Spring 2023

Reading and Composition (R&C)

“This Could All Be Yours Someday” – Imagining the Nation Through Literature
R1B : English Composition through French Literature
Spring 2023
Class No: 21616
263 Dwinelle
Tu/Th
Michael Arrigo
12:30 - 1:59 PM
This course will be oriented toward the development of research skills and the production of literary analysis papers that engage with secondary sources. Its theme will focus broadly on how literature shapes the “nation” and mediates our relationship to it. Using concepts from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities as a starting point, this class will focus on a variety of texts, principally from traditions of French expression, meant to consider various themes and questions literature helps to answer in creating and sustaining the imaginary of the nation: who belongs to the nation? how should the nation be represented? What is its genesis story? What versions of history should constitute the nation’s shared memory? Texts will range from Kourouma’s masterwork of disenchantment "The Suns of Independence" to Bégaudau’s fictionalized account of his experience as French teacher in a schoolroom in Paris in modern France. Beyond textual readings, students will develop practical skills involved in the research process including searching for secondary sources, note taking, bibliographical curation, as well as further improving analytic and argumentative writing skills. Please note that no-shows to the first four class sessions will result in an automatic drop to accommodate students on the waitlist.

Required texts:
Imagined Communities (excerpts)
Ourika
Sab
The Suns of Independence
Persepolis
The Class
The Stranger
The Meursault Investigation

Structures of Belonging: Family and Kinship on the Margins
R1B : English Composition through French Literature
Spring 2023
Class No: 31574
89 Dwinelle
MWF
Jacob Raterman
2:00 - 2:59 AM
The family unit—in its various forms across space, time, and culture—is one of the primary vehicles by which societies perpetuate themselves physically and ideologically. Just as human populations and collectives change in step with the multiplication, maintenance, and decline of family lines, social knowledge is learned and transmitted, to a significant degree, in families and down hereditary lineages.

Because the motor of this mechanism is generally heterosexual marriage and procreation, marginal and non-normative genders and sexualities have had complicated and often exclusionary relationships to conventional family structures, as well as to the legal, social, political, and economic benefits that these structures are accorded. In this course, we will examine media (literary and philosophical texts, fictional and documentary films, and graphic novels) that attempt to critique and subvert traditional family configurations or rethink them entirely, offering alternative models of acceptance, belonging, connection, community, and kinship independent of reproductive imperatives. In so doing, we will establish a critical distance from received ideas about family and reflect analytically, transhistorically, and transculturally about what it might mean to discover and create families on the margins of society.

Undergraduate Courses 

Practice Phonetics and Listening Comprehension
35
Spring 2023
Class No: 20779
DWINB3
TR
Ariel Shannon
12:30 PM - 1:59 PM

Practical Phonetics and Listening Comprehension
35
Spring 2023
Class No: 25342
2030 Valley Life Sciences Building
Tu/Th
Oliver Whitmore
12:30 - 1:59 PM
This multimedia course concentrates on pronunciation and listening comprehension skills and provides a new understanding of the French language. Theoretical and practical concepts are taught as necessary, in order to familiarize students with the wide range of pronunciation systems that span the Francophone world, as attitudes and ideologies associated with them. While honing their own pronunciation, students are encouraged to critically evaluate what it means to “sound French.” This course is strongly recommended before study, work, or travel in French-speaking countries, particularly for Education Abroad Program students.

Prerequisites:

Successful completion of French 3 (or equivalent high school / IB / AP / placement exam credit, etc.). If you have questions about placement, see the Placement Guidelines on French Department website. No prior linguistics knowledge necessary. Course is taught in French. This course is strongly recommended for students intending to teach or to study or work abroad in French-speaking countries.

Additional information:

Course not typically open to native or heritage speakers of French.

Required Text: Savoir Dire, 2nd edition, Diane Dansereau. Additional readings will be available on Bcourses.

Students who need DSP accomodations for audio and/or visual materials should contact instructor (whitmore.1@berkeley.edu) as soon as possible.

