Cornell University Registrar

FREN 1210-FREN 1220 is a two-semester sequence. FREN 1210 is the first half of the sequence designed to provide a thorough grounding in French language and an introduction to intercultural competence. French is used in contextualized, meaningful activities to provide practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Development of analytical skills for grammar leads students toward greater autonomy as language learners. Students develop their writing skills by writing and editing compositions. Readings are varied and include literary texts. Daily preparation and active participation are required.

FREN 1210-1220 is a two-semester sequence. This is the second half of the sequence designed to provide a thorough grounding in French language and an introduction to intercultural competence. French is used in contextualized, meaningful, and critical thinking activities to provide practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Development of analytical skills for grammar leads students toward greater autonomy as language learners. Students continue developing their writing skills by writing and editing compositions. Readings are varied and include literary texts and a short novel.

FREN 1230 is an all-skills course designed to improve oral communication, listening comprehension, and reading ability, to establish a groundwork for correct writing, and to provide a substantial grammar review. The approach in the course encourages the student to see the language within the context of its culture.

This course is specifically designed for premed students and students at large with an interest in medical related topics who wish to be better equipped with language skills that will enable them to convey more empathy and multicultural sensitivity while communicating with diverse patient populations throughout the Francophone world. This course aims as well to prepare students to engage in global health equity and promote awareness of language barriers in today's medical field, both domestically and abroad. This is a mid-intermediate level course, and as such, it will continue to develop and reinforce writing, reading, speaking, listening and presentational skills via an array of communicative tasks based on real-life situations.

This intermediate conversation and composition French course is designed for students interested in business fields such as Hospitality, Business Management, and Marketing, those looking for an internship or a job in French-speaking businesses or students interested in exploring the language and cultures of the French-speaking business world. The course will focus on improving oral and written skills through the acquisition of specific vocabulary and the review of essential grammatical structures commonly used in business. Students will use authentic written, visual and listening materials and engage in interactive activities relevant to the professional world and its intercultural dimension.

This intermediate-level course is designed for students who want to focus on their speaking and writing skills. Emphasis is placed on strengthening of grammar skills, expansion of vocabulary and discourse levels to increase communicative fluency and accuracy. The course also provides continued reading and listening practice as well as development of effective language learning strategies.

Working on pronunciation improves your ability to communicate in two ways. First, learning to distinguish and produce all of the sounds of French increases both your ability to understand the spoken language and your ability to make yourself understood when speaking. Second, it allows you to diminish the foreign accent that can distract some listeners and prevent you from getting your message across even if you speak quite fluently. This course focuses specifically on accent reduction and should interest anyone intending to use French in such professional arenas as international business, law, and project management, the import-export and hospitality industries, art restoration and curation, secondary and post-secondary teaching, or the performing arts. By the end of the semester students will achieve noticeably improved pronunciation, greater fluency, improved aural comprehension, and increased self-assurance in spoken French.

This advanced-intermediate course is highly recommended for students planning to study abroad as it aims to develop the writing and speaking skills needed to function in a French speaking university environment. A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated with the study of selected texts (short stories, literary excerpts, poems, articles from French periodicals, videos) all chosen for thematic or cultural interest. Students write weekly papers, participate in class discussions of the topics at hand, and give at least one oral presentation in class.

In this course, furthering oral communication skills and writing skills is emphasized. A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated through a variety of topics such as social unrest and inequality, immigration crisis, social and geopolitical issues within and outside the Eurozone, post-Brexit, cutting-edge technology, media, environment, and pop-culture via short stories, literary excerpts, videos, poems, and articles fromFrench magazines or newspapers, all chosen for thematic or cultural interest. Students write weekly papers (essays and translations), have daily conversations focusing on the topics at hand, and give at least one presentation in class.

The palace of Versailles has been an object of fascination for over three hundred years. A place of splendor and squalor Versailles has been identified with French culture as the epitome of elegance and grace from Louis XIV to Karl Lagerfeld. It has also been the scene of scandal and tragedy. This course will examine the importance the reality and mythology of Versailles has played across the centuries and across the world. We will examine the construction, the art, architecture, garden construction music and social history of the palace and its place both in Absolutist France and in our contemporary world. Using movies, reproductions or art and architecture as well as revealing the secrets of its sexual politics and murderous plots we will attempt to understand why the fascination of the greatest of all palaces continues to draw millions of visitors each year trying to discover its grandeur and decadence.

