HOME

DIRECTORY OF CLASSES

FACULTY

CONTACTS & SERVICES

Columbia University’s Directory of Classes
Class schedules are accessible here: Directory of Classes.

________________________________________________________________________

Fall 2012

FREN G4025 PRACTICUM IN FRENCH LANGUAGE PEDAGOGY
Pascale Hubert-Leibler
Designed for new Teaching Fellows. An introduction to the conceptual and practical tools of French language pedagogy.

FREN G4105 FRENCH MEDIEVAL LITERATURE LIT. OF MIDDLE AGES: The Roman de la Rose, a masterwork and the open text, from the 13th to the 16th century (in French)
Sylvie Lefèvre
In this seminar we will study Roman de la Rose, first attributed to Guillaume de Lorris and then the second author, Jean de Meun. Is the second part of the work a mere commentary of the previous, an attempt to deconstruct it, or the continuation which gave success to the whole?

We will see the lasting influence of the first Roman de la Rose on the allegorical writings and the debate on misogyny, feminism and fiction at the beginning of the 15th century. Then there are the rewritings: Jean Molinet’s on the one hand, and the pseudo-Clément Marot’s on the other. Why then has the Roman de la Rose almost disappeared in France, unlike the Commedia in Italy?

FREN G4203 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE 16TH CENTURY I
Phillip Usher
In this course, students will be introduced to French Renaissance literature via the historical and theoretical question of France's relationship to the rest of the world and to evolving understandings of the oikoumene and of human diversity in the light of the discovery of the New World (thus: the Americas, the Ottoman Empire, questions of alterity, national identity, race, the birth of ethnographic writing, etc.). Authors to be read include: Rabelais, Montaigne, Thevet, Léry, Du Bartas and Lescarbot. Modern thinkers to be discussed include: Foucault (on heterotopias), Lévi-Strauss, and others. For more details, check back soon at Phillip John Usher.

FREN G4615 LIT COLONIALE ET ETHNOLOGIE
Vincent Debaene
A study of the engagement of early Francophone writers and intellectuals with anthropological knowledge during the colonial period. Authors include Hazoumé, Sissoko, Senghor, Damas, Roumain, Hampaté Bâ, Césaire.

FREN G4620 FOUCAULT INVENTEUR DU STRUCTURAL
Etienne Balibar

FREN G8091 PROSEMINAR I
Elisabeth Ladenson
The Proseminar is designed as an introduction to graduate study in French literature and advanced study of literature in general. We will look at the history of approaches to literary criticism and theory from a variety of angles, starting with Plato and Artistotle and continuing through recent critical and theoretical trends. Specific readings and discussion topics will be chosen by the class as a whole at the start of the semester. We will use the Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory as our basic textbook.

FREN G8618 AFRICAN LIT & PHILOSOPHY: AFR LIT & PHIL: NEGRITUDE (ENG)
Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Negritude in conversation with Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson and Sartre.

The seminar will be a study of the philosophical and literary movement known as Negritude, created in the late 1930’s by black poets and thinkers Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) from Senegal, Aimé Césaire (1913- 2008) from Martinique and  Léon Damas (1912-1978) from Guyana. The ways in which Negritude has developed in conversation with  the works of philosophers such as Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, Levy-Bruhl, Sartre and Teilhard de Chardin will be examined.

The course will be in English. Part of the reading material will be in French but all texts will be studied in English.

FREN G9701 SPECIAL STUDIES FRENCH LIT I: DISSERTATION WORKSHOP
Joanna Stalnaker

HIST G8916 FRENCH EMPIRES: FRENCH EMPIRSE
Emannuelle Saada

__________________________________________________________________________

Columbia University’s Directory of Classes
Class schedules are accessible here: Directory of Classes.

________________________________________________________________________

Previous Course Offerings

FALL 2011

CLFR G4001 THEORY OF LITERATURE: JACQUES RANCIÈRE
Phil Watts
This semester's course will be devoted to a study of the writings of Jacques Rancière. We will read Rancière's major works, paying particular attention to his engagement with aesthetics, modernism, formalism, genre theory and film theory. We will also read Rancière in relation to major theoretical writings, including those of Althusser, Foucault, Bourdieu, Deleuze and Maurice Blanchot.