Man, Woman, Other: Across and Beyond the Gender Binary in Francophone Cultures
43B : Aspects of French Culture
Spring 2023
Class No: 26292
B-37 Dwinelle Hall
MWF
Will Burton
3:00 - 3:59 PM
Stories about gender variance and transgression have circulated in French and francophone cultures since the medieval period. Sometimes they have been the vehicle for philosophical and scientific debates (nature versus nurture, free will versus determination). In religious and spiritual contexts, gender-variant people have been used as metaphors for human diversity or divine transcendence. They have also played symbolic roles in discourses of emancipation, from anticolonialism to feminism.

While we investigate these themes, we will also attend to issues of anachronism and power in these works. How can contemporary ideas and terms guide our recovery of LGBTTQI+ lives from history—or hinder it? What is at stake when apparently cisgender writers take non-cisgender people as their subject matter? How are their stories similar to or different from ones written by the “interested parties”?

The class will begin with questions of terminology (using words like “queer” or “transgender” to describe figures from the past who did not have such words; the differences between French and English). We will also read a selection of classical texts that inform the works that follow (the Bible, Plato, Ovid). We will then read texts and watch films from French-speaking contexts, tracking five recurrent themes as we go: (1) familial and economic considerations; (2) Christian mysticism; (3) Platonic androgyny and the arts; (4) scientific theories of sexual difference; (5) free will and determinism.

In addition to regular participation and preparedness, students will have the choice between two tracks for evaluations: a test track (midterms and a final) and a paper track (midterm and final papers).

(* marks texts that students will need to acquire)
Selections from Genesis, the Gospel according to Matthew, 1 Corinthians, Galatians; Plato’s Symposium; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and the Encyclopédie

*Anonymous. The Life of Saint Eufrosine. Translated by Amy Victoria Ogden. Texts and Translations, vol 35. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2021.

Balzac, Honoré de. “Sarrasine.” In The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Other Stories. Translated by Peter Collier. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Barbin, Herculine. “My Memoirs.” In Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, translated by Richard McDougall, 3–119. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Diderot, Denis. D'Alembert's Dream. In Rameau’s Nephew ; and, D’Alembert’s Dream. Translated by Leonard Tancock. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth ; New York: Penguin, 1976.

Éon de Beaumont, Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée d’. “The Great Historical Epistle by the Chevalière d’Éon, Written in 1785.” In The Maiden of Tonnerre: The Vicissitudes of the Chevalier and the Chevalière d’Eon, translated by Roland A. Champagne, Nina C. Ekstein, and Gary Kates, 1-90. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Féret, René (dir.). Mystère Alexina. JML distrib., 2013 [1985].

*Garréta, Anne. Sphinx. Translated by Emma Ramadan. Dallas, Texas: Deep Vellum Publishing, 2015.

*La Mackerel, Kama. Zom-Fam. Montreal: Metonymy, 2020.

*Perrault, Charles, François-Timoléon de Choisy, and Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier. The Story of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville. Edited by Joan E. DeJean. Translated by Steven Rendall. Texts and Translations. Translations 16. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004.

Rey, Terry. The Priest and the Prophetess: Abbé Ouvière, Romaine Rivière, and the Revolutionary Atlantic World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Sciamma, Celine (dir.). Tomboy. San Francisco, California, USA: Kanopy Streaming, 2016 [2011].

Advanced Reading and Writing Workshop
102
Spring 2023
Class No: 3 sections (2 in person, one sychronous)
Various
MWF or TTh or MW
Various
Offerings:
MWF 10-10:59am / 87 Dwinelle Hall
MW 5-6:29pm / online (synchronous)
TTh 9:30-10:59am / 126 Wheeler Hall

Readings:
Course Reader; other readings as assigned by Instructor

Course Description:
French 102 is the gateway course to the upper division in French. Students build on the solid foundation in the language and culture acquired in French 1-4 by broadening and deepening their ability to read and write about French texts in an academic context.

