French

This course will explore how French and francophone writers in the postwar era have used literature as a means of writing their identities, memories, and life narratives. We will study how writers made use of both traditional genres of life writing, such as autobiography, diaries, and memoirs, alongside more experimental and hybrid forms of narrative. We will see how authors constructed their identities on the page through the lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, or history. Theoretical readings on memory, trauma, and testimony will allow us to explore the fraught relationship between fact and fiction when writing the self. Topics will include the representation of childhood and the family, women’s autobiography, confessional narratives, witnessing and testimony, intellectual development, language and learning, authenticity and documentation, and the relationship between self and other. Students will read both excerpts from longer texts and several works in their entirety. Authors studied may include Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Hervé Guibert, Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, Annie Ernaux, Patrick Modiano, Nina Bouraoui, Emmanuel Carrère, Marie NDiaye, and Édouard Louis. Several autobiographical films might also be screened to help understand the relationship between memory and media. In conference, students may undertake a critical or creative autobiographical project of their own or study other aspects of modern and contemporary French and francophone literature and culture. Alongside the study of literary texts, we will review some key lessons in French grammar and composition.

This course is designed primarily for students who have not had any exposure to French, allowing them to develop, over the course of the year, an active command of the fundamentals of spoken and written language. We will use grammar lessons to learn how to speak, read, and write in French. In-class dialogue will center on the study of theatre, cinema, and short texts, including poems, newspaper articles, and short stories from francophone cultures. In spring, students will conduct a small-scale project in French on a topic of their choice. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, weekly individual meetings with a French language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are highly encouraged.

This course will offer a systematic review of French grammar and is designed to strengthen and deepen students’ mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students will also develop their French writing skills, with an emphasis on analytical writing. The events of the French Revolution of 1789 to 1799—what the French call “la Grande Révolution”—were so dramatic and foundational that revolution has become a basic paradigm of French thought in politics and culture. In order to understand this legacy, one must first study the “Grande Révolution” itself. Thus, this course will be divided into two parts. In fall, we will study the original French Revolution, beginning with the forming of the Estates-General and the storming of the Bastille in 1789. We will familiarize ourselves with the Revolution’s unusual characters—from Marie Antoinette to Robespierre—and with major events and debates of the time. Students will study a variety of sources: histories, film, and primary materials such as caricatures and revolutionary posters. We will stage debates and act out scenes to better understand what was at stake in this shift from ancien régime to nouveau régime. In spring, we will focus on the relationship between politics and culture, studying five subsequent episodes of revolution: the Haïtian Revolution, Les Trois Glorieuses (otherwise known as the July Revolution), the Revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, and the events of May 1968. Course materials in spring will include poems, short stories, excerpts of Hugo’s novel Les Misérables, films, and posters. At the end of spring, we will also look at the use of revolutionary rhetoric and tactics in present-day movements in France, such as the environmental movement, riots in the banlieue, and the #MeToo (or #BalanceTonPorc) movement.

This course will offer a systematic review of French grammar and is designed to strengthen and deepen students’ mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students will also begin to use linguistic concepts as tools for developing their analytic writing. More than other countries, France’s identity was shaped by centuries of what is now perceived by the French as a historically coherent past. In this course, we will explore the complexities of today’s French identity—or, rather, identities—following relevant contemporary controversies that have shaken French society in the past 30 years while simultaneously exploring historical influences and cultural paradigms at play in these débats franco-français. Thus, in addition to newspapers, online resources, recent films, television series, and songs, we will study masterpieces of the past in literature and in the arts. Topics discussed will include, among others, school and separation from faith; cuisine and traditions; immigration and urban ghettos; women and feminism in France; France’s relation to nature and the environment; the heritage of French Enlightenment (les Lumières), duty to remember (devoir de mémoire), and France's relationship with dark episodes of its history (slavery, Régime de Vichy and Nazi occupation, and the Algerian war). Authors studied will include Marie de France, Montaigne, Voltaire, Hugo, Flaubert, Proust, Colette, Duras, Césaire, Djebar, Chamoiseau, and Bouraoui. In addition to conferences, a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant will be required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. This course is specifically designed to help prepare students to study in the Paris global education program.