CPLS G4125 CRITIQUE OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE INSTITUTION OF THE CITIZEN
Etienne Balibar
NOTE: Sep. 27 - Nov 3: TuTh 6:10pm-8:50pm (12 sessions). This seminar requires an application. Please send an email to Assistant Director Catherine LaSota with the following information: name, program and year, relevant courses taken, a couple of sentences explaining interest in the course.

The course aims at rethinking the articulation of "insurrection" and "constitution" in the trajectory of modern citizenship. It begins with a return to the conflicts between vindications and critiques of the "natural rights" declared by bourgeois revolutionaries, and finishes with a discussion of the perspectives of a "citizenship beyond the institution" opened by the contemporary crisis of the national, social and imperial State. A turning point will be provided by the critical discussion of Hannah Arendt's statement of the "right to have rights" as a negative foundation of the political community.

FREN G4025 PRACTICUM IN FRENCH LANGUAGE PEDAGOGY
Pascale Hubert-Leibler
Designed for new Teaching Fellows. An introduction to the conceptual and practical tools of French language pedagogy.

FREN G4730 DISCOVERING EXISTENCE
S. Bachir Diagne
A study of the theme of human existence confronted with the infinite universe of modern science (Pascal), with the proliferation of existence (Sartre), with the absurd (Camus), with the other (Levinas).

FREN G6001 HISTORY AND STRUCTURE OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE
Sylvie Lefèvre
Situates the French language within the Romance languages by tracing its archeology from classical to popular Latin, then through Middle Ages. The basic notions of historical phonetics and an introduction to Old French. Translate texts from the 11th to the 15th centuries, with focus on those of 12th and 13th centuries.

FREN G8535 BAUDELAIRE’S LE SPLEEN DE PARIS
Antoine Compagnon
Close reading of Baudelaire’s prose poems, with relation to the history and theory of the genre, the contemporary movement from prosody to free verse, the definition of modernity, the reception and influence of the collection, and the problematic meaning of a text that still challenges interpretation.

HIST G8165 HISTORY OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
Pierre Force
A study of the emergence of political economy in eighteenth-century Britain and France, with a focus on the problematic relationship between economics and politics, and the gradual establishment of economics as a separate field of knowledge. Authors include Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Say, and Ricardo.

SPRING 2012

FREN G4xxx MODERN FRANCE: HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
Emmanuelle Saada
This class is an introduction to the political and cultural history of France since the Revolution. It will present and discuss the major historiographical debates of the past thirty years on Modern France. For the French PhD students, the class will also serve as an introduction to the teaching of French civilization.

FREN G4xxx THEATER AND REVOLUTION
Joanna Stalnaker
This course will consider both revolutions in theatrical form and practice, and the role that theater played in political revolutions, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. What were the political implications of Diderot’s formal theatrical innovations and Rousseau’s virulent anti-theatrical critique? How did the stage both mirror and transform political events during the French Revolution? What were the various configurations of aesthetics and politics in the Romantic revolution? Authors will include Diderot, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, Sade, Gouges, Hugo, Sand, and Musset.

FREN G4xxx SURREALISM
Vincent Debaene
In this course, we will study one of the main movements of 20th-century literary history, and art history in general. We will pay particular attention to the evolution of surrealism - since it never was a stable entity - and to its theoretical implications on such key notions as: the notion of author, of avant-garde, of automatism, of image or of work of art. Although centered on literature, the course will also consider some visual pieces (paintings, collages, sculptures, photographs, short films...).

FREN G6005 STYLISTICS 
TBA
The linguistic fundamentals of the study of style: the function of language; language and discourse; pragmatic aspects of communication; theories of literarity; notions of style; models of classic rhetoric. The theories and methods of modern stylistics. Style resources: lexicon; syntax; prosody; the grammar of the text; composition; narrative techniques; argumentation; metrics; prosodics. The text and the intertext. Stylistic analysis from the 16th to the 20th century of French texts in prose and in verse.

FREN G8230 READING AND REWRITING THE MIDDLE AGES
Sylvie Lefèvre
Jean de Saintré was completed and sent by Antoine de La Sale to his addressee in 1456, together with two other texts which form a collection. A laboratory of sorts for new forms of narration and for the staging of a new chivalry, this text’s reception has proven long, complex and rich. It is this reception, from the Middle Age to the XXth Century, that we propose to study. Topics will include: roman/nouvelle, symbols/signs, and medieval/modern.