Students read a selection of works from different media and genres including short stories, poems, plays, letters, essays, paintings and films. Through close reading, students develop their analytical ability in French, paying particular attention to the different kinds of choices that writers make, and how these choices contribute to the making of meaning. Students also develop their skills as writers of academic French, focusing both on the content of their written work and on its form.

By the end of the course, students are ready to meet the reading and writing requirements of upper division courses in the French department.

Prerequisites:
French 4 at UC Berkeley. Students who have taken the equivalent of a third-year college-level French course elsewhere may enroll in French 102, and should contact the French Undergraduate Advising Office at frendept@berkeley.edu to confirm placement.

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 1 course requirement in French major or French minor.

Montreal: Colonisation, Urbanisation, Migration (1900–present)
103B : Language and Culture
Spring 2023
Class No: 21634
228 Dwinelle
MWF
Will Burton
2:00 - 2:59 PM
Montreal is the world’s fourth largest francophone city and North America’s eight largest one. As a French-speaking city surrounded by anglophone jurisdictions, the city lays at the crossroads of multiple histories of colonisation. As such, its authors and filmmakers have grappled with other central North American issues like sexuality, migration, racism and urbanisation in a way distinct from the Spanish– and English-language traditions that dominate the continent. We will study a selection of such works from the past century or so, divided into four broad categories:

francophone settlers’ efforts to construct a uniquely North American voice;
the social and economic dislocations caused North American-style industrialisation;
Indigenous resistance to colonisation in and around Montreal; and
migration to the city in the wake of slavery and war in the francophone world.

During the semester, students will complete a series of graduated exercises to initiate them in writing literary and filmic analysis. These exercises will culminate in a term paper.

Texts (*indicates that students will need to acquire a copy):
Berthelot Brunet, Les Hypocrties. La folle expérience de Philippe, roman, Montreal: Typo, 1989 [éd. originale : 1945]. (excerpts)

*Dany Laferrière, Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, roman, Montreal : VLB, 1985. ISBN : 9782890052185.

Émile Nelligan, Poésies. Édition originale de 1904, Montreal: Bibliothèque québécoise, 2012. (excerpts)

Gabrielle Roy, Bonheur d’occasion, roman, Montreal: Boréal, 1993 [1945]. (excerpts)

Sherry Simon, L’Hybridité culturelle, essai, Montreal: L’Île de la tortue, 1999. (excerpts)

*Michel Tremblay, Les Belles-Sœurs, pièce de théâtre, Montreal : Leméac / Actes Sud, 2007 [1ère représentation, 1965]. ISBN : 9782742770991.

Films:
Aquin, Hubert. À Saint-Henri le cinq septembre. Film documentaire. Office national du film, 1962. https://www.onf.ca/film/a_saint-henri_le_cinq_septembre/.

Bourdon, Luc. La Mémoire des anges. Collage cinématographique. Office national du film, 1985. https://www.onf.ca/film/memoire_des_anges/.

Burrows, Arthur and Jean Palardy. Montreal by Night. Office national du film du Canada, 1947. https://www.onf.ca/film/montreal_by_night/.

Girard, François. Hochelaga, terre des âmes. Film de fiction. Les films Séville, 2017. https://lumiere.berkeley.edu/students/items/49845.

Obomsawin, Alanis. Kanehsatake, 270 ans de résistance. Film documentaire. Office national du film, 1993. https://www.onf.ca/film/kanehsatake_270_ans_resistance/.

———. Sans adresse. Film documentaire. Office national du film, 1988. https://www.onf.ca/film/sans_adresse/.

Rached, Tahani. Haïti (Québec). Film documentaire. Office national du film, 1985. https://www.onf.ca/film/haiti_quebec/.

