In this course we will consider texts that become "national epics," texts that in some sense come to "represent" a nation. How and when might such imaginative texts emerge? Nations change, and old poems may no longer serve. Can the Song of Roland, once compulsory study for all schoolchildren in France, still be required reading today-- especially if I am French Muslim? What about El Cid in Spain? How do some texts-- such as the Mahabharata in India, or Journey to the West in China-- seem more adaptable than others? The course begins in western Europe, but then pivots across Eurasian space to become gradually more global. Most all of us have complex family histories: Chinese-American, French Canadian, Latino/a/x, Jewish American, Pennsylvania Dutch, Lenni Lenape. Some students may choose to investigate, for their final project, family histories (and hence their own, personal connection to "national epics").

Deception and lies are a constant theme and a mechanism of narrative art. For a genre literally synonymous with falsehood, fiction has always been touchy about its relationship to truth: Does the novel neutrally represent reality or does it recreate it? Are characters like living, breathing real people, or are they mere simulations? And if they’re just words on a page (or images on a screen), why are we so moved by their adventures, loves and misfortunes? In this class, we will explore and expand on these questions by focusing on novels and films that deal explicitly and exclusively with fakers, shapeshifters and doppelgangers, lies of necessity and of opportunity, as well as with works that revel in exposing their own manipulative artificiality. We will read psychoanalysts, sociologists, philosophers, and postcolonial thinkers and ask, What does it mean to be authentic? How malleable are our individual identity, race, gender and sexuality? What forces shape it, and how constant is this shape? Are we the same selves when we have a conversation as when we give a presentation? Do we remain ourselves when we talk to customers at our service jobs, to teachers, to students? When we “pass” as a different race? When we speak in a different accent? How do we reconcile the conflicting demands of “be yourself” and “fake it till you make it”? What is the relation between our presentation of ourselves and our selves?
Novels and shorts stories for discussion might include classics like Nella Larsen’s Passing, Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as movies like Gaslight, The Battle of Algiers, The Yes Men, and American Psycho. While much of the weekly work in this class will be reading-and-discussion based, oral presentations – keenly aware of their own artifice – will count toward half of the final grade. A final oral presentation will be based on a creative project in conversation with class materials.
The course would satisfy those interested in fulfilling the Advanced Film and Literature and Global Literature and Film requirements.
This is a CWiC course, Communication Within the Curriculum.

This course will introduce students to the historical and intellectual forces that led to the emergence of queer theory as a distinct field, as well as to recent and ongoing debates about gender, sexuality, embodiment, race, privacy, global power, and social norms. We will begin by tracing queer theory's conceptual heritage and prehistory in psychoanalysis, deconstruction and poststructuralism, the history of sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, woman-of-color feminism, the feminist sex wars, and the AIDS crisis. We will then study the key terms and concepts of the foundational queer work of the 1990s and early 2000s. Finally, we will turn to the new questions and issues that queer theory has addressed in roughly the past decade. Students will write several short papers.

This course explores literature that resists normative categories of gender and sexuality. By focusing on figures writing from the margins, we will explore how radical approaches to narrative form and subject-matter invite us to think in new ways about desire and identity. We will read texts that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, hybridizing the genres of poetry, drama, and autobiography to produce new forms of expression, such as the graphic novel, auto-fiction, and prose poetry. From Viriginia Woolf's gender-bending epic, Orlando, to Tony Kushner's Angels in America, this course traces how non-normative desire is produced and policed by social and literary contexts - and how those contexts can be re-imagined and transformed.

This course explores the evolution of representations of the Black femme body in French and francophone imaginaries, tracing a chronological arc that begins with early colonial imagery and ends with the rise of a 2018 movement spearheaded by a collective of Black comediennes, denouncing exclusionary practices in the French entertainment industry. We will first focus on the male gaze — European, Caribbean and African — and the way it constructed the Black femme body, to better understand how Black female authors undermine, resist, parody, or continue to bear the weight of these early images when they take control of their own representation. While our primary readings will be authored by French-writing women, including Mayotte Capecia (Martinique), Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Mariama Bâ (Senegal) and Marie Ndiaye (France), our theoretical foundation will include anglophone thinkers, such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and others. Readings and discussions will be in English.