This course, designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to an array of literary and visual material from the French and Francophone world. It aims to develop students' proficiency in critical writing and thinking, as well as presenting students with the vocabulary and tools of literary and visual analysis. Each section of FREN 2310 will have a different focus-for example, colonialism and the other, or the importance of women and sexual minorities in French and Francophone history, performance in literature and film, or image and narrative-but all sections of FREN 2310 will emphasize through writing assignments and in-class discussions, the development of those linguistic and conceptual tools necessary for cultural and critical fluency.

This course designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to key cinematic techniques used in analysis of films and to major movements in the twentieth century French cinema. Students will view a broad range of French and Francophone films spanning from 1945-2004 that includes canonical as well as contemporary works. Topics studied include: the evolution of gender representation in French and Franophone films, the depiction of decolonization, and the films de banlieu genre. The class will combine discussion, presentations, class scene analysis and readings from journalistic and film criticism texts, and will be conducted in French.

Throughout Western history, the nature of melancholy (aka depression, its modern counterpart) has both inspired and baffled philosophers, doctors, artists, and writers. Compared to other ailments, affects, or conditions, this mysterious sadness has provoked a proliferation of concepts, theories, therapies, and artworks. This seminar offers a comparative survey of discourses on melancholy/depression and their related ideological, social, aesthetic, and scientific issues, from the Ancient Greeks onwards. We will focus on the ways in which melancholy/depression has been theorized in medicine, theology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, ethnography, philosophy, and ecology; on how its shifting forms are related to issues of politics, society, culture, race, and gender; and on the many modes through which it has been file and expressed in literature, visual art, music, and today's social media.

This course adopts an interdisciplinary lens to reflect on how we can think difference productively in our current global condition, through examining some of the challenges that traditionally normative legislative systems (French secularism, shari'a laws in Francophone muslim countries) come up against when faced with increasingly multi-ethnic and pluralistic societies. We will examine a wide array of contemporary issues in the French metropole and the Francophone sphere, as well as their particular histories. Combining an interdisciplinary approach, we will look at a set of current events, legislations, and public debates, such as the burqa ban, terrorism, the same-sex marriage debate (marriage pour tous), and immigration 'queston'.

The history of the Francophone world is riddled with cold cases: political scandals, investigative enigmas, and cover-ups that either remain unanswered today, or that look decades to finally be "solved";: Who killed Patrice Lumumba? How did Maurice Audin 'suddenly' disappear in Algiers? In this course, we will examine some of the most haunting political assassinations, disappearances, and cover-ups, through public media, political essays, histor7, but also through fiction and film. We will grapple with how the 'truth' becomes the locus of political struggle, but also the means to justice, and potential repair. The course fulfills the Francophone requirement.

The French Revolution was one of the most dramatic upheavals in history, sweeping away centuries of tradition and ushering in the political and cultural modernity we arguably still live in today. Although often remembered for mass executions by guillotine and the rise of Napoleon, it was much more. Between 1789 and 1815, the French people experimented with virtually every form of government known to the modern world: absolutist monarchy, constitutional monarchy, representative democracy, radical left-wing republicanism, oligarchy, and right-wing autocracy. This course explores the rapidly changing political and social landscape of this extraordinary period, the evolution of political culture (the arts, theater, songs, fashion, the cult of the guillotine), and shifting attitudes towards gender, race, and slavery. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)

This course offers an introduction to Canadian literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with a special focus on the multilingual, multicultural character of Canadian cultural production. We'll take a look at texts from both French-speaking (in translation) and English-speaking Canada, including Indigenous and immigrant authors who locate themselves at once inside and outside those linguistic traditions. Special emphasis will be given to queer voices and other engagements with the representation of gender, sexuality, and desire. An additional independent study, conducted in French, may be taken by students who wish to explore Francophone material in greater depth.