Inventing Modern Comedy: Molière and His Time
117A : 17th Century Literature
Spring 2023
Class No: 30865
33 Dwinelle
T/Th
Déborah Blocker
9:30 - 11:00 AM
Molière was France’s most prominent comical actor, playwright and stage director during the Classical Age and his plays remain central to the French imaginary to this day. This class provides an introduction to Molière’s works and times. We study a selection of his plays, ranging from his Italianate farces and the comédies-ballets (or musicals) he produced for the Court, to the high-flying social critiques he wrote and staged for his Parisian audiences. We also explore Molière’s role in the social and political institution of the theater at a time when playwriting and acting were first codified and legitimized. We give particular attention, in this respect, to Molière’s relationship to Louis XIV, and to the ways in which the King’s patronage impacted Molière’s theater. We also enquire into the history of early modern performance, studying both how Molière’s texts were pronounced, and how they might have been staged, in his time. Modern filmic reconstitutions, from Ariane Mnouchkine to Vincent Dumestre, serve as a point of departure for this investigation into the history of performance. Finally, we examine the canonization of Molière’s oeuvre, by studying examples of the publication of his works in modern times, as well as a selection of modern and contemporary performances, ranging from recent Comédie Française video productions to excerpts of historic performances made available on the site of the French INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel).

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

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

Qu’est-ce qu’une comédie ?
121B : Literary Themes, Genres, Structures
Spring 2023
Class No: 26293
4125A Dwinelle Hall
MW
Nick Paige
12:30 - 1:59 PM
Le genre classique de la tragédie est plus ou moins mort depuis plus de deux siècles, mais la comédie—grâce surtout à la comédie romantique et musicale au cinéma—continue à fonctionner selon des conventions qui remontent très loin. Ce cours propose une introduction au genre comique en France, allant de la farce médiévale à la très jouée et traduite écrivaine contemporaine Yasmina Reza. (Nous étudierons aussi quelques comédies au cinéma.) Le rire comique est-il subversif, comme on le prétend souvent ? A quoi sert la comédie, dont les « happy ends » sont si prévisibles ? Qu'est-ce que l'évolution du genre comique—et, d’un autre côté, son étonnante stabilité—peut nous dire sur les transformations du monde moderne, et sur la façon dont se construit l'identité individuelle, sociale, et sexuelle ? En plus d’une approche analytique, ce cours comprendra un volet pratique : il s’agira d’explorer ces textes de l’intérieur, en en jouant des scènes. Si l’intérêt des étudiant·e·s le justifie, nous pourrons même travailler en vue d’une représentation publique de l’une des œuvres. Mais aucune expérience d’acteur·rice n’est requise.

Introduction to the Films of the French New Wave
140D : French Literature in English Translation
Spring 2023
Class No: 26294
155 Social Sciences
Tu/Th
Nick Paige
11:00 - 12:29 PM
This class will introduce students to a number of classic films of the French New Wave, perhaps the most important and emblematic moment in modern cinema, and a still a point of reference for filmmakers ranging from Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese to Alfonso Cuarón and Wong Kar-Wai. Along the way, we will look at the theoretical and cultural factors that help explain this extraordinary flowering of filmmaking talent in the late 1950s and early 1960s; we will also be reading some important short essays from the period that will help bring the films’ originality into focus, as well as more recent scholarship. General points to be explored include: France and American popular culture; post-war economic transformations and consumerism; changing norms of sex and gender; the documentary image; the subversion and pastiche of genre; the ideology of form. All films available for streaming, with subtitles. No knowledge of French is necessary.

Women in French Literature
150A
Spring 2023
Class No: 30866
263 Dwinelle
Tu/Th
Michael Lucey
2:00 - 3:29 PM
Three quirky and extremely different novels, from 1842, 1910, and 2013 and by three quite different women novelists will allow us to explore questions of freedom and constraint, mobility and identity, across three centuries—not only on the level of the novels’ plots, but also in the way these writers play with what a (woman’s) novel can be. Along with reading the three novels, each student will also do some independent research related to one of the authors, or novels, or the history of women’s writing, or French social history or women’s history, or the history of feminism and present that research to the class.

