Course Catalog

Considers a selection of Shakespeare's plays in the context of the dramatist's explorations of the possibilities of theatricality. Examines how theater is represented in his work and how his work lends itself to production in theater and film today. Students view video versions, visit Paris theaters, and travel to London and Stratford-on-Avon to see the Royal Shakespeare Company in performance.

Explores the work of Anglo-American modernist writers in Paris, concentrating on the works of Ernest Hemingway, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, and other writers. Relates their formal experimentation to the visual arts and to the psychic dynamics of exile: the experience of liberation from the constraints of one culture and an alienated relation to the new environment.

By promoting careful analysis of two landmarks of French literature while building skills in language and cultural semantics, oral and written communications, this course aims at helping students weave together literary meaning and cross-cultural belonging. By becoming more familiar with French literary language and mindscapes, students will further their understanding of L’Esprit français, the special relationship between literature and culture, writers and intellectual history in France.
The choice of works and pairings will differ every year according to the instructor’s interests.

This course considers how the language of film can sometimes unlock the secrets of Shakespeare's world and help us to understand his contribution to the evolution of art cinema as well as to blockbuster culture. Focus is given to close readings of Shakespeare's plays, analysis of cinematic adaptations and a study of films such as Al Pacino's Looking for Richard or Shakespeare in Love. Directors Kozintsev, Welles, Godard, Olivier and Kurosawa are also studied.

Examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature made Paris into a city of revolutions. Considers historical and literary arguments about the political impact of various forms of texts, and evaluates the implications of literary representations of and responses to social unrest. Authors may include Stendhal, Hugo, Dickens, Marx, Flaubert and Vallès

This course addresses the dark side of the imagination: monsters, vampires, hauntings and demons. It opens students to the history and genealogy of the fascination with excess, the supernatural, and horror, tracing the development of a genre from its 18th- century inception through to its late bloom in the Victorian era; leaving it to students to pursue through their pick of twentieth- and twenty-first gothic. Authors studied include Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, the Marquis de Sade, James Hogg, R.L. Stevenson, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. The course also attends to visual representations of gothic in painting, ballet, television, and film.

The intellectual anti-heroes of Dostoevsky’s novels, novellas, and short stories from the period beginning in 1864 have left a more decisive and enduring mark on Western culture than those of any other Russian writer. The author’s struggles with poverty, poor health, imprisonment, epilepsy, and gambling led him to question the existence of any social, moral, or metaphysical order. His underground characters, divided between reason and will, confront lust, despair, schizophrenia, and insanity, sometimes descending into sado-masochism, rape, murder, and suicide. We will read this powerful fiction with an eye first to its Russian context and then to a sampling of its international repercussions (Gogol, Tolstoy, Gorky; Faulkner, Sartre, Bernhard …).

Studies the literary works, poetic aspirations and legal trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire, while tracing their tremendous influence on 19th-century French literature and their contribution to the emergence of modernity. Readings include Madame Bovary, Trois contes, Bouvard et Pecuchet, and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal among other works, as well as a range of critical and philosophical commentaries.

Approaches Western political discourses through major texts of 19th-century literature. Provides an introduction to socialism, anarchism, liberalism, and communism, and relates them to questions of literary production, arguing that the literary and the political imaginations are intimately related. Literary texts studied include fiction by Zola, Gaskell, Dickens, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chernyshevsky, and Conrad, and poetry by French and British writers.

Examines the origins, works and legacy of German Romanticism. Topics include Romantic conceptions of irony, love and nature, as well as broader historical events in Europe that contributed to the movement’s development. The central theme is that of radical loneliness – the “absolute inwardness” at the heart of Romantic aesthetics. Students study Romantic painting, music, literature and thought.