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

Tuesday, 12:30pm - 3:00pm

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.

5-wk seminar co-taught by visiting prof. Edouard Louis & prof. Sylvaine Guyot

À travers la lecture d'écrivains et d'écrivaines comme Émile Zola, James Baldwin, Violette Leduc, Alice Walker, Jean-Luc Lagarce ou encore Alan Hollinghurst (liste indicative), nous verrons comment la littérature (au sens large) s’est emparée et s'empare aujourd'hui de la question des classes sociales, des luttes et des impossibilités à lutter qui traversent ces classes, des rêves, des aspirations ou des privations qui définissent les individus selon leur place dans la société. Dans ce séminaire à deux voix – celle de l'écrivain qui est aussi penseur engagé, et celle de l'universitaire qui est aussi praticienne – les séances prendront diverses formes : discussions critiques, ateliers
de réflexion théorique, travail de plateau, laboratoire d'écriture, enquêtes et tables rondes.

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 Stéphane Gerson, Professor of French, French Studies and History at NYU, Taught in French

Description:  

Depuis quelques années, un nombre croissant d’historiens et d’historiennes, d’anthropologues, de sociologues se tournent vers l’histoire de leurs propres familles. Ces ouvrages s’émancipent de normes disciplinaires qui ont longtemps prôné la distance face à son objet de recherche. Il mérite donc que nous nous y arrêtions. Nos objectifs seront les suivants: (1) comprendre les raisons intellectuelles, politiques et autres de cet intérêt pour sa propre famille; (2) saisir les savoirs ainsi produits et les regards que ces ouvrages nous proposent (retour, enquête, récit, trajectoire, généalogie, etc.); (3) découvrir de nouveaux modes d’écriture, plus personnels, réflexifs, expérimentaux que ceux auxquels nous sommes accoutumés; (4) nous interroger, avec un esprit critique, sur les apports et les limites actuels de ce genre.
Les auteur·e·s que nous lirons pourraient inclure Philippe Artières, Audrey Célestine, Christine Détrez, Didier Eribon, Kaoutar Harchi, Ivan Jablonka, Rose-Marie Lagrave, Camille Lefebvre, Nicole Lapierre. Certain·e·s d’entre eux pourraient nous rejoindre pour une discussion distancielle.
 

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?

Taught by new faculty members (TBD)