Texts:
George Sand, Consuelo (Gallimard, Folio)

Colette, La vagabonde (LGF, livre de poche)

Marie NDiaye, Ladivine (Gallimard, Folio)

Slavery and Colonialism in Early Modern France
171B : A Concept in French Cultural History
Spring 2023
Class No: 30867
263 Dwinelle
MWF
Susan Maslan
12:00 - 12:59 PM
From first contacts with the new worlds of North and South America in through the first successful Revolution of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue/Haiti at the end of the 18th century, French readers, writers, and thinkers 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 and political consequences of such representations. We will consider how thinking of themselves as colonizers and subjects of an empire shaped conceptions of Frenchness and French identity. We will consider the formation and reformation of concepts of barbarism and savagery, civilization and enlightenment.

The early modern period 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 and the consciousness of the global nature of human society. We will read narratives of encounters with Amerindian people in North and South America; we will also read letters and memoirs of those who participated in or witnessed French colonial and slave societies and read texts by abolitionists.

Readings will include: Montaigne, “Des Cannibales”; Les Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle France (excerpts); Lahontan, Dialogues avec un sauvage de bon sens (excerpt); Voltaire, Candide; Raynal, L’Histoire politique et philosophique des deux Indes (excerpts); Chamfort, Le Marchand de Smyrne; Diderot, Le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville; Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, Duras, Ourika.

Psychoanalysis and Literature
172A
Spring 2023
Class No: 30868
263 Dwinelle
MWF
Soraya Tlatli
1:00 - 1:59 PM
Le but de ce cours est triple. Il est premièrement historique: il s'agit de découvrir la naissance et le développement de la psychanalyse dans le contexte de la psychiatrie française de l’époque. Il est deuxièmement théorique: il permettra de comprendre les principaux concepts de la psychanalyse et de la psychiatrie, en particulier l’évolution de la notion d’hystérie feminine, de Charcot à Freud. Enfin, il est littéraire: nous explorerons ensemble un ensemble de textes et d’oeuvres d’art produites par les surréalistes.

Documentary Films in the French Language
178A : Studies in French Film
Spring 2023
Class No: 32679
B-37 Dwinelle
Tu/Th
Maya Sidhu
12:30 - 1:59 PM
Course conducted entirely in French. Filmmakers working in the French language have had an outsized role in documentary innovation. In this course, we will explore the rich history of documentary film from the early 20th century to the present through a focus on influential filmmakers working in French such as: the Lumière brothers, Jean Painlevé, Jean Rouch, Safi Faye, Chris Marker, Marcel Ophüls, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, Gilles Groulx, Pierre Perrault, and Alice Diop. In this course, we will take an expansive view of documentary ranging from: scientific, political, essayistic and cinema-vérité. Students will learn how to analyze a film closely by examining how film elements work together to produce meaning. As a final project for the course, students will make a short cellphone documentary film inspired by one of the filmmakers studied. This class is open to both French and Film majors, though a knowledge of French is required.

Writing the Prison – Sensationalism, Metaphor, and Revolution
180D : French Civilization
Spring 2023
Class No: 30869
263 Dwinelle
Tu/Th
Ty Blakeney
11:00 - 12:29 PM
In this course, we will trace three parallel traditions of the representation of prisons in French culture across the 20th and 21st centuries. First, there was a sensationalist tradition of representing the prison in popular literature. These texts, often written by outsiders, exhibited the space of the prison as a kind of morbid curiosity for the avid gaze of the French public, often at the expense of the dignity of the prisoners themselves. After the Second World War, the prison also became an important metaphor for existentialist and other writers, a kind of limit case of the human experience that revealed philosophical truths. Finally, there was a tradition of literature written by prisoners themselves, often connected to the movement to reform and abolish prisons that gained steam after 1968.

