Courses 2007-08

French General

FRENGEN 45N. American Writers in 20th-Century Paris—Stanford Introductory Seminar. Preference to freshmen. A crosscultural inquiry into Paris as a part of American culture, a myth, a longing, and source of inspiration. Role of artistic movements (Cubism, Surrealism, Existentialism) and cultural institutions such as the cafés, libraries, and salons in the life and creativity of the expatriate. Birth of their writing selves and existential questioning around issues of national and individual identities. Readings: Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Anaïs Nin, and Baldwin. In English. 3-4 units, Win (Alduy, C)

FRENGEN 122. Literature as Performance—(Same as COMPLIT 122.) Theater as performance and as literature. The historical tension between performance and sexuality in the Western tradition since Greek antiquity. Non-European forms and conventions of performance and theatricality. The modern competition between theater and other forms of performance and media such as sports, film, and television. Sources include: classical Japanese theater; ancient Greek tragedy and comedy; medieval theater in interaction with Christian rituals and its countercultural horizons; the classical age of European theater including Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Molière. 5 units, Win (Gumbrecht, H)

FRENGEN 162. The Time and Space of the Historical Avant Garde—(Same as ITALGEN 162.) Avant garde strategies of representation. How avant garde artists reproduced the experience of modern life in works of various media. Focus is on manifestos, prose and poetry, performances, films, and collages. Readings by Apollinaire, Tzara, Breton, Cendrars, Ball, Fondane, Urmuz, Arp, Marinetti, De-Saint Point; films and audio performances by Marcel Janco, Jean Arp, and Hugo Ball. 3-5 units, Aut (Eram, C)

FRENGEN 163. Texts in History: Enlightenment to the Present—(Same as HUMNTIES 163.) Priority to students in the Humanities honors program and French majors. The relationship between intellectual, political, and cultural history, and literary creativity in the modern period. Texts include Voltaire, Philosophical Letters; Rousseau, Second Discourse; Kant, What is Enlightenment? and the Critique of Judgment; documents and speeches from the French Revolution; Hölderlin, The Rhein; Schlegel, Dialogue on Poesy; Balzac, Père Goriot; Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground; Sorel, Reflections on Violence; T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land; Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Artaud, Theater and its Double; and Kane, Ambiguous Adventure. GER:DB-Hum. 5 units, Spr (Edelstein, D)

FRENGEN 165. Comic and Erotic Literature of the French Renaissance—How 16th-century French writers use humor in their treatment of relationships between the sexes and in their social commentaries. Readings in English translation: François Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and Giovanni Boccaccio. In English. No knowledge of French or Italian required. 4 units, Aut (Sterritt, D)

FRENGEN 180Q. Aspects of Contemporary French Society through Film—Stanford Introductory Seminar. Preference to sophomores. Films depicting important events in French society since WW II, up to current problems of integration of minorities and changing familial, sexual, and political relations. Emphasis on autobiographical films in which historical events and a personal experience within them are recreated by the metteur en scène or the author of the script, such as Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants. Films selected for filmic quality and documentary value. GER:DB-Hum. 4 units, Spr (Bertrand, M)

FRENGEN 181. Philosophy and Literature—Required gateway course for Philosophical and Literary Thought; crosslisted in departments sponsoring the Philosophy and Literature track: majors should register in their home department; non-majors may register in any sponsoring department. Introduction to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. Issues may include authorship, selfhood, truth and fiction, the importance of literary form to philosophical works, and the ethical significance of literary works. Texts include philosophical analyses of literature, works of imaginative literature, and works of both philosophical and literary significance. Authors may include Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Borges, Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Nussbaum, Walton, Nehamas, Pavel, and Pippin. GER:DB-Hum. 4 units, Win (Anderson, L; Landy, J)

FRENGEN 192E. Images of Women in French Cinema: 1930-1990—The myth of the feminine idol in French films in historical and cultural context. The mythology of stars as the imaginary vehicle that helped France to change from traditional society to modern nation after 1945. Filmmakers include Renoir, Truffaut, and Nelly Kaplan. The evolution of the role of women in France over 60 years. Lectures in English; films in French with English subtitles. GER:DB-Hum, EC-Gender. 3-5 units, alternate years, not given this year

FRENGEN 203. Dare (Not) to Know: The Gamble of the French Enlightenment—Focus is on tensions and transformations in the history of the French Enlightenment. How did the social and intellectual projects of the philosophes coexist? Could the modest epistemology of the early Enlightenment resist the temptations of absolute knowledge? Readings from Bayle, Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Condillac, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Condorcet, Destutt de Tracy, and authors from SULAIR’s new Super-Enlightenment database. 3-5 units, Win (Edelstein, D)

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FRENGEN 207. Existentialist Fiction: The Literature of Absurdity—(Same as ITALGEN 207.) 20th-century French and Italian novels dealing with the theme of absurdity, including: Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal; Sartre’s Nausea; Beckett’s Molloy; Duras’s The Sailor from Gibraltar; and Calvino’s Mr Palomar. 4-5 units, Spr (Harrison, R)

FRENGEN 208. The French New Novel: Fiction and Film—50s and 60s French experimental fiction: how they do away with traditional plot, chronological narrative, and character to focus on objects and investigate the nature of physical and mental perception. Authors include Butor, Duras, Ricardou, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Simon. Cinematic versions such as Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour. 3-5 units, Spr (Wittman, L)

FRENGEN 247E. Fictions of the Self—A tradition of pseudo-confidence which critiques, parodies, and offers a substitute for the traditional confessional narrative; works in which talking about oneself constitutes not an act of self-description but a feat of self-construction. Readings: Constant, Proust, Beckett, Perec, Nabokov. 3-5 units, Aut (Landy, J)