Part theory, part textual analysis, and part creative writing, this course aims to help students develop a richer, more nuanced understanding and command of both the spoken and written language. As students refine their understanding of style and learn techniques for characterizing stylistic varieties, they apply these concepts both to the reading of a singular (and yet very plural) literary text. Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style, and to the writing of new exercices de style of their own. We also consider the relevance of stylistics to translation and of translation to Queneau's text. Seminar-style participation in class discussions and activities is expected.

In this course, both seminar and workshop, students discuss writing about translation, mostly in French, and practice translating from French to English. The theoretical texts studied represent a variety of perspectives and the French texts translated, a variety of literary and non-literary genres. Students will investigate ways of addressing various types of difficulties they encounter in the process of translating across languages and cultures with the aim of developing their own principled approach to translating.

This course is designed to teach ways of reading and understanding works created from the Romantic period to the present day, in their cultural context. A range of texts from various genres is presented, and students refine their analytical skills and their understanding of various methodologies of reading. Texts by authors such as Balzac, Baudelaire, Cixous, Duras, Genet, Mallarme, Michaux, Proust, Rimbaud, Sarraute, and Sartre.

I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep is a famous quote of 18th C. French writer Beamarchais;it presents a durable trait of French culture, where laughter used to be - and still remains - a powerful way to interact socially. From humour bon enfant to comedic transgressions, from biting irony to conservative strategies fueling the fear of ridicule, laughter in France is neither marginal nor anodyne. Our course will bring together literary texts from the 15th C. onward (theatrical plays as well as poetic satires or novels) with visual media (including political caricatures from the French Revolution up to Charlie Hebdo, or 20th C. movies). Studied authors could include: Rabelais, Moliere, Voltaire, Jarry, Bergson. Conducted in French.

Modern capitalism is intimately connected to the ethics of play. Through French and Francophone literature, this course explores a host of capitalist players and the vexed moral questions they raise from casino gamblers and roulette addicts to bankers who invented speculative finance by domesticating fortune through probability, a middle-class founded on ruinous debts, and hustlers who create an informal economy in order to make their own luck in the capitalist game. Readings may include: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Guitry, Mabanckou, Carrere, among others.

This course is conceived as a critical introduction to a cultural and political debate that appeared in the years of Mitterrand's France and reached its climax in the last decade. It will focus on a French society deeply shaped by immigration and globalization. In which way do the youth of the banlieue - mostly formed by postcolonial Blacks and Muslims - create their own culture with the French culture? How have literature, essays, movies, documentary films, national identity carried on by governments reacted to these transformations? Selecting literary texts (by Maryse Conde, Zahia Rahmani, Adb El Malik) and other cultural productions, the course will explore the new expressions of France as an imagined community.

The concept of intellectual - the writer or scholar who takes a political commitment - was born in France at the end of the nineteenth century. From the Dreyfus Affaire to the recent polemics on French identity, passing through Vichy, the Algerian War and May 68, intellectuals established a symbiotic relationship between culture and politics, becoming a sort of national brand, object of both admiration and contempt outside of the country. The aim of this course is to revisit some crucial moments of this history, focusing on different attempts to define the nature and function of the intellectual, from Emile Zola to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Simone de Beavoir to Michel Foucault.

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called city films, combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of knowing a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

This course will offer an overview of theoretical and historical responses to bodily and cognitive difference. What was the status of people with (dis)abilities in the past, when they were called monsters, freaks, abnormal? How are all of these concepts related, and how have they changed over time? How have we moved from isolation and institutionalization towards universal design and accessibility as the dominant concepts relative to (dis)ability? Why is this shift from focusing on individual differences as a negative attribute to reshaping our architectural and more broadly social constructions important to everyone? Authors to be studied include: Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, and Jasbir Puar.

Literature offers valuable perspectives on medicine and the human body that help us focus on the humanity of the individual who is the object of medical interventions. This focus often occurs as a result of carefully chosen languages that can be seen as constituting a poetics of the body. In this course, we will examine the poetics of the body in a range of literary, philosophical, and scientific works. We will explore how literary authors revise or rework medical representations of the body and of the individual in order to evoke the value and complexity of the human body.

