• FRE 5535-01/FRE 4930-01 - Post-Colonial Cultures in France
• FRE5900/4930-02 - Studies in French Literature: Blanc sur noir, noir sur blanc
• FRW5595 - Studies in 19^th-Century French Literature & Culture: George Sand and Her Century/George Sand et son siècle
• FRW5599 - Studies in 20^th-Century Post-War French Literature: The Novel Since World War II
• FOL 5934 - French-Italian Renaissance: Dialogues of the French and Italian Renaissance
• FOW 6907-01 - Tutorial on Christine de Pisan
   

FRE 5535-01 and FRE 4930-01 Post-Colonial Cultures in France
TR 3:35-4:50 pm Professor Alec Hargreaves

International migration from former colonies has brought a new cultural vibrancy to France. This course focuses on the hybrid cultural practices being forged in France by new generations of writers, film-makers and musicians mixing elements from African, Caribbean, French, American and other sources. Particular attention is given to artists emerging from among France’s largest post-colonial minority, whose origins lie in the Maghreb, i.e. the North African states of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. The course is taught in French, their main language of expression. It explores their participation in a variety of cultural spaces and seeks to identify the extent to which these new voices are being marginalized or incorporated into the mainstream of French culture. Among the works studied are novels, autobiographies and films by writers and directors such as Azouz Begag, Mehdi Charef, Soraya Nini and Malik Chibane.

FRE5900/4930-02 Studies in French Literature: Blanc sur noir, noir sur blanc
MW 4:00-6:00 pm      Professor Roger Little

Postcolonial studies have, among other things, alerted modern readers to the interest and importance of literature written by formerly colonized peoples. The historical dimension has very often, however, been neglected. This course explores chronologically the literary expression of the development of attitudes through a sample of (mostly short) writings liberal for their time: firstly by four white French writers (18^th-20^th centuries) and then by four 20^th-century black writers. Of the eight authors, three are women. Abolitionist or anticolonialist didacticism rubs shoulders with psychological realism, high seriousness with humour. The main geographical focus is on West African, the origin of almost all the principal characters, who, in fiction mirroring the evolving reality from slavery to various more freely chosen forms of migration, travel to the New World or to Europe. The resulting confrontation of cultures is of central interest. The course is taught in French, the language of expression of all the works considered. One of the texts, Ourika, will be the central focus for a day-long conference on “Reading ‘Race’ in French Studies” on Saturday, February 14, 2004, bringing specialist speakers to FSU.

FRW5595 Studies in 19^th-Century French Literature & Culture: George Sand and Her Century/George Sand et son siècle
MW 2:30-3:45 pm Professor Aimée Boutin

This graduate course coincides with bicentennial of the birth of George Sand (1804-1876) in 2004. Against the turbulent social, political and literary background of mid-19th century France, she established herself as one of the most important and distinctive figures of her age. Today, thanks in part to films such as Impromptu and the recent Children of the Century, a large part of her fame centers on her life: her love affairs with Chopin and Musset, for example, and her habitual cross-dressing. Yet she was above all a brilliant and prolific writer whose literary career spanned 45 years. In her novels such as Indiana (1832), Horace (1841) and François le Champi and La Petite Fadette (1848), Sand offers a radical view of the equality of the sexes and of social ranks, especially when compared with her contemporaries Honoré de Balzac (Eugénie Grandet, Père Goriot) and Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary, Un Coeur simple). 

FRW5599 Studies in 20^th-Century Post-War French Literature: The Novel Since World War II
MWF 1:25-2:15 pm Professor William Cloonan

This course will examine the permutations in the French novel from the end of World War II, and the birth of the nouveau roman to the present. In the course of the semester we will have occasion to examine the importance of the nouveau roman and the Oulipo movement to the development of French fiction, but our concern will be much more with themes than the emergence of putative literary groups. Thus we will discuss the creation of literature in the post-Auschwitz environment, the emergence of women as major contributors to French fiction, the collapse of Communism and psychoanalysis and its impact of the novel, the role of publishing houses in defining the direction literature is taking, the obsession with the marginal personality, etc. For the month of April the course will benefit from the active contribution of Olivier Rolin, one of today’s major novelists, who will participate in our discussion of his Tigre en papier (2002).

The Renaissance is a period of profound reconsideration of the place of the human being in its surrounding society. In an intense and fascinating convergence of Christian and Classical traditions, the Renaissance humanists and poets sought to define a new kind of individual, which is traditionally associated with our idea of ‘modernity’ (hence « early modern » as an alternative name for this period), but which is really a complex product of old and new. At the same time, in its questioning of moral, socio-political, literary and religious issues, Renaissance humanism also rejected dogmatism and felt the need to cover the complexities of human society in a variety of voices in debate. The humanist dialogues, literary texts which stage several interlocutors debating issues of the time, and other ‘open’ forms such as novella and poetry collections, are therefore crucial for our understanding of the humanist way of thinking and will be our main focus in this course. In this period, the Italian-French axis cannot be emphazised enough. Although is traditionally considered the cradle of the Renaissance, the movement of European humanism is profoundly indebted to Franco-Italian cultural interactions. In this sense, this course will also explore the ‘dialogue’ between the Italian and French Renaissance.In texts by humanists and poets such as Petrarch, Bruni, Alberti, Castiglione, Erasmus, Marguerite de Navarre, Du Bellay, Labé and Montaigne, we will study the way in which these authors imitate and emulate Classical authors in rhetoric and poetry, and analyze in depth the central questions of their ‘civic humanism’ : the humanist concern with the individual in its surrounding socio-political, literary and religious universe (the city-republic, the court, the academy, the family, marital life, etc.). This course will also focus on the place of woman and, to a lesser extent, the role of female authors, in this early modern humanism. The main objectives of the course will be : 1) to convey a sense of the originality and the innovative thought of the humanist debates, 2) to understand how these texts both reinterpret the past and form the basis of a 'modern' way of thinking, and 3) to gain a better understanding of the role of literary form in the shaping of early modern thought, e.g. the power of (vernacular) language, the interplay between rhetoric and poetry, the dynamics of dialogue, and the ‘poetics’ of the Renaissance novella.

This course will be thematic in nature, so that in each session we will combine and discuss texts from both the Italian and French Renaissance.

Taught in English, all readings in English translation, though texts will be available as much as possible in the Italian and French originals. All student work, such as midterm and final papers and weekly e-mailed reader responses, must be written in the student’s ‘target language’ (i.e. French or Italian). All meetings with the professor will be conducted in the student's target language as well.

In this one-hour tutorial, we will explore current areas of research on Christine de Pizan, the early fifteenth-century Italian-born author working at the French court of Charles VI.   Suggested topics include her contacts with Queen Ysabel de Bavière; the manuscripts of her works; the related notions of translation and vernacular writing; and sources of influence like Boethius, Augustine, and the Italians Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.  Choice of topics will depend upon student interest.