Bi-weekly lectures on methodology, grading and testing, demonstration class with required attendance five times per week; language laboratory observations; supervised classroom practice. Additional seminars and discussion sections on methodology. Required for all Graduate Student Instructors teaching French 1 for the first time.

In this seminar, we will read a number of literary texts by authors with links to North Africa, West Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and France. In one way or another, all of these texts self-consciously engage with French colonial history and its many afterlives. Some present themselves more or less explicitly as historical narratives; others experiment with poetic language to tap into aspects of historical experience that would otherwise be silenced; still others draw history forward into an imagined future. Many of them involve characters who are driven to pursue historical inquiry, and to work with archives both official and unofficial, by the desire to understand the structuring effects of past violence in their present lives. Throughout our discussions, we will consider the specificity of each text while remaining open to insights made possible through reading comparatively. In other words, our goal will not be to synthesize a unified theory of “francophone historical fiction,” but rather to analyze individual texts in light of common textual strategies, formal elements, and practices of representation. Specific details about readings will be announced at our first meeting, but in addition to selected secondary material, authors considered are likely to include Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, Didier Daeninckx, Ahmadou Kourouma, David Diop, Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, Anna Moï, Linda Lê, and Doan Bui. Please note that reading knowledge of French is required.

We'll have three major goals in this seminar: 1) to acquire a reasonable familiarity with representative works from the massive and massively influential "realist" novelistic project that Honoré de Balzac elaborated in the 1830s and 1840s; 2) to think about the way Balzac's project could be viewed as a version of critique by way of novelistic form; 3) to explore a range of major critical approaches (along with some of their theoretical underpinnings) from the last half century or so via the way they have taken up various texts by Balzac. Those approaches will include marxism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism, queer theory, speech act theory/performativity, and decolonial critique. Seminar participants will be encouraged to develop a writing project that involves exploring a bit further both in Balzac's corpus and in one of the critical literatures we will be engaging with. French Department students will be reading the Balzac texts in French. Other students are welcome to read in English.

For Paul Zumthor, medieval literature was defined, above all, by a particular rootedness in what he called “vocalité”. Over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, writers reflected self-consciously – and somewhat anxiously – on the instability and manipulability of voice, a concept that sat troublingly between the oral and the written, the personal and the social, the material and the immaterial, the body and mind. In this class, we’ll read a selection of the most important medieval French and Occitan texts through a theoretical focus on the problem of voice and its connection to subjectivity. We'll ask: Is voice that uncanny remainder of the body? Does it mark authorial individuality, and if so, how? Is it beyond the symbolic? In a hands-on session with manuscripts at the Bancroft Library, we'll think about how written objects can only obliquely capture a culture of the viva voce, considering: how are past voices – if indeed they are – mediated through material artefacts? Our medieval readings will be supplemented with critical and theoretical writings drawn from a range of traditions, including psychoanalysis, historicism, narratology, material culture, poststructuralism, and translation studies. No prior knowledge of medieval French or Occitan is required, as some language training will be provided. All medieval texts will be available in modern French or English translation. Students without a reading knowledge of modern French should contact the instructor. Class discussion in English.

This course gives first-year graduate students a general introduction to reading, analyzing, and writing about French texts.

This course is designed to give all new graduate students a broad view of the department's faculty, the courses they teach, and their fields of research. In addition, it will introduce students to some practical aspects of the graduate career, issues that pertain to specific fields of research, and questions currently being debated across the profession.

Introduction to speaking, listening, reading, and writing in French.