If humanistic research consists of finding consensus positions, articulating simple expressions, summarizing texts, standardizing identities, or doing passable translations, then this it: we arrived at the place where artificial intelligence is able to accomplish these missions to a convincing degree. However, we erred if we ever thought such tasks would constitute the humanities. Combining theory and practice, this interdisciplinary class aims to show what AI can generate, and capture… and what the humanities can create, and think. A critique of AI is essential, but it needs to be both scientifically sound and scholarly robust. Our course will look at key issues about language, cognition, textuality, or creativity, while taking advantage of ongoing research and editorial projects hosted by the Humanities Lab.

This course will examine how monster stories are told, from medieval tales of giants and dragons to modern horror films. We will discuss why these stories are often monstrous in their form, disorient the reader with disorderly narratives. What are strategies the authors deploy to unsettle us, rhetorical strategies like silence, euphemism, hyperbole, and chronological and perspectival disruptions? We will examine the complex meanings of these tales, often torn between acceptance of radical difference (corporeal or cognitive) and rejection of the other. Texts will include: Le Chevalier au Lion, Le Fantome de l'Opera, Les Revenants, and horror stories by Maupassant.

In the age of smartphones and social media, it's a cliche to say that the competing claims made on our attention only seem to be multiplying. But a cliche can be true. This course is an opportunity to enact certain practices of attentiveness and concentration, drawing largely from religious, literary, artistic, philosophical sources. We'll be trying to slow down our normal critical processes, to suspend the appropriative, pragmatic, and goal-oriented nature of much of the modern university. Through various exercises, from memorizing poems to immersing ourselves in our surroundings to reading about the ways in which our senses reach out to the world, we'll try to make ourselves more attentively available to that world.

Discussions surrounding controversies about gender often exclude intersex, perpetuating the assumption that nonbinary gender is not "natural". We will examine the social and political stakes of including intersex in our thinking about gender, guided by the work of Hil Malatino, David Rubin, Iain Morland, and others, as well as by early modern theories of intersex and transgender elaborated by Ambrois Pare, Michel de Montaigne, and Jacques Duval, who recognized intersex as a natural variation. Intersex theory will be linked to George Canguilhem's critique of the concepts of normal and abnormal and contrasted with John Money's problematic theories of gender.

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors. Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives. As unbound energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life. Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology. Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

This course will introduce students to the contemporary ecofeminist theories which are being developed in the francophone world today in parallel with the analysis of different case studies, using literary, philosophical, scientific French and Francophone works. The course seeks to look at some of the engendered frameworks that have led to political, sociological and ecological impasses and explores how solutions to ethical, environmental and economical problems may require a feminist perspective. The goal of the course is to open a dialogue between these works, as they represent, symbolize, translate the so-called universal knowledge of the Western World and the emerging situated knowledges of the Other Non Western World.

Practice makes perfect, the old saying goes, but the nature of that connection remains opaque. This course, conducted in English and intended as a sequel to FREN 3540 - On Paying Attention, gives students the opportunity to engage with everyday material and spiritual practices, and to reflect upon the kids of things these practices make. What is the place of routine and repetition in our lives? How can we open a conversation about our habits? We'll look for models to the long history of writing on the subject, largely but not exclusively by Christian thinkers (e.g. Augustine, Benedict, Aelred, Francis, Ignatius), even as we develop new ways of accounting for, and developing, the practices that make our lives meaningful. Artists, athletes, and introverts especially welcome.

This course will introduce students to the relationship between modern fantasy fiction and the Middle Ages. What kind of world is the world of quests and secret love affairs, swords and sorcery? We'll begin with the two main models for adventure stories in medieval French literature, the Song of Roland and Lancelot, before examing how they appear in modern literature and film. Along the way, we'll consider more familiar exchanges between medieval literture and modern allegory in the work of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and we'll ask what fantasy fiction allows us to fantasize about.

Readings in French and Francophone philosophy and theory, from the 16th century to today. Themes may vary each offering, but can include questions of: death and finitude, gender, existence, affect, literature, art, and aesthetic, humanism and posthumanism, ecology, responsibility, ethics politics, violence, slavery, education, capitalism,and colonialsim.Texts from numerous authors, such as: Montaigne, Derrida, Irigaray, Deleuze, Rousseau, Fanon, Pascal, De Beauvoir, Blanchot, Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Debord, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Levinas, Cixous, Mbembe, Descartes, Badiou, Latour, Althusser, Weil, and others.