FREN G8623 LITERATURE & CINEMA OF THE ALGERIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
Madeleine Dobie
This course will consider a few of the many works of literature, cinema, philosophy, and historiography that have responded to the Algerian War of Independence of 1954-62. Areas of study will include: the Algerian war and the emergence of Algerian literature; the War and the ‘École d’Alger’; the public debate over torture and human rights; the Algerian war as a precursor of 1968; Memory/commemoration of the war in Algeria and in France; gender in/and the Algerian war; the Algerian War in French/Algerian/colonial historiography, and violence and memory in the first, second, and third Algerian wars (1830-1954-1991).

FREN G8715 INTELLECTUAL INNOVATION IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE
Pierre Force
A study of changing conceptions of "the new" in science, philosophy and literature from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Authors include Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, La Bruyère, Fontenelle, Du Bos, Voltaire.

FREN G8092 MA ESSAY DIRECTION

PHIL G8xxx POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF GANDHI
S. Bachir Diagne and Akeel Bilgrami

Fall 2010/Spring 2011

FREN 8091 PROSEMINAR I 
Phil Watts
Designed for first-year graduate students. An introduction to the conceptual and practical tools of literary research.

FREN G8235 TEXT & IMAGE IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Sylvie Lefèvre
In a very specific subfield of text/image studies, we will look at works with an iconographic project.

FREN G8618 AFRICAN LITERATURE & PHILOSOPHY
Souleymane B. Diagne 
Negritude: Literature and Philosophy. The movement of Negritude started in the 1930s in Paris by African and Caribbean francophone writers was at once a literary and a philosophical project. The literature of Negritude will then be studied in this seminar as literature and as philosophy.

CLFR G8655 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: PROUST 
Elisabeth Ladenson
A general introduction to the Recherche (text read in French or English; discussion in English); we will read the entire text together and try to make sense of it and some critical approaches, as well as the history of its reception.

FREN G8716 LITERATURE & ELOQUENCE IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE
Pierre Force
A study of the rhetorical tradition in French literature from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Authors include Montaigne, Cyrano de Bergerac, Pascal, Bossuet, Longinus in Boileau’s translation, Rousseau, de Staël.

FREN G8765 PARIS, 1966: ANNUS MIRABILIS
Antoine Compagnon
On and around 1966, essential literary, esthetic and theoretical works appeared in Paris. Through the lens of this extraordinary year, we will propose a thorough exploration and contextualization of the French late modernity and early post-modernity.

CPLS G4070: CIVIC UNIVERSALISM AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES
Etienne Balibar
The seminar will address a central issue concerning the relationship between “civic-bourgeois universalism” (which in the principle asserts limitless access for every human being to the complete range of civil and political rights), and the new function of anthropological differences (sex-gender, age, health-normality, intellectuality, race, etc.), and it will try to show how this tension has affected the ideas of subjection and subjectivation which, together, constitute the identity of the modern (philosophical) subject. Whereas in traditional societies such differences as sex, age, genealogy, are used to establish hierarchies among status groups and limit access to public functions, in modern polities which legitimize their institutions through an equalitarian notion of human rights, they become at the same time more pervasive and less stable, less authoritative and more violent (symbolically and/or physically).

FREN G4105 INTRODUCTION TO MEDIEVAL FRENCH LITERATURE 
Sylvie Lefèvre
Thursday, 4:10 - 6:00 (call number: 93200)

Singing, telling, writing: what is literature in the Middle Ages?
Defining what is literature is a recurrent issue, especially for the early periods. Since the French language in the early Middle Ages became a new medium of expression, besides Latin, it was a way to imagine new forms : chanson, chanson de geste, roman, lai, fabliau, etc. Modern critics, who have emphasized differences between oral and written words, literate and illiterate audiences, learned and vulgar cultures, gave the possibility of rethinking the medieval works in other ways. However their composition and reception often exceed these kinds of division. We will look at texts in their changing historic context and manuscripts, as well in modern editions and scholarly literature.

We will explore key notions as text and book, variant and variation, author and authority.

