French 3650, Section 002: "Sports and the Body in Modern France"
MW: 8:15 A.M.-9:30 A.M.
3 credits
Description: Prerequisite: FREN 3015. In the lead-up to the Rio Olympics and the Moscow World Cup, this course will examine the cultural and political uses of sport in the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries, as well as some of the many ways sports have been imagined to make or unmake bodies. Through encounters with literary texts, criticism, film and other cultural materials, we will parse attempts to define what sport is and is not, to understand sport’s ethical, aesthetic, and political implications in the era of mass spectacle, and to describe how sports have participated in shaping bodies in modernity. From the athletic young girls in Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs to the sinister games in Perec’s W, from the mythologized footballer in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s “La Mélancolie de Zidane” to Barthes’ sport “mythologies,” this course will pay close attention to how athletic gestures have been imagined to express aspects of ethnicity, gender, and class identity in motion.
Instructor: T. Wilds