During the course, students will ask questions like…

What is the role of literature in perpetuating forms of oppression? What is the role of literature in revolutionary challenges to oppressive structures?
To what extent do representations of prisons in 20th and 21st century prisons give us access to the experiences, feelings, and thoughts of prisoners themselves? What forms are best suited to do so?
Is there such a thing as an “authentic” prison text? To what degree does the embeddedness of artistic works in economic, intellectual, and political fields of struggle dictate their form and content?
How are representations of prisons across this period impacted by intersectional questions of identity, especially gender, race, class, and sexuality? (For example, is it possible to represent homosexuality in prison without sensationalizing it? Why are the metaphorical prisoners of the post-war period all straight white middle-class men? Why is the question of race largely absent from the prison reform movement of the 1970s?)
How has the representation of prisons changed as the French security state has expanded, especially in the wake of the “war on terror” in the 21st century?
What is the relevance of this tradition of prison representation for contemporary debates about the abolition of prisons?
Students will leave the class with a rich understanding of 20th century French literature’s embeddedness in historical, cultural, and political movements. The class will seek to challenge some conventional notions that students might have about the inherent revolutionary potential of literature, and give students a more nuanced theoretical framework through which to understand the relationship between literature and politics, both revolutionary and conservative. The class will also introduce students to wide range of literary and filmic texts, both canonical and “minor.”

Required texts (to be purchased online -- please search using ISBN and get only these editions):

Jean-Paul Sartre, Le Mur (978-2070368785)
Jean Genet, Notre Dame des Fleurs (978-2070368600)
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (978-2070729685)

La guerre d’Algérie et ses conséquences politiques
183B : Configurations of Crisis
Spring 2023
Class No: 30870
263 Dwinelle
MWF
Soraya Tlatli
10:00 - 10:59 AM
Dans ce cours nous analyserons les évènements historiques de la guerre d’Algérie (1954-1962), mais aussi le système du colonialisme français pendant le vingtième siècle. Nous étudierons en détail la manière dont la guerre d’Algérie a modifié le paysage politique français ainsi que les populations vivants en Algérie et en France. Nous étudierons plus particulièrement les réactions d’intellectuels français et algériens, comme Mouloud Feraoun, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre. Nous nous interrogerons sur le rôle crucial que la torture a joué pendant la guerre ainsi que sur sa redécouverte en France dans les années 2000. Nous discuterons également un ensemble de films.

Graduate Courses

17th Century Literature
230A
Spring 2023
Class No: 30871
4226 Dwinelle
W
Déborah Blocker
1:00 - 3:59 PM
This seminar is an in-depth investigation of Blaise Pascal’s most famous work, the Pensées, or Thoughts, first printed in 1670 as Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets, qui ont esté trouvées apres sa mort parmy ses papiers. Though left unfinished at Pascal’s death in 1662, the work, once published, immediately became a best-seller, and continues to fascinate literary scholars, philosophers and theologians to this day. After spending several sessions approaching the work in a contemporary standard edition, we investigate the Pensées in four main directions. First, we study the history of its making(s), from manuscript to print in 17th century France, and from one edition to the next in the contemporary world, to take stock of the Pensées’ incompleteness and instability as a text. While doing so, we conduct extensive close-readings of series of pensées, studying how different editions of the text create different hermeneutical possibilities for the unfinished work, with far-reaching implications for the (re)construction of Pascal’s philosophical and theological positions, as well as for the history of Jansenist thought and action. Second, we investigate a variety of ways in which the work has been contextualized in existing critical traditions, asking to what extent these historicized readings of the Pensées mobilize the editorial history of the text to support their claims. Thirdly, we inquire into the text’s continued aura in contemporary French thought, by examining how the fragmentary and discontinuous nature of Pascal’s Pensées provide epistemological and/or stylistic models for two important contemporary French thinkers, Louis Marin and Pierre Bourdieu. Finally, we examine some aspects of the international reception of Pascal’s Pensées, using a few foreign editions and translations as the basis for our inquiries.

The class offers an introduction to 17th century French literature, philosophy and theology, as well as to their enduring presence in French culture, and to their international reception. More generally, it familiarizes students of literature, philosophy and theology with the material study of manuscripts and editions, so that they become comfortable mobilizing philological know-how and the protocols of material bibliography in their own research. Several sessions of the seminar will be taught in the Bancroft Library, to allow for the hands-on study of editions and translations of Pascal’s Pensées. A good reading knowledge of French is necessary. Class discussions will be in French or in English, depending on the student body. For their final paper, students will be given the choice between a paper related to the history and reception of Pascal’s Pensées (to be written in French or in English) and the production of a detailed syllabus for a similar course on another canonical text of their choosing (including in another language than French).

