Three seminars will be offered in our department next semester. Some seminars in our department require participation in French, others require reading knowledge of French. See below for details...
French 8270: Literature Out of Bounds in Modern and Contemporary France (Prof. Mária Brewer)
French 8410: Storied Identities: Women Writers in Contemporary Quebec (Prof. Eileen Sivert)
French 8120: The Problem of the Fifteenth Century (Prof. Susan Noakes)
French 8270 Critical Issues: Prose. Literature Out of Bounds in Modern and Contemporary France
Mária Brewer--Th 2:30-5:00pm
The questions of the literary and its boundaries (or lack of them) have undergone dramatic changes in response to historical situations and events as well to the propositions of avant-garde aesthetics and its various forms of experimentation. This course aims to provide the opportunity for discussing selected narrative and critical works that have contributed significantly to resetting the boundaries for an understanding of literature and the socio-symbolic conditions for representation in modernity. Seminar readings and discussions will be organized according to the following topics: 1) The novel and subjectivity in the early 20th Century; 2) What is literature in existentialist thought and action? 3) The New Novel reconsidered; 4) Boundaries of the subject in la societe de fiction. Literary works will be selected from the following: Marcel Proust, Louis-Rene des Forets, Nathalie Sarraute, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Georges Perec, Monique Wittig, Marguerite Duras, Amelie Nothomb, Marie Darrieussecq, and Kossi Efoui. (Note: no more than six texts will be selected from the above for common reading, but all of the above as well as the critical theorists below may be chosen as subjects for the presentation and/or the seminar paper.) In conjunction with these works, we will read essays by theorists who have engaged with the notion of literature and its status in history, culture, and critical thought. Selections will be made from writings by the following: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roman Jakobson, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Helene Cixous, Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man, and Jacques Ranciere. The course will be conducted in French. If you have a reading knowledge of French, you are welcome to participate in either English or French.
French 8410 Topics in Quebecois Literature: Storied Identities: Women Writers in Contemporary Quebec
Eileen Sivert--Tu 2:30-5:00pm
This course looks at the disproportionate role women writers have played in the transformation of the novel in Quebec. We will touch briefly on the development of the Quebecois novel from the `novel of the land? (which dominated literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Quebec) to contemporary writing. The class, however, will concentrate on more recent novels (and some films) which pose questions about power, authority, language and form. Changes in narrative will be considered in the context of changes in the social order. We will see how, with these writers, there is a shift from a male-centered `novel of the land? to, first, a modern psychological novel, which foregrounds the female and announces and participates in the liberalization of social institutions. At the same time these novels reveal the beginnings of experimentation with form that are so evident in the literature of Quebec today. The writers selected work in different ways to question boundaries or limits imposed by lingering traditions in a changing society. Through novels as well as cultural and theoretical readings, we will analyze the acts of writing and storytelling as means of reconstructing social meaning as well as forming and altering social relations and community in contemporary (that is to say rootless and itinerant) society. The experience of Quebec women writers, moving suddenly from limited access to the published word to near dominance in many literary circles, as well as the radical transformation of their place in modern Quebec society, makes them particularly suitable subjects for this kind of study. They all suggest, through storytelling, a kind of fluid self-determination, teased out in a process of shuttling between a community standpoint and a growing individual perspective, with community chosen and created, constructed through writing and storytelling. Indeed these novels serve as case studies that both test and expose the creative power of narrative on identity. Primary readings will include novels by Gabrielle Roy, Monique LaRue, Anne Hebert, Louise Dupre, Elise Turcotte and possibly Nicole Brossard or Lise Tremblay. Cultural and theoretical readings will be chosen from writings of Sherry Simon, Deborah Parsons, Michel de Certeau, Julia Kristeva, Lori Saint-Martin, Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin. Readings are mostly in French with some in English. Seminar discussions will be in English. A reading knowledge of French is required.
French 8120 Topics in Later Medieval French Literature. The Problem of the Fifteenth Century
Susan Noakes--W 2:30-5:00pm
French literary historiography has long struggled with the literature of the fifteenth century. Perhaps the best-known and most coherent overview of the period and its cultures appears in Johan Huizinga's THE WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES. The class will work to develop an understanding of this century of literary experimentation and change by studying especially the works of Christine de Pizan, Charles d'Orleans, and Francois Villon. Attention will also be given to THE FARCE OF PIERRE PATHELIN, Rene d'Anjou's LE LIVRE DU CUER D'AMOUR EPRIS, LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI, and Froissart's LA PRISON AMOUREUSE. Important themes will include nostalgia for courtliness, the reaction against courtliness, the representation of gender, and the literary effects of the Hundred Years' War. Some attention will be given to the development of Middle French and to the early history of French poetic forms and their relation to the history of music. Conducted in French.
