Graduate Seminars

For information about courses please refer to Yale Course Search and Canvas :

Fall 2024

fren 844 : inventories and inventions: cabinets de curiosité and the writing of singularity (dominique brancher)

A seminar on “cabinets de curiosités” and the stories told about the objects they contain, whether real or invented. We pay close attention to catalogues, as modes of exhibition in their own right, as products of a collection, as well as vectors for the dissemination of a given collection of objects. We see how the catalogue is a textual crossroads, able to absorb, integrate, and sometimes correct developments in scholarly or travel writing. The catalogue is often also the pretext to parodic or fictional forms. For example, some might claim to present imaginary collections. Others present themselves as real catalogs while exhibiting the signs of fabrication. Catalogues include “Le Cabinet de M. de Scudéry” (1646), “Musaeum clausum” or “Bibliotheca abscondita” by Thomas Browne (1684), and the fictitious catalogue included in Francis Bacon’s “La Nouvelle Atlantide” (1627). This course includes readings in relevant critical and theoretical literature, as well as visits to museums and libraries in New Haven. Readings and discussions in French. For each session, critical readings (complementary texts, articles, excerpts) are proposed on the server in PDF or HTML format.

FREN 861 Margins of the Enlightenment (pierre saint-amand)

This course proposes a critical examination of the French Enlightenment, with a focus on issues of progress, universalism, empire, and race. We confront these notions with approaches that have emerged in the postcolonial field of studies as well as gender and sexuality studies. Canonical authors are reinterpreted in that light along with lesser-known works. We are assisted by contemporary historians and critics of the Enlightenment, principally Michel Foucault, Lynn Hunt, and Robert Darnton. Readings by Mme. de Graffigny, Mme. de Stael, Mme. de Duras, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, Raynal and Cugoano. Conducted in French.

FREN 930: Fiction and the Archives (alice kaplan)

What can be learned about 20th-century French literature from literary archives? This course investigates fiction by Proust, Céline, Guilloux, Sartre, Sarraute, Wittig, studying finished books in the light of manuscripts, letters, and historical sources. An exploration in particular of the idea of the “genesis” of a literary work. A number of classes will take place in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Conducted in English.

fren 969: Islands, Oceans, Deserts (Jill jarvis)

This seminar brings together literary and theoretical works that chart planetary relations and connections beyond the paradigm of francophonie. Comparative focus on the poetics and politics of spaces shaped by intersecting routes of colonization and forced migrations: islands (Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Martinique), oceans (Indian, Mediterranean, Atlantic), and deserts (Sahara, Sonoran).

Prerequisite: reading knowledge of French; knowledge of Arabic and Spanish invited. Conducted in English.

Spring 2025

fren 668:  Ekphrasis and Art Criticism (Carol Armstrong)

Ekphrasis in its ancient Greek sense refers to the vivid description of an object, animal, person, place, scene, or event undertaken as an exercise in oral rhetoric. In that original context, the practice of ekphrasis was meant to “paint” a picture in the mind of the listener, and thus pointed to both the imagistic capacities of verbal language, and the integral link between the image and the imagination. In the twentieth century, ekphrasis acquired a narrower meaning: poetry addressed to or modeled on works of visual art. While informed by both of those understandings, this seminar considers ekphrasis both more broadly, in terms of genre, and more narrowly, in relation to a partial history of art criticism as a modern form of writing in the anglophone and European worlds, with a focus on the eighteenth through the twentieth century. It treats the different writerly modes now understood to be embraced by the term ekphrasis: not only poetry, but also the prose poem and the novel, as well as the Salon and art review. It also touches on such issues as the Renaissance inversion of the phrase ut pictura poesis; the competition between the arts of word and image; the presence or absence of illustrations; the modern relations between genres and mediums and the question of mediation; and the address of the different arts to the subjectivity of the reader/spectator. In addition to weekly presentations, a short preliminary paper, and a final research paper, students organize and contribute to a workshop on ekphrasis based on their own ekphrastic exercises, undertaken in the Yale Art Gallery. (Some class time is devoted to those exercises.) This seminar is the second of two (the first is HSAR 667); our hope is that students from both seminars will collaborate on this final event.

fren 670:  Methods and Techniques in the Italian and French Language Classroom (Anna Iacovella/candace skorupa)

This course creates a substantial apprenticeship program for second-year graduate students. Rising teaching fellows are exposed to a variety of methodologies and perspectives historically and currently applied in teaching Italian and French with reference to global education. In order to maximize all learning opportunities, students analyze and discuss several methods without dismissing or favoring some over others. The intent is to encourage students to develop their own teaching styles, drawn from a number of important approaches to language pedagogy. At the same time, far from focusing only on methodologies and practices, the course strives to integrate other aspects of language education as well, and students have the chance both to observe classes and to develop and teach several classes of their own during the term.

FREN 770:  Derrida Among the Poets (Thomas c. Connolly)

Prerequisite: ability to read, write, and discuss in French.

FREN 785:  Haiti in the Americas (marlene daut/anne eller)

This course broadens the temporal parameters of Atlantic history to consider the formation and impact of colonial Saint-Domingue, the import of revolutionary Haiti, and the trajectory of state making on the island through imperial projects of the twentieth century. The course engages with scholarship from the circum-Caribbean, the United States, France, and the greater Atlantic African diaspora.

fren 802:  Chaucer and Translation (ardis butterfield)

An exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400), brilliant writer and translator. Using modern postcolonial as well as medieval theories of translation, memory, and bilingualism, we investigate how texts in French, Latin, and Italian are transformed, cited, and reinvented in his writings. Some key questions include: What happens to language under the pressure of crosslingual reading practices? What happens to the notion of translation in a multilingual culture? How are ideas of literary history affected by understanding Chaucer’s English in relation to the other more prestigious language worlds in which his poetry was enmeshed? Texts include material in French, Middle English, Latin, and Italian. Proficiency in any one or more of these languages is welcome, but every effort is made to use texts available in modern English translation, so as to include as wide a participation as possible in the course. Formerly ENGL 545.

fren 900:  History of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Europe (carolyn dean)

An introduction to the various lines of inquiry informing the history of sexuality. The course asks how historians and others constitute sexuality as an object of inquiry and addresses different arguments about the evolution of sexuality in Europe, including the relationship between sexuality and the state and sexuality and gender.

FREN 909:  Joyce and Proust (Marta Figlerowicz)

This course is devoted mostly to the close reading of Joyce’s Ulysses and parts of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. We read Proust in translation, but special guidance is given for students who can read French.

fren 917:  Railway Lines (Morgane Cadieu)

The seminar examines trains in literature, cinema, and theory, from the end of the nineteenth century and the first locomotives to the subway in contemporary Paris. The readings and discussions will focus on: the representation of French historical events through trains (industrialization, colonization, deportation, decolonization, immigration); the railroad as an anthropological tool; the aesthetics of trains; and the tracks as metaphors for determinism and free will. We visit the Beinecke collections and the Yale University Art Gallery. Corpus can include Augé, Chéreau, Delbo, Djemaï, Dongala, Ernaux, Renoir, Sebbar, Sembène, Verne, Wajsbrot, and Zola. Conducted in English. Reading knowledge of French is not a requirement.