Is Homo sapiens the only species capable of producing visual art? Nonhuman great apes, especially, seem to be able to draw, paint, and enjoy such works. Our prehistoric ancestors are responsible for the adornment of the Lascaux, Altamira, or Chauvet caves. Our next of kin in the distant past (including Neanderthals) also displayed symbolic activity involving visual (re)presentation. Avant-garde or Aboriginal practices, “outsider art” concurrently challenge how we define the visual realm. Thus, the purpose of this interdisciplinary class is to revisit the contemporary debate on the dawn of art by bringing together research in paleoanthropology and primatology at the interface of aesthetics, cognitive science, and speculative theory. The course could also allow students to participate in related research projects undertaken in the Humanities Lab.

The Second World War and the Occupation of France by German forces had a traumatic impact on the nation's identity. We will examine the way France has tried to deal with this conflicted period through a series of films that each deal, directly or indirectly with the major questions posed by history to French memory of the Occupation. What was the role of collaboration, resistance, anti-Semitism, of writers and intellectuals during this traumtic period? How has film helped to define and re-shape the ways in which France has come to terms with its conflicted past?

This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. Occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media.

This course examines how writers, filmmakers, and content creators from Africa engage with and revise public images of bodies-specifically pleasure, queerness, sex strikes, etc. Our inquiry also surveys theorists' commitment to highlighting forms of self-fashioning and agency/responsibility in addition to troubling problematic tropes of pathologization and excess. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious yet empowering nature of the body. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentations) and deep attention to analysis and writing (reaction papers, an abstract, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you refine your understanding of body politics.

Western modernity and humanism have been the target of decisive critique over the past decades in philosophy and theory. But these trends are not contemporary in any simple sense; they have strange affinities with the premodern modes of writing and thinking put forth in the Essays (1580-95) of Michel de Montaigne. This seminar interrogates the contemporaneity of Montaigne by rereading the Essays in dialogue with influential philosophers and theorists, such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Adorno, Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Derrida, and Haraway. While studying Montaigne's untimely place in intellectual history, we will examine related aesthetic modes and explore how the unprecedented (anti)philosophical gesture of the Essay resonates with posthumanist styles and questions in ecological thought, philosophy, politics, and indigenous studies.

Guided independent study of special topics.

Guided independent study of special topics.

This course studies philosophical, literary, and scientific conceptions of nature and the ethics and politics of human-nonhuman relations. We will cover a wide array of texts and global issues-such as animal cruelty, indigenous ecological thought, climate justice, plant ecologies, and ecological sovereignty-while trying to trace a history of French and Francophone ecological thought, from the 16th century to today. Our readings will address a number of related questions: what is our responsibility to nonhuman beings? How must our conceptions of nature, humanity, ethics, and politics change to become more ecological? And are these issues contemporary or have they been with us for centuries, even millennia? Students will closely study and collectively discuss texts while undertaking assignments ranging from the analytic to the experimental.

A number of well-known French novels have been adapted, appropriated, and reimagined, giving them a life well beyond France and beyond the time in which they were produced. We will explore how one novel can serve various, sometimes contradictory, purposes in different times and cultures by examining the context in which it was written, the text itself, and the variations that have arisen over time.

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' - the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes- to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of capitalist ruination which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Edouard Glissant (1928-2011). We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought.

Feminism has a long history in France, from the work of Christine de Pizan (1364-1431), which instigated the centuries-long discussion of women's rights and women's status known as the Querelle des femmes (the Quarrel about women), through Louise Labé and Marie de Gournay in the sixteenth century and Olympe de Gouges in the eighteenth, to modern and postmodern feminists such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, and more recently, Mona Chollet. The work of these authors will be seen in the light of premodern and modern misogyny, witchcraft theory, queer theory, (Foucault and Judith Butler) and political theory (theories of sovereignty from Jean Bodin to the present). This course will be conducted in French.