FRENGEN 261. Framing the Aesthetic Experience, 1630-1780—Aesthetics as organization of cognition, experience, and feelings; the beholder framed as cognitive, sensitive subject and as member of an elite community defined culturally and politically. Topics include: the epistemology of confused perception and the poetics of incompleteness; the je ne sais quoi and the sublime; the dialectics of pleasure and pain; and taste and decadence. Works by Félibien, Bouhours, Dubos, Boileau, Fénelon, Marivaux, Montesquieu, Diderot, Leibniz, Burke, and Lessing. 3-5 units, Aut (Russo, E)

FRENGEN 275. Writing Hate: Anti-Semitism and Aesthetics in Modern French Literature and Culture—From the 19th century until WW II. Why were anti-Semites so preoccupied with the beautiful? How does aesthetics structure ideology? Readings may include fiction by the Goncourt brothers, Maupassant, and Drieu la Rochelle; anti-Semitic tracts by Drumont and Céline; and theoretical and critical texts by Plato, Aristotle, Sartre, Kristeva, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Carroll. 3-5 units, Spr (Bell, D)

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FRENGEN 290E. The Modern Tradition II: Self-Deception in Literature, Film, and Philosophy—(Same as MTL 334B.) Possibilities of cross-fertilization between continental philosophy (such as Sartre) and analytic philosophy (such as Donald Davidson) by reference to the topic of self-deception or bad faith. Literary works by Molière, Benjamin Constant, Dostoevsky, Camus, Sartre, Borges, and contemporary writers; films by Hitchcock, Losey, and Bergman. 3-5 units, Win (Dupuy, J)

FRENGEN 295. Science, Technology, and Society in Europe and the U.S.: Ethical Debates and Controversies—Differing approaches in the case of advanced technologies, focusing on the convergence of nanotechnology with biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. Relationship of these cases to the scientific, technological, industrial, economic, and military race. The necessity for cooperation in the establishment of ethical norms or standards at the international level. 3-5 units, Win (Dupuy, J)

FRENGEN 301E. New Methods and Sources in French and Italian Studies—(Same as ITALGEN 301E.) Based on student interest. Changes in research methods: the use of digitized texts, resources, and databases available through Stanford Libraries’ gateways. Emphasis is on strategies for exploration of broad and specialized topics through new and traditional methods. Using a flexible schedule based on enrollment and the level of students’ knowledge, may be offered in forms including a shortened version on the basics, independent study, or a syllabus split over two quarters. Unit levels adjusted accordingly. 1-4 units, Spr (Sussman, S)

FRENGEN 317. Crowds—(Same as COMPLIT 257C/357C, ITALGEN 317.) The place of human multitudes in the Western sociopolitical imagination from 1789 to the present. Theories of collectivity in works such as Tarde’s Laws of Imitation, Le Bon’s Psychology of Crowds, Freud’s writings on mass psychology, and Canetti’s Crowds and Power. Representations of crowds in literature, art, theater, and film. How modern mythologies are informed by premodern precedent and reflect upon the question of multitudes in postindustrial societies. Students write semantic histories and curate a virtual gallery. 3-5 units, Aut (Schnapp, J)

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FRENGEN 325. Modern Seminar—(Same as HUMNTIES 325.) The postmodern condition as post-WW II rupture in Western tradition; moral, political, cultural, and aesthetical dimensions. Sources include literature, philosophy, essays, films, and painting. Authors and artists include : Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, Alain Resnais, Samuel Beckett, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, David Riesman, Georges Perec, Juliet Mitchell, and Francis Bacon. 3-5 units, Win (Apostolidès, J)

FRENGEN 343. Guy Debord: His Life and His Work—(Same as DRAMA 343.) How Debord’s intellectual and artistic productions can be connected to their concrete historical context; their contemporary pertinence. Increased academic visibility for his work and ideas. 3-5 units, Aut (Apostolidès, J)

FRENGEN 354. Racine—One of a series of seminars on the Western literary tradition to provide an updated image of an author’s work using biography for historical context. Racine’s drama and tragedy emphasizing 17th-century traditions and evolution of performance and the Alexandrin meter constitutive for tragedy in French classical drama. His engagement in other literary genres including as royal historiographer; contemporary intellectual positions and battles including Cartesian varieties of philosophy and the Jansenist attempt at a theological modernization in the Catholic Church. 3-5 units, Win (Gumbrecht, H)

FRENGEN 370. Anthropology of Speed—(Same as COMPLIT 370, ITALGEN 370.) Ideas about accelerated motion; its significance and effects on cultures, from prehistory to the present. Impact of transportation revolutions on beliefs regarding selfhood and society. The rise of forms of intelligence and human skill sets that interact with, resist, or enable such revolutions. Topics include: speed and divinity; the evolution of conventions and techniques for capturing accelerated movement; speed and accident; velocity and liminal states such as inspiration, transport, and intoxication; and cognitive implications of sped-up states and their impact on cultural norms. 3-5 units, Spr (Schnapp, J)

FRENGEN 395. Philosophical Reading Group—(Same as COMPLIT 359A, ITALGEN 395.) Discussion of one contemporary or historical text from the Western philosophical tradition per quarter in a group of faculty and graduate students. For admission of new participants, a conversation with H. U. Gumbrecht or R. Harrison is required. May be repeated for credit. 1 unit, Aut, Win (Gumbrecht, H)

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