Required materials:
Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets, qui ont esté trouvées apres sa mort parmy ses papiers, 2nd edition, 1670 (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1511234f/f16.item); Blaise Pascal, Pensées, eds. P. Sellier and G. Ferreyrolles, 2002 ; electronic edition of Pascal’s Pensées, eds. D. Descotes and G. Proust, 2011: http://www.penseesdepascal.fr/index.php ; Léon Brunschwig (ed.), Original des Pensées de Pascal, facsimilé. du manuscrit 9202 (Fonds français) de la Bibliothèque nationale : texte imprimé en regard et notes, 1905 (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9464p/f9.item) ; Louis Lafuma, Histoire des Pensées de Pascal (1656-1952), 1954 ; Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu caché, 1959 ; Marin, Louis. La Critique du discours : sur la Logique de Port-Royal et les Pensées de Pascal, 1975 and Pascal et Port-Royal, 1997; Alain Cantillon, Le Pari-de-Pascal : étude littéraire d’une série d’énonciations, 2014 ; Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes, 1997.

The French Revolution
240B : 18th Century Literature
Spring 2023
Class No: 30872
4226 Dwinelle
M
Susan Maslan
2:00 - 4:59 PM
This seminar will be a deep dive into the world-historical event that gave birth to modernity: the French Revolution.

The seminar will offer students a foundation for understanding the extraordinary complexity of the Revolution itself. After getting up to speed quickly, we will devote most of our time to work on primary documents, works, and artefacts of the Revolution. We will ask some fundamental questions: do books make Revolutions? That is, what relationships can we establish between Enlightenment writing (especially that of Rousseau) and Revolution? Conversely, we will ask whether Revolutions can create art: we will study revolutionary theater (which, like the press, grew exponentially), study the great painter and revolutionary Jacques-Louis David—thanks to the importance of David, art historians such as T.J. Clark have offered some of the most compelling accounts of the relations among art, modernity, and revolutionary politics. We will explore the meaning and significance of “minor literature” (and in so doing seek to ask what minor literature is) and popular culture in shaping the Revolution; and seek to understand how the lines between art and propaganda are drawn.

The Revolution spurred and was shaped by the explosion of print—literally hundreds of newspapers sprang to life to life nearly immediately. We will read revolutionary journalists from the obscure to the famous (Camille Desmoulins), to the infamous (Marat). The Revolution also inaugurated a new era of oratory; we will read major speeches given in the National Assembly by Robespierre, Siéyès, Condorcet, and more. We will study some famous and some not so famous debates. We will study the politics of the street: marches, riots, and political posters (many of which are available for study in the Bancroft Rare Books library). We will study the Haitian Revolution, itself a world-historical event, and the relation between it and the French Revolution.

We will study the French Revolution’s re-invention of time and space: i.e. the invention of the Revolutionary republican calendar (refigured by a poet!) and of the metric system.

This seminar will immerse students in the specificity of the Revolution itself, and also help us examine even larger questions about the relation between art and history, artistic representation and political representation, and the relation between political and social equality. We will study revolutionary changes to language, law, conceptions of race, the family, the city of Paris, and much more.

All this, and the guillotine!

Readings will be in French, class discussion largely in English.