Taking the form of ghosts, revenants, and zombies, dead are regularly summoned up in literature, film, and TV series. Their eternal return and narrative power reflect the upheavals of our troubled times as either disquieting or mischievous, tragic, or comic characters. How can we explain this return of the repressed? How do they manifest themselves in contemporary French-language fiction? What do they tell us about ourselves, our hidden memories, our conceptions of the invisible, an our projections into the future? This seminar will scrutinize many novels, films and TV series that raise these questions by combining literary, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This will provide the opportunity of rethinking some key methodological notions such as uncanny, hauntology, and spectral turn.

This course will examine a rich literary, artistic and cinematic collection of women's stories and gendered narratives that were usually considered as belonging to the margins of History. Simone de Beavoir's Second Sex was one of the first to attempt to unveil the philosophical and ideological workings of the sexual ordering of the Occident, its prejudiced and obfuscations. While analyzing some of the West's traditional myths, tales, representations and narratives, this course will extend the scope of Beauvoir's inquiry into a non-Western and transnational perspective. The texts and material to be examined will include works by Germaine de Stael, George Sand, Flora Tristan, Marguerite Duras, Helene Cixous, Assia Djebar, Maryse Conde among others.

The course will propose a parallel reading of some of the most famous texts of romantic literature with texts less known in order to develop and challenge both the canon of literary history but also to extend the field of romantic studies beyond purely literary concerns and geographies. Taking as a starting point Harold Bloom's famous definition of Romanticism as the internalization of romance, particularly of the quest we propose to scrutinize some of these canonical works. Texts to be read could include Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir, Germaine de Stael's Corinne ou l'Italie, Chateaubriand's Atala, Flora Tristan PeIregrinations d'une noir, George Sand's Indiana, Suzanne Voilquin, Memoires d une fille du peuple en Egypte, Louise Michel's L'ere nouvelle.

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by literature and the sciences. Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

What is the “meaning of meaning,” exactly? Are signification, significance, sense, and meaning one and the same? Is “semantics” a sub-branch of linguistics, or what GPT “does,” or a path to poetry? This transdisciplinary research seminar will put to the test vastly different theories—and practices—of meaning, ranging from the display of signification in the verbal arts to the task of philosophical definition, from the technology of the dictionary to that of computerized word embedding, from the interplay between cognition and communication to the scholarly art of reading. Our scope will be broad and comparative, across disciplines, languages, historical periods, and genres. The course could also allow students to participate in related research projects undertaken in the Humanities Lab.

Western modernity and humanism have been the target of decisive critique over the past decades in philosophy and theory. But these trends are not contemporary in any simple sense; they have strange affinities with the premodern modes of writing and thinking put forth in the Essays (1580-95) of Michel de Montaigne. This seminar interrogates the contemporaneity of Montaigne by rereading the Essays in dialogue with influential philosophers and theorists, such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Adorno, Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Derrida, and Haraway. While studying Montaigne's untimely place in intellectual history, we will examine related aesthetic modes and explore how the unprecedented (anti)philosophical gesture of the Essay resonates with posthumanist styles and questions in ecological thought, philosophy, politics, and indigenous studies.

Designed for those with little or no background in French. Aims primarily to develop skill in reading French. Covers grammar basics, extensive vocabulary, and strategies for reading in a foreign language. Some flexibility in selecting texts according to fields of interest.

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' - the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes- to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of capitalist ruination which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Edouard Glissant (1928-2011). We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought.

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Guided independent study for graduate students.

This course is for anyone drawn to beauty-and anyone who, within the beautiful, finds the trace of a loss. What do we grieve, what do we miss, when we find ourselves in the presence of beauty? And what, in every retrospective, prospective or otherwise non-present beauty, do we nonetheless crave and nonetheless mourn? What is the beauty hidden within mourning? We'll take a look at thinkers, poets, and artists from both modern and premodern culture, potentially including Anne Carson, Augustine of Hippo, Fra Angelico, Gillian Rose, Herve Guibert, Pepe Espaliu, and others, as we try to sit with dual summons of beauty and grief: beauty or grief.

There's a moment in the movie The Princess Bride when, listening to an adventure story, a kid worries that this might be a "kissing book." This course takes kissing books as places where "romance" and "fantasy," two overcharged words and two overlapping genres, are stages for our enjoyment. If medieval romances give us a template for narrating desire, and if medieval monastics use kissing, especially in the Song of Songs, to articulate an erotics of reading, the recent explosion of queer romance and fantasy fiction may give us a new way to read (and, who knows, maybe even kiss) with our manifold bodies and desires. Expect Chretien de Troyes, Brnard of Clairvaux, Dante, and lots of queer fiction.

