Graduate Course Offerings

The Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture offers a range of graduate courses on the literature, culture, and thought traditions of France and the Francophone world. Students are able to choose from the rich offerings of a large department. Below you will find graduate course offerings just announced for Summer 2023, Fall 2023 and Spring 2024, subject to change.

François Noudelmann

June 19-30, 2023, NYU Paris

Rien ne semble plus éloigné de la philosophie que la folie. Son irrationalité sert de contre-exemple aux raisonnements méthodiques dont les philosophes font l’éloge. Comment expliquer alors l’intérêt, voire la fascination, des penseurs pour la folie ? Les lumières de la raison seraient-elles des garde-fous contre une tentation profonde pour le délire, l’obscur et la démesure ? Les constructions systématiques de philosophie ne relèvent-elles pas de discours paranoïaques cherchant désespérément à donner du sens à ce qui n’en a pas ? Freud a déchiffré cette attitude commune à la philosophie et aux religions, analysant leurs concepts comme des fétiches. Une écoute psychanalytique des textes philosophiques permet d’en révéler des significations nouvelles et de découvrir quelques folies douces ou violentes parmi les grandes figures de la pensée occidentale.
Dans ce séminaire, on étudiera des extraits d’œuvres philosophiques hantées pas la division de la conscience, sous les figures du démon intérieur, du malin génie, du dédoublement, de la dépossession et du sentiment océanique. On observera les stratégies par lesquelles la philosophie invente des maladies pour proposer des remèdes ou des consolations. Une attention sera portée à ses tonalités, entre discours apaisants ou apocalyptiques. On analysera tout particulièrement les manières dont les philosophes raisonnent sur les maladies psychiques et proposent des études de cas sur des êtres pathologiques tels que Flaubert ou Artaud. On distinguera les approches théoriques et les écritures selon qu’elles définissent la folie pour mieux repousser son danger ou qu’elles s’en inspirent pour expérimenter des délires et inventer de nouveaux styles de penser.
Bibliographie : un exemplier proposera des textes de Platon, Boèce, Érasme, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Weil, Foucault, Deleuze, Glissant, Derrida, Cixous
 

Professor Sylvaine Guyot

Tuesday 3:30 pm- 6:00 pm

Comment se forger une voix critique émancipée, en se situant dans notre environnement de recherche contemporain, qui est aussi historiquement complexe que désormais polycéphale et interdisciplinaire ? Autrement dit : 1. Que souhaite-t-on garder des diverses traditions d'analyse et de pensée ? 2. Que peut-on inventer – et où puiser – pour renouveler notre approche des textes et des productions culturelles ? Ce Pro-Séminaire a pour objectif de dresser les contours de la constellation de méthodologies critiques et de cadres théoriques qui traversent aujourd'hui le champ des sciences humaines et sociales. Chaque semaine, un.e professeur.e du Département de
French Literature, Thought & Culture sera invité.e à venir présenter son travail et sa démarche à partir d’un groupement de textes critiques et théoriques, mis en dialogue avec des sources primaires de nature variée (fiction, archives, performance, cinéma, manuscrits, poésie, etc.) Ce Pro-Séminaire est également conçu comme un laboratoire d'exploration de nos manières d'écrire, de lire, de construire des corpus, de transmettre les savoirs, de s'inscrire dans le monde social, d'interagir avec l'actualité artistique, de fabriquer des discours : il s'agira autant de se familiariser avec les pratiques universitaires établies que d'explorer ensemble de possibles nouvelles façons
de faire.

Professor Hannah Freed-Thall 

Thursday  11am - 1:45 pm

Queerness—in its many forms—animates and energizes modern French/Francophone literature and film. This graduate seminar will explore gender and sexuality as generative forces for thought and vision, focusing especially on modes of desire and gendered being that fall outside of available categories. Among our questions: How are gender and sexuality entangled with the vectors of social class and race; to what styles of vision does this entanglement give rise? If queer people have historically been excluded from the temporalities of the state-sanctioned family, what other narrative and temporal modes has queerness enabled or inspired? How are eccentric or marginal sexualities expressed via heightened attention to style and form, from decadent aestheticism to camp and drag? Discussions will center on theoretical/ critical texts as well as fiction, photography, and film; authors/ artists will include Rachilde, Cahun/Moore, Proust, Genet, Wittig, Garréta, Louis, Leduc, Bouraoui, Sciamma, Demy, Sontag, Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Preciado, Amin, Kahan, Lucey, Dinshaw, Muñoz, Richards, and others.