In no other period, with the possible exception of the European Enlightenment, did French thought enjoy greater international influence than in the decades after the Second World War. From Existentialism, through Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Postmodernism, French thinkers played a crucial role in shaping the intellectual history of the second half of the twentieth century. This seminar surveys the intellectual movements and some of the key figures of this period. While our discussion will touch on many themes, the core of our inquiry will be the status of the human subject. If late nineteenth and early twentieth-century thinkers were preoccupied by the question of the “death of God,” French philosophical discourse in the late twentieth century was famously obsessed by the death of “Man”. Jean-Paul Sartre opened the post-war era by declaring that the death of God heralded an unprecedented age of Man; soon that proclamation came under attack as rival thinkers of the post-war period subjected the idea of the human “subject” -- the “self” or “ego” -- to unprecedented criticism. With the waning of Sartrean Existentialism, the unfolding dynamics of that critique came to drive the most creative and influential figures in French intellectual life.

In this course, we will examine a representative sample of premodern women’s writing in French, beginning in the Middle Ages and concluding in the Revolutionary Era. The authors studied come from differing walks of life, social classes, and religious and political identifications, and they express themselves in a wide variety of genres, including short stories, fairy tales, lyric poetry, letters, plays, and novels. Despite their many differences, these authors are united by a common tendency to question a centuries-old tradition of misogynistic discourse, patriarchal social order, and gender normativity.
Authors to be studied include:
- Marie de France (ca. 1160), a brilliant storyteller and poet attached to the court of Henry II of England whose fabulous tales, arguably an early form of speculative fiction, imagine alternatives to the rigidity of arranged marriages and the heterosexual couple.
- Christine de Pizan (1364–ca. 1430), a court writer for Charles VI of France and several other powerful patrons who is often considered France’s first professional female writer. Her Livre de la Cité des Dames (Book of the City of Ladies) systematically refutes the misogynistic pronouncements of learned male authors and holds up devotion and religious life as alternatives to accepting the assigned role of wife and mother.
- Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), the sister of Francis I of France and a prolific author of devotional poetry, plays, and the Heptaméron, a collection of tales modeled on Boccaccio’s Decameron and known for its often shocking subject matter. Throughout her oeuvre, she calls into question the social perception of women rooted in misogynistic discourse, as well as the tendency to blame sexual violence on women, while at the same time revealing the potential danger of masculinity for men and women alike and envisioning Pauline Christianity as a means of radical equality.
- Pernette du Guillet (1520–1545), Louise Labé (c. 1524–1566), and Anne de Marquets (1533–1588), three poets who respond to and write against the male-centered tradition of Petrarchan love poetry. Guillet and Labé stand out for their frank and often sensual depictions of female desire and sexuality in spite of taboos against their public expression, while Marquets, a Dominican nun at the convent of Poissy, combines Petrarchan, devotional, and mystic tropes to envision religious life as an alternative to the heteronormativity of lay French society and the Protestant Reformation.
- Madame de Lafayette (1634–1693) and Madame de Sévigné (1626–1696), whose writings are of monumental importance in the history of literature in French as well as invaluable testimonies to the role played by women in the intellectual developments of the early modern period, including salons, Jansenism, and free-thinking (libertinism).
- Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (1685–1755), author of the first known version of La belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast), who, along with other female authors of fairy tales, used the conventions of the genre to challenge social conventions and criticize the treatment of women.
- Claire de Duras (1777–1828), whose novel Ourika, much like Villeneuve’s La belle et la bête, shows how feminist concerns might intersect with colonialism and race; a bestseller in its day, it is one of the first works in French to feature a complex and articulate black narrator and what many scholars consider to be a modern outlook on race and identity.
To provide historical and theoretical context, these readings will be supplemented with relevant primary and secondary sources, as well as with modern and contemporary adaptations, such as illustrations and films. The course is open to graduate students and to advanced undergraduates with permission of the instructor. Discussions will be in English. Readings will be made available both in the original French and in English translation, and final papers may be writte