Teaching

Since its invention, photography has inspired and provoked writers. In this course, we will consider how the histories of photography and literature are intertwined, with a particular focus on how photography has served many modern and contemporary French writers as an...

In this seminar, we will work our way through Marcel Proust’s multi-volume novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, published between 1913 and 1927, reading some volumes in their entirety and selections of others as we study a variety of themes upon which Proust touches...

In this introduction to French literature from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, we will look at how questions of emotion and affect have been central to literary production and writerly preoccupations with memory, history, space, class, identity, and...

How has theater in France, from the 17th-century to the present, served as a site of political, social, and philosophical reflection? In this course, we will attempt to answer that question by studying a selection of plays representing the major trends, movements, and...

In this course, we will study literary responses to and representations of loss, both public and private, in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. We will investigate how mourning intersects with various theoretical and historical topics including gender and...

This course looks at examples of the strange, frightening, eerie, violent, and uncanny in modern literature in French, from the nineteenth century to the present. We will consider the following questions: How did writers make use of horror, its motifs, and strategies, as a...

This course offers a survey of the vast landscape of literary production of the French-speaking world. We will read and examine works by writers from the Maghreb, West Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and Québec, as we consider how literature nuances historical...

How does the notion of self and of one’s self change through time, both historically and in an individual lifetime? How do literary traditions of writing the self reflect and influence these changes? This course surveys the tradition of autobiographical writing in French...

In this course, we will trace the history of French theater from the early twentieth-century to the present: its major trends, figures, and forms as well as its intellectual, historical, and political contexts. As we read and interpret texts that were written with...