Borders, Media, and the Crisis Imaginary
260A : 20th Century Literature
Spring 2023
Class No: 30873
6331 Dwinelle
Th
Debarati Sanyal & Rhiannon Welch
2:00 - 4:59 PM
This team-taught course challenges the rhetoric of border ‘crisis’ through an investigation of visual media and multidisciplinary theory. Our primary works will include feature-length narrative and documentary films, as well as experimental media and installations that convey the complex operations of contemporary borderscapes and myriad forms of resistance and refusal. We will consider theories of biopolitics/necropolitics, racialized imperial histories and their afterlives, border theory, the intersections of natural elements (water, soil, air) and media. Additional sites of engagement include the critical and creative resources of postcolonial theory and Black thought. Among the questions we will explore are: How do testimonies by migrants and their representations resist the EU border’s violence, historicize the refugee “crisis,” and convey new modes of becoming or belonging? How do contemporary border technologies and policies reanimate histories of racialized and imperial violence? What forms of dissent, becoming and belonging are taking shape at borders? How do we understand poiesis – as in making, self-fashioning, world-building– as lived practices as well as representations that stage the power of life to endure and escape the border’s power over life? What are the possibilities and limits of humanitarian approaches and human rights discourses on refugees–from the Sahara to the Mediterranean, from Calais to Ukraine? Theoretical works to include: Sandro Mezzadra, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott, Miriam Ticktin, Achille Mbembe, Janet Roitman, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Rosi Braidotti, and Roberto Esposito, among others. Knowledge of French and/or Italian preferred, but not required.

Students may enroll either through Italian Studies or French; course counts as an elective (290) toward the DE in Critical Theory. Students will have the opportunity to participate in a Spring conference on borders and media.

What is Sex?
265B : Modern Studies
Spring 2023
Class No: 31617
226 Dwinelle
F
Damon Young
1:00 - 3:59 PM
Depending on the context, “sex” might name a set of acts (defined between institutions of medicine and the law); a genre of relationality; or an idea and ideology of the biological division of the species. Sex is bound up in imaginaries of biological and social reproduction; of personal identity and trauma; and it lies at the heart of fears and fantasies about racial difference and national belonging. Sex is also centrally at issue, overtly or implicitly, in many or even most genres of narrative media, from the marriage plot through to romantic comedy, horror, melodrama, and of course pornography. In this course, we will consider sex as a philosophical, social, political, and representational question and problem, drawing on work in psychoanalytic theory; radical feminism; queer theory; trans studies; and a French tradition of erotic philosophy influenced by Sade and Bataille. As part of this theoretical investigation, we will examine the ways sex shapes genres and systems of representations, sometimes pushing them to their limits, sometimes safely contained within them. To this end, we will consider French feminist films and literature that use explicit sexuality as a form of politicized aesthetics; contemporary iterations of confessionality as the production of a gendered and racialized sexuality; and examples of cinema in which sex—in both senses—comes into question, or names the very question that cannot be posed. Authors and film-makers may include: Freud; Lacan; Sade; Bataille; Alenca Zupancic; Avgi Saketopoulou; Andrea Dworkin; Paisley Currah; Leo Bersani; Andrea Long Chu; Paul Preciado; Judith Butler; Lauren Berlant; Brontez Purnell; Jean Genet; Hortense Spillers; Kadji Amin; Marquis Bey; Jean-Luc Nancy; Eugenie Brinkema; Catherine Breillat; Pier Paolo Pasolini; Céline Sciamma; and Catherine Millet. Includes occasional screenings on Wed nights.

Dissertation Writing Seminar
297
Spring 2023
Class No: 33871
226 Dwinelle
Th
Damon Young
2:00 - 4:59 PM
Students having completed doctoral qualifying examinations and now working on a dissertation or prospectus will undertake a structured process leading to the completion of a finished piece of work, in most cases a dissertation chapter. Each week, students will discuss one or more works in progress, and will have an opportunity both to learn from other students’ process and research, and to receive feedback from a diverse group on your own writing. Alongside the work of participants, students will read relevant theoretical texts and discuss research methods, questions of genre, tools for moving through blocks, and avenues for publication.

Teaching French in College
302
Spring 2023
Class No: 21635
4226 Dwinelle
T
Rick Kern
2:00 - 3:59 PM

Teaching in French, Advanced Level
303
Spring 2023
Class No: 21636
4226 Dwinelle
T
Vesna Rodic
12:00 - 1:59 PM