Building on the foundations learned in Intermediate French I (FREN 3501), this course will include a systematic review of French grammar and vocabulary, with a focus on writing papers according to French expectations alongside reinforcing linguistic correctness in spontaneous oral communication, in order to develop real fluency. This yearlong course will be divided into two separate themes. In fall, the focus will be on the literary and cultural revolutions brought on by World War II in France, from Sartre’s existentialist novel, La Nausée, to Camus’ absurd novel, L’Etranger; alongside Beauvoir’s revolutionary book, Le Deuxième Sexe, and Beckett’s play, En attendant Godot; to new experimentations in the genre of the novel, including Butor’s La Modification and Duras’ Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein. We will also study this time frame as one of the darkest periods of recent French history, learning about the collaboration of the French state in the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps and the violence of colonization that led to the Algerian war. In spring, the focus will be on the history and contemporary ramifications of the notion of nature and the environment in France. We will read and discuss extensively the current debates in France around the question of climate change and protecting biodiversity, exploring exciting initiatives happening all over the country. These discussions will be anchored in an exploration of the cultural origins of the French relationship with the natural world, from the notion of “terroir” of aristocratic origins, to Romantic admiration for natural landscapes, to colonialist constructions of the “exotic,” and philosophical reflections on the human/animal divide, to name a few topics of potential discussion. In addition to conferences, a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant will be required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. Aimed at consolidating students’ B1 level (Common European Framework of Reference, CEFR) and bringing students to B2 level, sufficient to potentially attend French universities, this course is specifically designed to help prepare students to study in the Paris global education program. The spring semester will also be an opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration with the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) courses offered at the College.

This course will explore the powerful architecture, sculpture, and painting styles that lie at the heart of the creation of Europe and the idea of the West. We will use a number of strategies to explore how expressive narrative painting and sculpture and new monumental architectural styles were engaged in the formation of a common European identity and uncover, as well, the artistic vestiges of diverse groups and cultures that challenge that uniform vision. These are arts that chronicle deep social struggles between classes, intense devotion through pilgrimage, the rise of cities and universities, and movements that could both advocate genocide and nurture enormous creativity in styles both flamboyant and austere, growing from places as diverse as castles and rural monasteries to Gothic cathedrals. The course will explore those aspects of expressive visual language that link works of art to social history, the history of ideas, and political ideology.

This course will take an industrial approach to the study of global film and film history, highlighting box-office hits, fans, stars, workers, and dream factories from multiple (trans)national contexts. Foregrounding questions of labor, technology, circulation, and genre, we will examine popular cinema as an industrial film form with a particular emphasis on melodrama, comedy, and the musical. This seminar is framed by some of film history’s most persistent questions: What is “popular” culture? What is a “mass” medium? Is cinema a universal language? Can art be separated from commerce? Proceeding chronologically from the 1920s through the present, we will first explore “classical Hollywood cinema” as an exportable style and mass reproducible system. Next, we will follow the rise of other “-ollywoods” around the world, contextualizing and comparing several major film industries and their popular cinemas. Ranging from Western Europe to the Soviet Union and the Global South, topics will include the studio lot as dream site, urban film cultures, vernacular modernism, colonial film production and cultural imperialism, cine-workers as global workers, divisions of voice labor in Hollywood vs. Bollywood, the transnational feminization of film handiwork, and the relationship between new film industries and new media from polyglot talkies to Nollywood video-films.

Since the Lumière brothers filmed their female employees leaving the factory in 1895, the “working girl” has become a fixture of global cinema. This lecture approaches this archetypal modern character as a foundational figure for film history and an important vernacular link for national film industries competing with Hollywood. We will begin by asking: What is a working girl? How has the category changed over the course of the 20th century as it has circulated around the globe, despite its fraught ideological construction? And how can we turn the category into a tool for intersectional feminist film history? With these questions in mind, we will launch our investigation in the United States and Europe and then move on to the Soviet Union, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Mexico, Senegal, and Cameroon. We will read classic film theory, short fiction, and local histories of film culture and gendered labor alongside films about shopgirls, dancing girls, telephone girls, factory girls, office girls, laundresses, and maids. Topics to be discussed will include working girls as moviegoers, cultural imperialism and vernacular modernism, migration and mass reproduction, sex work, workplace romance, and contradictions of capital and care. In this class, students will conduct comparative, multimedia analyses of film texts and read global film history through the globalization of modern gendered labor. 

