Modern Languages: French Division Graduate Courses Fall 2005

FRW 5415 Dr. Lori Walters
Autobiography and Advice in Christine de Pizan

   In this course we will examine how Christine de Pizan (ca. 1365-1430) established her authority as an advisor to royalty through her self-presentation as a woman remarkable for her wisdom, learning, and conduct. She uses her own personal "autobiography" to help communicate a message about the spiritual and moral health of the early fifteenth century French state. Since in the Middle Ages it was believed that a person who could not govern her own morals was not worthy of ruling the country or telling others how to do so, Christine's defense of her reputation was part of her concerted political strategies. For example, like a candidate for a modern political office, she felt compelled to defend herself against rumors that she had taken a lover after the death of her husband. In a similar way, Christine's credibility would be diminished if she were seen as belonging to a tainted gender. An important part of her strategies was thus to defend the entire female gender against antifeminism in literature and in life.

We will concentrate on four works written during the period 1403-1405:
     The Path of Long Study (Le Chemin de long estude)
     The City of Ladies   (La Cité des dames)
     The Three Virtues (Les Trois Vertus)
     Christine's Vision (L'Advision Cristine)

The mass media play a major role in both reporting and shaping relations between majority and minority ethnic groups. In France, immigrant groups from former colonies, most notably the North African states of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, have attracted huge media coverage especially with the growing visibility of Islam. Drawing on first-hand sources such as television, newspapers, cinema and the internet, this course focuses on three key aspects of the relationship between these minorities and the media in France: representation, production and reception. In examining media representations, we consider how far the dominant media may be said to construct one-sided or misleading images of minority groups. It is often said that misrepresentations can only be corrected through the participation of minorities in the production of media outputs. We test these claims by looking at TV programs and other media outputs produced by professionals of minority ethnic origin. Finally, we look at the reception of media outputs by majority and minority audiences, asking how far these audiences are fragmented or united in their patterns of media consumption. The course is taught in French, giving students the opportunity to research at first hand current media outputs in genres such as hard news, documentaries, sit-coms and reality shows. In French

FRE 5900-03 Dr. Noemie Parrat
Women and War in 20th Century Literature and Film

In this course we will explore the relation between women and war in two films and in a selection of texts by French and Algerian women writers. We will focus on World War II, on the conflicts between France and its colonies, namely Vietnam and Algeria, and finally on a purely feminist war. We will look at the social function of war in relation to the separation between the sexes. We will also consider the influence of maternity on woman’s role in war and, at the political level, the active or re-active agency of women in relation to decisions on war and peace.

We will start with World War II and Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur, a journal de guerre on her awaiting her husband’s return from a concentration camp, Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Sang des autres, a novel on the notion of l’engagement existentialiste and the film “Hiroshima mon amour,” the screenplay of which was written by Marguerite Duras. We will then move to Kim Lefèvre’s Métisse blanche, an autobiographical account of a young girl whose father was a French soldier in Vietnam. We will then pay attention to the active role of women during the Algerian conflict with Yamina Mechakra’s La Grotte éclatée and the film “La Bataille d’Alger.” We will end this course by analyzing Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères, a feminist novel using war as its principal metaphor.

Critical and theoretical texts pertaining to women and war and to notions of gender will be read in conjunction with the primary literature. This course will be taught in French.

This course will focus on different individual "voices" and their "dialogues" in 16th century French literature. Since Renaissance authors took a special interest in language as an expression of individuality as well as in the revival of the classical genre of the dialogue, the notion of voice and of interacting voices in a dialogical setting will be crucial to understanding the literature of the period. We will study for instance how the Renaissance perceived the relation between the author's authentic voice and the divine logos (the word of God); the importance of orality and the spoken word; the role of rhetoric; the significance of dialogue in the Renaissance ideal of education; as well as the expression of the male/female poetic voice, the voice of the storyteller, etc. Authors will include Clément Marot, Marguerite de Navarre, some Pléiade poets, Rabelais, Montaigne, as well as Northern European humanist Erasmus (in French translation). We will study these authors paying specific attention to the role of the word in the period's religious context, in particular the early Reform movement in France.

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