detailed reading of the Roman de la Rose and its critical heritage with a study of the medieval tradition of allegorical writing. Annex texts will include those written by some of the great predecessors of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, including selections from Saint Augustine, Macrobius, Boethius and Alain de Lille. The latter few weeks of the course will concentrate on extended passages from the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé, which not only illustrates the move to translation in the later Middle Ages, but also exemplifies a type of exegetical reading, issuing from the theological tradition, applied to a manifestly secular (and frankly immoral) text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Additional topics will include the rhetorical mode of personification, verbal and visual modes of allegorical representation, Biblical exegesis, and symbol vs. allegory. Work for the course will include a class presentation and a substantial research paper or alternate written assignment. Class will be conducted in English and no knowledge of medieval French is presupposed, though reading knowledge of modern French will be helpful, as the Rose will be read in a dual-language edition, with facing page Old French and modern French translation. Since the class will center on close readings, a certain amount of class time will be reserved for discussion of linguistic and translation issues.

French Theories and their Aftermaths
274 : Traditions of Critical Thought
Spring 2019
E. Colon
Texts:

Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx

Catherine Malabou, La plasticité au soir de l’écriture

Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée

Maurice Blanchot, La communauté inavouable

Michel Foucault, La volonté de Savoir. Droit de mort et pouvoir sur la vie.

Achille Mbembé, Nécropolitique

Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique

Course Description:

In this course, students will be introduced to the theoretical problems that have emerged in France in the wake of “French Theory.” We will consider the extent to which the questions and epistemological methods of structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction have been reshaped through the political urgencies of the 1980s and 1990s, in particular the emergence of neo-liberalism and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Reading Derrida, Malabou, Blanchot, Nancy, Rancière, Foucault, and Mbembé, we will explore how recent critical theory written in French has negotiated the enabling and foreclosing effects of these phenomena, as well as the intellectual traditions there carry with them, on the very procedures of critique—especially when critique aiming at social emancipation. Derrida’s late engagement with Marx through the notion of “spectrality” will be our first case study, followed by Malabou’s conceptualization of “plasticity” in the wake of Derrida’s “écriture.”

We will then will move to three of the fundamental theoretical gestures of the last three decades: the conceptualization of the “community,” alongside literary creation and at a critical distance from communism (Nancy, Blanchot, Rancière); the redefinition of the political, against the police order, as a disruptive redistribution of the sensible (Rancière); and the re-articulation of power as differentially exerted upon life (Foucault, Mbembé). In their oral presentations and papers, students will be encouraged to bring in the materials in dialogue with their areas of specialization.

Seminars will conducted in English. Readings in French.

The Politics of Representational Pleasures: Early Modern Court and City Spectacles of Theater, Music and Dance in Comparative Perspective (1600-1800, and in their modern-day receptions and performances)
281 : Interdisciplinary Topics in Literary and Cultural Studies
Spring 2019
D. Blocker
Texts/Performances:

Please note: current English translations will be made available.

1) Shakespeare, Julius Cesar in historical perspective (in 1599 at the Globe Theater ; in 1672, as staged by Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Company, in avril 2019 by the troupe of Le Théâtre National de Bretagne, on tour at Cal Performances in the spring of 2019)

2) Euridice (1600 — court opera libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini, with music by Jacopo Peri)

3) Orfeo (1607 — academic and court opera libretto by Alessandro Striggio, with music by Claudio Monteverdi)

4) Les Plaisirs de l’Île Enchantée (1664 — large scale court divertimento, including several plays by Molière and music and dance choreographies by Jean-Baptiste Lully et al., in the 1665 edition and in a 1973 video recording of an abridged performance of this court spectacle staged by the French choreographer Maurice Béjart at the Comédie Française in Paris)

5) Le Bourgeois gentilhommme (1668 — court and city comédie ballet by Molière, with music and dances choreographies by Jean-Baptiste Lully et al in the 1669 edition and in the contemporary performance of the work given by the French troupe Le Poëme Harmonique in 2004 )

6) Dido & Aeneas (1689 — school opera libretto by Nahum Tate with music by Henry Purcell, in the contemporary libretto and in the modern-day performance of the work given by the French troupe Le Poëme Harmonique in 2014), La Dansomanie (1800 — comedy ballet with choreography by Gardel and music by E. N. Méhul, to be studied in the surviving contemporary sources )

7) Le Mariage de Figaro (1784, court and city play by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais)

8) Le Nozze di Figaro (1786 — opera buffa, with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte and music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in a variety of modern and contemporary performances and recordings).

Course Description:

This seminar will comparatively investigate the social and political uses of early modern court and city spectacles of theater, music and dance over a 200-year period (1600-1800), both through the contextualized study of early modern documents and in a number of modern-day performances of the 8 works listed above. This thoroughly interdisciplinary seminar — originally designed with REMS students in mind, but also more than suitable for RLL students, as well as graduate students in French, Italian Studies, English, German, Music and Performance Studies — will have three main learning goals : 1) initiate students to the contextualized analysis of early modern court and city performances, in their various social, political, institutional and economic contexts ; 2) train participants in the production history and analysis of contemporary performances of early modern spectacles, in the context of the current wave of Baroque revival productions (including through a live production of Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar by Le Théâtre National de Bretagne, to be given at Cal Performances on April 26-28 : http://calperformances.org/performances/2018-19/theater/theatre-national..., which the class will collectively attend in the last week of the semester) ; 3) develop in all participants the necessary skills and confidence to enjoy, interpret and historicize early modern spectacles comparatively, in five closely interrelated geographic areas across early modern Europe (Italy, England, France, Prussia and modern day Germany, as well as the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

Additional Information:

The works studied (please see detailed list given above) will be examined in class in the language(s) they were originally produced in. But current English translations exist for all of the works to be investigated and will be made available to students via the seminar’s Courses site. Thus, no other language than English is needed to take this seminar,

Teaching French in College -- Advanced First Year
302
Spring 2019
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 2019
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.