France

This course provides an in-depth look at how French history and culture influenced French literature. It utilizes textual analysis and brief history lessons to contextualize literary movements. Poems and passages are critically analyzed for historical accuracy, biases, et cetera.

This course discusses North American comic books as an ever-transforming form of popular culture from the mid-19th century to the early 21st century. The approach is mostly chronological, from the “invention” of comics in Europe in the 19th century to the rise of graphic novels in the United States since the turn of the 21st century. It also includes examples of the way comics have served as an inspiration for other media – most notably in the contemporary wave of superhero films – and have conversely adapted or imported content origination in other media, from silent movie stars to literary classics. Beyond specific examples, the course offers theoretical approaches to intermediality, with a special focus on adaptation, and address such key notions as genre and cultural hierarchies. The course explains the interactions between technology, market forces, aesthetic choices, intermedial circulation, and social uses in specific comics. It conducts a range of readings including select examples of comics and theoretical texts before each class.

This course focuses on two classics in English literature: OLIVER TWIST by Charles Dickens published in 1838 and JANE EYRE by Charlotte Brontë published in 1847. Both novels focus on the hero and the heroine’s struggle in a hostile world. The course is based on close analyses of extracts of both novels and weekly presentations on the context. The last four sessions closely analyze the movie adaptations (OLIVER TWIST (2005) starring Barney Clark and JANE EYRE (1996) starring Charlotte Gainsbourg).

This seminar studies literary and artistic production during the Modernist era, seen as a period of crisis that is both a moment of rupture and a critical moment in the field of art and literature after the First World War. It covers Picasso’s Cubism; Bartok’s and Stravinsky’s music; Diaghilev’s Russian ballet; and the European literary scene including Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence in Great Britain; and Marcel Proust and André Gide in France. The course also examines this new literary “modernity” in American fiction, including Dos Passos’s 1919 (1932), Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s TENDER IS THE NIGHT (1934). Each novel provides an opportunity to study the tension between satiric representation and formal experimentation, or the “creative violence” characteristic of Modernism. The second part of the course looks at how modernist writers engage with ordinary life and objects, not only from a phenomenological standpoint as they explore the sensible aspect of subject/object relationships, but also from a political one underwritten by gender and economic considerations. The course considers how numerous, sometimes uncanny, encounters with daily matter in modernist fiction are not only critical in the characters’ existence but also of the materialistic and consumerist turn of 20th century society.