This course is designed to help us understand and critique the meaning of violence in the modern era. Drawing on theoreticians of violence and case studies of events, we will explore a variety of types of violence and their impact on politics and society, with a particular focus on Europe and its colonies. At the center of this course will be a number of questions: Is violence modern or archaic? What are the causes and uses of violence? What are the costs of violence on both its perpetrators and its victims? What is the legacy of different kinds of violence? What can comparing different times and places tell us about the use of violence in different contexts? Topics covered will include the establishment of state control over violence, terror, terrorism, total war, The Holocaust, and attempts to come to terms with mass violence, among others.

In 1909, Norman Angell wrote The Great Illusion, a book that went on to become a bestseller. Its premise: Industrialized countries had become so interconnected that war between them did not make sense and would not happen anymore. Five years later, Europe’s industrialized countries were at war with each other. The Great War, as it was called then, lasted from 1914 until 1918 and would change the course of the 20th century. But Angell was not entirely wrong. Precisely because European economies were so interconnected, the war and its aftermath were particularly devastating. After 1918, they were entangled through an additional layer of massive loss of life, devastation, and the resulting resentment and hostility from which Europe struggled to extricate itself until 1945. This period now is sometimes called “Europe’s civil war.” Not all of this was war, however. Beyond earnest struggles for a new peacetime order, much of what we consider modern—from entertainment to consumption but also new modes of politics—has its origins in this period. The course will investigate the cultural, social, economic, and military causes and reverberations of the conflict, from the war itself to the revolutions that followed it, the enfranchisement of women, and expansion of democratic government—but also the rise of communism and fascism and ultimately war again from 1939 to 1945. The impact of these developments was not contained within Europe alone but, rather, extended to the rest of the world—not least of which was the United States. In the course, we will on occasion look beyond the European continent’s border.

World War II led to destruction of such magnitude that the international order shifted fundamentally and new terms had to be coined to describe its violence. This course will examine the events that led to the war, the war itself, and its aftermath. It will begin with a chronological outline of the Great War, the interwar years, and the war itself and then shift to explore key themes such as The Holocaust, military life, women at war, the changing meaning of race and ethnicity, occupation, etc. This course will discuss battles and leaders, but its main focus will be on the impact of the war on culture, politics, and society. Students will be asked to think seriously about how these global events were experienced by what Stalin called “the little screws of history”—i.e., “ordinary people.” This course is really about them. Issues such as total war, genocide, occupation, the terrifying new technologies of the war, and soldier’s life in the different armies will be examined. We will also look at how, after the devastation of the war, people tried to make sense of what had happened. Politicians reacted by creating new laws and institutions, while artists painted, sculpted, and made films and authors turned to the page to understand what they had seen and done.

This course will explore the powerful hold that Paris has exerted on literature since the early 19th century, when the city established itself as a world capital of artistic, intellectual, and political life. Our guiding focus will be on how writers use the geography of Paris—streets, monuments, markets, and slums—to depict the complexities of modern life, posing the urban landscape as a place of revolution and banality, alienation and community, seduction and monstrosity. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which the representation of the city allowed writers to question the form and function of literature itself. We will begin with the 19th-century French novelists and poets who made Paris the site of epic literary struggles, including Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, and Émile Zola. We will see how the city provided fertile ground for the aesthetic experimentations of 20th-century literature in works by Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Colette, and Georges Perec. Our study will explore writers who have recorded the often violent and traumatic history of modern Paris, such as Marguerite Duras, Leïla Sebbar, and Patrick Modiano. Finally, we will analyze how Paris is experienced as a cosmopolitan space in works about expatriates, immigrants, exiles, and travelers from authors as varied as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Alain Mabanckou, Faïza Guène, and Enrique Vila-Matas. Beyond our focus on close readings of literary texts, students will have the opportunity to read some historical and theoretical considerations of Paris and also watch several films where Paris features prominently. Class will entail close readings and discussions of primary texts in English translation and focus on how to offer critical analyses of works in seminar discussions and class essays. Biweekly in fall and spring, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities that will include writing workshops, screenings, and field trips.