Professor Phillip Usher

Thursday, 4:30pm - 6:30pm

This seminar, situated at the crossroads of French Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), will open up a French-language library of texts and documents that might potentially serve as an archive for Native American hidden histories, for “contact zones” between indigenous and European populations, for questions of territory, colonialism, and ecology, and to interrogate how we might decolonize (French) literary and non-literary history. With a focus on forms of representation (literary and visual) we will, throughout the course of the semester, read texts by a series of French-language authors who — at the very moment that France became aware of, traveled to, and tried to colonize the New World — produced texts and images at the limits of literature, proto-ethnography, and colonial propaganda, including André Thevet, Jean de Léry, Samuel de Champlain, Marc Lescarbot, Rene Goulaine de Laudonnière, and others, taking us to France’s contact with (amongst other places) Brazil, Canada, Florida, and (briefly) New York state. Alongside French-language texts, we will also read key theoretical and historical texts on the concept of indigeneity and more broadly from the growing field of NAIS. We will also plan to engage in archival exploration, and make several outings (notably to NY’s National Museum of the American Indian).

Professor Emily Apter

Thursday, 2pm-4pm

The goal of the writing seminar intended for Ph.D. students in French Literature, Thought and Culture who have completed their coursework and are preparing their exams and dissertation prospectus is threefold: 1) Finalize Qualifying Exam lists and study preparation; 2) draft the Dissertation Prospectus (with special emphasis on the stakes and clear articulation of the project); and 3) hone the thesis structure: the content of a thesis introduction, writing style, dissertation length and chapter break-down.
In a small group discussion setting students will address questions of coverage, critical method, and research focus: what is your archive or contribution to specific critical fields, area studies? What is an important problem in the critical humanities today that makes a particular contribution to a field or emergent interdisciplinary nexus (i.e. aesthetics and poetics; literary history, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, transmedia studies, environmental humanities, medical humanities, translation studies, digital humanities, new materialisms)? How do your teaching fields dovetail with and diverge from your dissertation specialization? How can you shape your teaching interests and particular specialization areas towards two kinds of sample courses: a) an undergraduate humanities course designed as survey, that is maximally inclusive, and that provides accessible coverage and b) a graduate seminar or upper-level course for advanced undergrads?

The seminar will encourage deadline discipline for establishing a productive work and writing rhythm and create a supportive, workshop atmosphere for sharing ideas and receiving constructive feedback. As a complement to articulated goals for each session, there will be topically focused discussions: drafting and publishing an article, how to craft a dissertation topic that addresses theory and coverage; how to develop a critical voice at once personally invested and scholarly; the evolving status of “theory” (what it means to different subfields) in relation to a dissertation topic or the job market; situating dissertation work in relation to academic jobs and creative professions outside traditional academia (curating, publishing, translating, media arts institutions, political work), and balancing the practicalities of professionalization with a commitment to original thinking and intellectual risk-taking.
The course is taken for credit, generally in the third year. If taught as a two-semester course the expectation is to take the Qualifying Exam by the end of J-term (fall) and to submit the Prospectus by the end of spring term. This timeline will optimize students’ time-to-degree, positioning them well for successful fellowship applications, job market prospects, and maximum input on their work from fellow students, faculty and advisors.

Professor Sylvaine Guyot
Wednesday, 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm

Description:  
À travers une constellation de textes et de figures auctoriales (fiction réaliste, autosociobiographie, science-fiction, théâtre, enquête sociologique, journalisme), ce séminaire se propose d'analyser la manière dont « le littéraire » (au sens large) prend en charge la question de la lutte des classes et contribue à publier, qualifier et politiser la réalité sociale, avec ses inégalités, ses mobilités, sa contingence. Multiplier les cas d’étude permettra d’analyser les structures du champ littéraire, ainsi que la porosité entre ce qu’on nomme « littérature » et les autres modes d’écriture. Les questions seront multiples : Qu’est-ce qu’une « littérature du réel » ? L’écriture peut-elle avoir une action politique ? La fiction permet-elle de refonder nos imaginaires de la lutte ? Quelle légitimité y a-t-il à porter la parole, les aspirations, la condition des déshérités ? Comment rendre compte de sa propre expérience de la violence sociale ? Comment l’esthétique travaille-t-elle l’écriture de l’enquête ? À l’heure où les inégalités environnementales reconfigurent les coordonnées de la justice sociale, et où la lutte des classes s’est déplacée de la centralité ouvrière à l’inclusion des discriminations raciales et genrées, y a-t-il ou non convergence des luttes ? Une critique littéraire marxiste est-elle encore possible ?

