|
|
Course Criteria
Add courses to your favorites to save, share, and find your best transfer school.
-
3.00 Credits
Undergraduates only register for this section. Prerequisites: French 325 and French 326 or one of these courses and the equivalent Washington University transfer literature course from Toulouse or Paris. One-hour preceptorial required for undergraduates.
-
3.00 Credits
The 18th century saw a rise in overtly moralizing texts, on the one hand, and unapologetically immoralist philosophies on the other. We focus on texts that avoid these extremes, allowing multiple voices to be heard. With the aid of excerpts from Genette, Bakhtine, Todorov, and Barthes, we identify the voices of dissent in several 18th-century genres, including satire, the tale, the novella, the philosophical dialogue, theater, autobiography, and the epistolary novel. By reading authors such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Prévost, Diderot, Cazotte, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, and Charrière, students come to appreciate a third tendency in 18th-century texts that is crucial to our understanding of the Enlightenment: the tendency to validate conflicting perspectives. We consider whether a moral can be derived from a text that consistently questions the voice of authority. We analyze the implications of such questioning in the years before the Revolution. Finally, we consider the extent to which the overzealous censorship laws of the period may have obliged authors to couch socially controversial ideas in narrative forms that seem to deny their own assertions. Prerequisites: French 325 and French 326 or one of these courses and the equivalent Washington University transfer literature course from Toulouse or Paris. One hour preceptorial required for undergraduates.
-
3.00 Credits
Prerequisites: French 325 and French 326 or one of these courses and the equivalent Washington University transfer literature course from Toulouse or Paris. One-hour preceptorial required for undergraduates.
-
3.00 Credits
This course examines major 18th-century aesthetic treatises and literary texts that explore solutions for aesthetic quandaries. Authors include d'Alembert (Preface a l'Encyclopedie), Rousseau (Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts, Lettre a d'Alembert), Diderot (Entretiens sur le Fils Naturel, Le Paradoxe du Comedien, Le Neveu de Rameau), Cazotte (Le Diable Amoureux), Beaumarchais (Le Barbier de Seville, Le Mariage de Figaro), Staël (De la Litterature, Corinne). These works allow us to study some of the major insights into the aesthetics of music, painting, and the performing arts with an eye to how these aesthetic "revolutions" expanded the scope and influenced the form of the French language and literary texts. Prerequisites: French 325 and French 326 or one of these courses and the equivalent Washington University transfer literature course from Toulouse or Paris. One-hour preceptorial for undergraduates.
-
3.00 Credits
We investigate the representation of women in 18th-century texts. Why did the novel and epistolary fiction became so closely associated with women as writers, heroines, and readers in the course of the century? Why were women considered exemplary and yet, at the same time, a threat? The 18th century saw the last of the salons led by women well-versed in philosophy, literature, art, and politics. It saw the reinforcement of the opposition between the public and the private sphere. Woman was the incarnation of the ideal of liberty and yet excluded from the "rights of man." Rousseau praised women's role as nurturers and peacemakers but cast into doubt their capacity for genius. Literary texts that feature women became a sparring ground for two of the century's major literary trends: Sensibilite and Libertinage, for a woman's sensitivity was thought to contain the seeds of virtue and licentiousness. We investigate philosophical discourses on the senses and emotions and political discourses on republican responsibility. We read these texts in conjunction with the literary works of men and women authors, including Prévost, Marivaux, Graffigny, Riccoboni, Diderot, Rousseau, Charrière, Laclose, Sade, and Staël. Prerequisites: French 325 and French 326 or one of these courses and the equivalent Washington University transfer literature course from Toulouse or Paris. One hour preceptorial required for undergraduates.