The surrealist movement emerged in France in the early 1920s, when a group of writers questioned the narrative of reason, progress, and tradition that had long defined European culture. In exploring the potential of the unconscious, the surrealists endeavored to create an avant-garde artistic and political revolution motivated by desire, madness, and dreams. The concepts and techniques developed by the French surrealists would go on to have an enormous influence on writers, artists, and filmmakers across the globe. This course will explore some of the key ideas, practices, and figures in the history of surrealism. The first portion of the semester will focus on the group’s origin in France. We will read several of the movement’s foundational texts and study many of the strategies that the surrealists invented for artistic creation. From there, we will examine the legacy of surrealism in a variety of locations—from Latin America and the Caribbean to Egypt, Japan, and the United States—in order to see how the movement’s message of revolution and nonconformity has been adopted and adapted by writers and artists up through the present day. Topics addressed will include automatic writing, dream work, mad love, the marvelous, games and chance, urban flânerie, gender and surrealism, anticapitalist and anticolonial surrealism, and reality itself. Although our first focus will be on the literature of surrealism, this will be a very interdisciplinary course; students will see how surrealists made use of many types of media and expression, including drawing, painting, collage, photography, and film. For conference, students will follow the collective model of the movement and pursue small-group projects that will carry on the creative and critical legacy of surrealism. 

What is in a feeling, and what does it do? This course will explore how medieval writers understood the emotions—what they called the passions—as forces that move the soul, affect the mind, transform the body, and raise pressing questions about free will and moral responsibility. Because the passions operate at the threshold of the soul and body, virtually every domain of medieval thought had something to say about them—from poetry and medicine to philosophy and contemplative devotion. For instance, physicians like Peter of Spain diagnosed lovesickness and melancholia as genuine medical conditions. Philosophers like Aquinas compiled catalogues of the passions—from joy and sorrow to fear and courage to despair and hope—and offered phenomenological descriptions of how the passions arise through both embodied sensation and ensouled experience. Occitan troubadours like Arnaut Daniel and Italian lyric poets like Cavalcanti and Dante could write of love as the bondage of mind and will or the source of ethical nobility and spiritual freedom. (Dante did both.) Mystics like Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich explored how emotional awareness could be refined into subtler modes of spiritual attention and how, at the same time, the inmost experience of divine love could be expressed as ecstatic, passionate feeling. In addition to the themes and writers above, this course will examine how the passions open onto questions of habitus and disposition—how repeated action shapes how we feel and how the way we repeatedly feel shapes our action. We will also consider how emotion is at the center of vice and virtue—how the quality of our feeling determines the quality of our inner life and our life with others. With the help of contemporary scholarship, we will approach the medieval passions with historical and phenomenological methods of analysis. Through these lenses, we will see how the passions in the Middle Ages serve as a unique site for comparative intellectual history, spanning disciplines and bridging ancient, medieval, and modern traditions. At the same time, studying the medieval passions offers something more personal: the chance to recover forms of feeling and attention from the past that might expand the borders of our own in the present.

Western philosophy originated in Ancient Greece more than 2,500 years ago, addressing fundamental questions about being and time, about the human condition, and about ethics and politics, science and religion. Despite the universal nature of these questions, for most of these 2,500 years philosophy was practiced (at least publicly) mostly by men. It was not until the 20th century that this convention began to be significantly challenged, both practically (by the fact that more and more women entered the forefront of philosophical work) and theoretically (by questioning the historical contents of this male-dominant tradition). This yearlong course will be a survey of continental philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries that, countering the aforementioned tradition, focuses exclusively on the work of women in philosophy. Among the authors we may read are Sarah Ahmed, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Karen Barad, Talia Bettcher, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Melany Klein, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones, Simone Weil, Sylvia Wynter, and Virginia Woolf. Some of these philosophers are feminist or consider sexual difference as philosophically pertinent, and some are not. One way or another, surveying their thought will be our means for acquiring a comprehensive view of key developments in continental philosophy in the last and present centuries, including phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, structuralism and poststructuralism, feminism, Black feminism, decolonial, and queer theories. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course (readings will not normally exceed 30 pages per week, but philosophical texts can be extraordinarily demanding). Students will be evaluated based on weekly reading assignments, participation in group work and group discussions during class, and timely submission of three short papers each semester, as well as demonstrable investment in conference work throughout the year. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and group conferences that may include academic skill development such as time management and effective communication, as well as research, reading, writing, and editing. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.