Professor Catherine Malabou

2 credits / Friday 2:00 – 4:45 pm, October 27-December 15

Description:  

This course revolves around three major reflections on anxiety. Philosophical, with Heidegger and the existential notion of being-for-death. Psychoanalysis, with Freud and the question of the origin of anxiety. Neuroscientific, with the study of stress and its possible epigenetic transmission. By crossing these studies, we will ask ourselves if anxiety is a threat to the plasticity of the subject, to their capacities for transformation and evolution, or if it does not act on the contrary as a power of metamorphosis and self-creation. We will start with the fundamental distinction between anxiety and fear, the first, unlike the second, having no object. What is this nothing of anxiety? This non-being that triggers anxiety? These questions have proven fundamental in the late twentieth century’s continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. They are currently lying at the heart of the most recent research in neuroscience and epigenetics. After exploring these different domains, we will approach political critiques of the concept of anxiety, like those developed by afro-pessimist thinkers, arguing that this concept is a pre fabricated response to the absolute lack of plasticity of the non-being.

Professor Sylvaine Guyot

As theaters across the world were deemed “non-essential businesses” and forced to close their doors during the pandemic, we will take an opportunity to reflect on the past, present, and future of performing arts. Do theatrical performances contain generative political and aesthetic possibilities that other media do not have, simply in virtue of the very liveliness and togetherness of theater? How have dramatic forms engaged with contemporary realities throughout their history, and how might they do so now? At a time of unprecedented upheaval on multiple levels, how might theater as a form of embodied and sensory expression become an agent for structural
change? This seminar will combine in-depth investigation of a transhistorical corpus of plays (ranging from the understudied theater of the early seventeenth century to twenty-first-century docu-theater and immersive productions) with a multilayered theoretical approach (including performance theory, political thought, affect studies, post- and decolonial criticism, social history, and visual culture). For those who are interested in the intersections of art practice and critical inquiry, the seminar will also provide students with the creative space to experiment with interdisciplinary and collaborative research-creation, as well as new modes of knowledge formation and dissemination.

[Readings in French. Discussions in both French and English.
Assignments in either French or English.]

Professor Zakir Paul

(Comp Lit, cross-listed in English & French)

This course will take a comparative foray into modern novel and narrative theory by questioning the equation between the rise of the novel, the bourgeois subject, and the nation state. What techniques and traces remain in the interstices of such genealogies? Where and how do marginalized figures appear in the novel (the worker, the foreigner, the orphan, the artist, the prisoner, the adulterer, the migrant, the insane, the "gypsy," the prostitute...)? How does their appearance alter the economics, logics, and atmosphere of time and space? How finally do borders, civil and international war disturb the legislated stability of identifying, reading, and writing as a citizen of a nation state?

Professor Isabel Bradley : Thurs 3:30pm - 6pm

This graduate seminar will center vegetal life as a means to deeply engage Francophone
Caribbean poetics, understood as encompassing written and oral expression, music and
kinesthetics, visual art, and spirituality. We will not merely consider how authors and artists reap unilateral symbolic meaning from plants in the aftermaths of plantation slavery and colonialism; rather, we will study how multifaceted models of memory, historicity, autonomy, solidarity, and futurity germinate from the entanglements of Caribbean thinkers with particular tropical vegetation. Though primarily focused on Haiti and the departmentalized French Antilles and Guiana, the seminar will incorporate perspectives from the Americas, Africa, and the anglophone Caribbean to survey emerging frameworks that view plants as active makers of worlds, including
Indigenous cosmovisions; ecofeminisms; ecopoetics; plant intelligence; sensory ethnobotany; and ecological metaphysics. Our principal guiding texts will include novels, poetry, critical essays, and visual art by Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Suzanne Roussi Césaire and Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, Daniel Maximin, Patrick Chamoiseau, Françoise Vergès, Dénètem Touam Bona, Malcom Ferdinand, Mimerose Beaubrun, Edwidge Danticat, Jean Casimir, Monchoachi, Emanuele Coccia, Humberto Maturana, Édouard Duval-Carrié, and others. Discussions will also touch on colonial botanical archives and histories of ecological activism in the greater Caribbean. Our interrogations will raise issues of embodiment, trace, and historical consciousness; subjectivation, nonhuman agency, and modes of “ecological being”; species, taxonomy, and racialization; sensory knowledge and phenomenology; and form and aesthetics.
What are the contributions of plant beings to Caribbean conceptual landscapes? How do Francophone Caribbean paradigms of thought both contest and enrich approaches such as “postcolonial ecocriticism” and “racial capitalism”? The seminar will be taught in English, and readings may be done in French or in English .