This seminar will offer a critical examination of the literature of perversion (sadism, masochism, fetishism), with readings drawn from major texts of the libertine or S/M traditions (Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Lautreamont, Reage, Flanagan), as well as recent works of philosophy that share with these writers an investment in what I will term writing the real. We will consider works of perversion not merely as literary or clinical cases, therefore, but as illuminating how the discourse of perversion, broadly understood, posits or constructs the real-its cases or modes of postulation or figuration. We will focus our attention on three modes of construction that purport to straddle the alleged gap between language and its real-figure, fetish, and formalization-considering in each case their relation to the problematic of the drive. In addition to the authors mentioned above, readings will include selections from Badiou, Freud, Deleuze, Ferenczi, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Meillassoux, Perniola, and Zizek.

This course will examine a rich literary, artistic and cinematic collection of women's stories and gendered narratives that were usually considered as belonging to the margins of History. Simone de Beavoir's Second Sex was one of the first to attempt to unveil the philosophical and ideological workings of the sexual ordering of the Occident, its prejudiced and obfuscations. While analyzing some of the West's traditional myths, tales, representations and narratives, this course will extend the scope of Beauvoir's inquiry into a non-Western and transnational perspective. The texts and material to be examined will include works by Germaine de Stael, George Sand, Flora Tristan, Marguerite Duras, Helene Cixous, Assia Djebar, Maryse Conde among others.

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by literature and the sciences. Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

What is the “meaning of meaning,” exactly? Are signification, significance, sense, and meaning one and the same? Is “semantics” a sub-branch of linguistics, or what GPT “does,” or a path to poetry? This transdisciplinary research seminar will put to the test vastly different theories—and practices—of meaning, ranging from the display of signification in the verbal arts to the task of philosophical definition, from the technology of the dictionary to that of computerized word embedding, from the interplay between cognition and communication to the scholarly art of reading. Our scope will be broad and comparative, across disciplines, languages, historical periods, and genres. The course could also allow students to participate in related research projects undertaken in the Humanities Lab.

This seminar considers the transformative ingress of ecological concerns into a number of fields, from philosophy and deconstruction to anthropology and literary studies. While acknowledging the unprecedented events - e.g., anthropogenic global warming-that have precipitated this eco-turn, our course will also sample millenary pre-history of environmental philosophy in the West and place it into dialogue with ecological thought and ethics from Caribbean and other non-Western, especially American indigenous culture. Our trajectory is threefold: we will study philosophical, literary, and scientific conceptions of nature, nonhuman beings, and human-nonhumans relations; we will grapple with the how to articulate the ontology and phenomenology of the environmental conditions; and we will investigate a handful of subfields of ecocriticism (such as animal studies, plant studies, and cold studies).

This course is a broad survey of the theoretical and aesthetic movements that have attempted to grapple with trans-cultural or multicultural contexts, in contact zones produced historically by colonialism, slavery, and indenture labor, and more recently by migration. The seminar will ask the following questions: How did theories of hybridity emerge in the colonial context, and how did they evolve in their postcolonial enunciation? How did Caribbean and Indian Ocean intellectual traditions negotiate their own multi-racial identities through, respectively, Creoleness and Coolitude? How do more recent forms of trans-cultural identity, like Afropolitanism, renegotiate between multiple identities? Includes woks by Senghor, Cesaire, Chamoiseau, Glissant, etc.

Kant’s third Critique is often read as a text that inaugurates aesthetic philosophy proper and confirms the essential connection between aesthetics and (the modern metaphysics of) the human subject. Challenging this humanist understanding of Kant, this seminar studies pre- and post-Kantian philosophy, literature, and theory so as to rethink aesthetic categories as modes of being, ones deeply consequential in a time of nascent posthumanist and environmental thought. Alongside ancient, early modern, and contemporary readings, we will study relevant cases in the arts (the grotesque; landscape; sketching; the non-finito; fragments; ruins) and in ecological theory (fungi; plants; monstrosity; spontaneity).