Titles or authors to be studied include : Serments de Strasbourg ; Chanson de Roland ; chansons de troubadours et trouvères ; Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiaire ; Roman de Renart ; Rutebeuf ; Adam de La Halle’s Jeu de Robin et de Marion ; Voir Dit de Guillaume de Machaut ; Lais et Testament de Villon ; Pathelin, etc.

FREN G4203 FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE 16TH CENTURY
Phillip John Usher
Monday, 6:10 - 8:00 (call number: 05160)

The Birth and Rebirth of the Genres in Sixteenth-Century French Literature
During the sixteenth century, French literature almost completely reinvented itself, shedding medieval forms, finding inspiration in the newly printed classics of Antiquity, and inventing some completely new modes and models. This course explores this moment through the study of several key literary genres (epic, tragedy, the novel, the essay) with a focus on generic forms and frontiers. In particular, we will look at the ongoing dialogues between old and new, between tradition and innovation, between translation and imitation, as well as at the contemporary and often generically inflected navigation between traditional and new geographic reference points (Ancient Rome, Modern Rome, Jerusalem, the New World). Authors to be studied include: d'Aubigné, Du Baïf, De Bèze, Dolet, Du Bellay, Garnier, Jodelle, Léry, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Ronsard. We will also be reading from Aristotle, Euripides, Seneca, Sophocles, Virgil, and other classical sources. By the end of the course, students will have a solid general knowledge of essential landmarks of the period’s literature and of some of the key critics and thinkers currently working in the field.

The goal of this course is to study the ways in which films have participated in the debates about democracy in 20th century France. We will focus on the films of two moments of political crisis?the 1936 Popular Front and May 68 and we will raise some of the following questions: In what ways does genre condition our understanding of the work of art? What are some of the political and aesthetic differences between the films of the 1930s and the films of the late 1960s? How do we account for these differences? What is the relation between the fictional world and contemporary events? What exactly do we mean when we speak of an "art of the masses"? We will watch films by Vigo, Duvivier, Malraux, Bernard, Renoir, Godard, Varda, Duras, Marker and Truffaut. Readings include texts by André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze, and Serge Daney. This course will be taught in English.

The goal of this class is two-fold: it aims to provide first-hand knowledge of Rimbaud’s poetry, in order to understand the fascination he elicited among 20th-century writers and literary theorists. In other words, we will consider both Rimbaud the writer and Rimbaud the literary figure, both the work and the myth. The term will be divided into three parts, each of which will be devoted to one of Rimbaud’s “collections,” in chronological order (Poésies, Une saison en enfer, Illuminations). At the end of each of those three parts, we will address one of the aspects of Rimbaud’s legacy that made him so influential for the future of literature and of literary theory. We will read texts by 20th century writers on or about Rimbaud (André Breton, Georges Bataille, René Char, Maurice Blanchot, Yves Bonnefoy, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, etc.) and consider the posterity of such ideas as that of “voyance” or that of “alchimie du verbe”, as well as the famous “silence de Rimbaud”.

A historical and conceptual study of what it is to read historically, with a focus on the hermeneutic tradition. Authors include Erasmus, Spinoza, Schleiermacher, Droysen, Dilthey, R.G. Collingwood, Heidegger, Leo Spitzer, Jorge-Luis Borges, H.-G. Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and Hayden White.

In this course we will read Rousseau through the lens of the extremely polarized critical reactions his writings have elicited, from Diderot to Derrida and beyond. We will try to understand why this figure has been viewed as an exemplar of both the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment, as a defender of human liberty and as a proto-fascist, as an inspiration to women writers and as a misogynist. We will also address the ways Rousseau defined himself and his work, often in opposition to his fellow philosophes and critics. The course will be held in French, but papers may be written in English for students outside the French department.

The seminar will examine the philosophy of Islamic mysticism through classical works that can be read as both philosophical and mystical. After preliminary considerations about Islamic Neo-Platonism, we will study works by classical philosophers such as Avicenna (on Mi’raj, Remarks and Admonitions), Al Ghazali (Deliverance from Error, The Niche of Lights), Ibn Tufayl (Hayy ibn Yaqzan), Suhrawardi (Philosophy of illumination), Ibn Arabi (On Being). The last part of the seminar will be devoted to the examination of the metaphysics and symbols of a particular Sufi order.