-
3.00 Credits
In this course we examine works in which the comic, the erotic, and the grotesque-base urges that 18th-century audiences deplored yet found entertaining-made inroads into the literature of the time. The Enlightenment was highly suspicious of impulses and intuitions that challenged or escaped the bounds of virtue, sentiment, and reason. French philosophers debated whether genius lay in the supreme mastery or the spontaneous creation of art, whether talent was inborn or could be acquired through practice. Reading texts that span the long 18th century, by authors such as Molière, Marivaux, Crébillon fils, Voltaire, Diderot, Restif de la Bretonne, Beaumarchais, Sade, and Hugo, we investigate how the satirical, the bawdy, and the profane served as the wellspring of Enlightenment inspiration, giving rise to visions of an ideal society. Prerequisites: French 325 and French 326 or one of these courses and the equivalent Washington University transfer literature course from Toulouse or Paris. One-hour preceptorial for required for undergraduates.
-
3.00 Credits
The French Enlightenment witnessed a veritable explosion of short fiction, including philosophical, oriental, moral, and libertine tales bearing such self-conscious titles as A Thousand and One Follies and This is Not a Tale. Though written by the literary elite and not considered children's literature, the genre enjoyed widespread popular appeal and had the power to shape mentalities. Often satirical in tone, these tales served to convey and question contemporary political, philosophical, scientific, religious, and moral trends. They inspired some of the most vivid illustrations of the day and were often circulated as part of the literary underground. We read works by Crebillon fils, Voltaire, Diderot, Cazotte, Charrière, Sade, and Staël alongside excerpts from French cultural history on 18th-century mentalities, salons, and print culture. Prerequisites: French 325 and French 326 or one of these courses and the equivalent Washington University transfer literature course from Toulouse or Paris. One-hour preceptorial required for undergraduates.
-
3.00 Credits
This course studies pre-Romantic themes in the works of Madame de Staël and Chateaubriand and of their evolution in the poems of Lamartine, Musset, and Vigny, the theater of Victor Hugo, and the novels of George Sand and Victor Hugo. Emphasis is placed on the emergence of a "littérature du moi" (literature of the self), the redefinition of the place of the artist in society after "la bataille romantique," and the stylistic innovations that lead to "modernism." Prerequisites: French 325 and French 326 or one of these courses and the equivalent Washington University transfer literature course from Toulouse or Paris. One-hour preceptorial required for undergraduates.
-
3.00 Credits
Among the hallmarks of 17th century, French classicism celebrated reason, order, balance, and a power often associated with the great achievements of Ancient Greece and Rome. Reason, however, coexisted with dreams and madness; order encountered threats both political and sexual; disharmony persisted despite longings for justice; and depictions of Antiquity flourished alongside those of the Orient, the exotic other world of the East. The course explores these "a-classicisms," or countervailing forces, by studying the challenges that ground the struggles and seductions in dramas by Corneille, Molière, and Racine as well as in the novels of Madame de Lafayette. We read Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne, Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Laclos' Liaisons Dangereuses to understand classicism retrospectively, through the "a-classicism" of the 18th century's treatment of identity, alienation, desire, and societal tensions. Prerequisites: French 325 and French 326 or one of these courses and the equivalent Washington University transfer literature course from Toulouse or Paris. One-hour preceptorial for required for undergraduates.
-
3.00 Credits
The court of Louis XIV at Versailles was remarkable for its grandeur, its consolidation of power, and its celebration of the Sun King. Arguably, all aspects of court life were regulated by the crown and all things produced-whether wars or monuments; art or science; novels or histories-were tributes to the king. All reflected a certain "ideology of commemoration," that is, an implicit or explicit validation of the monarch's privilege and prestige, both for his contemporaries and for posterity. We explore how authors (including Louis XIV, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Perrault, La Fontaine), artists (Lebrun, Rigaud, Poussin, Félibien), and historiographers/memorialists (Racine, Saint Simon) support the ambitions of the crown through their works. Modern critics Elias, Marin, Burke, and Merlin guide our research into the activities of the royal family, the ideology of absolutism, and the role of art in affirming the power of Versailles as we continue to memorialize it through surviving texts, monuments, and images. Prerequisites: French 325 and French 326 or one of these courses and the equivalent Washington University transfer literature course from Toulouse or Paris. One-hour preceptorial for required for undergraduates.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|