Fall 2024
FR 2970/ITAL 2970 Teaching of French/Italian
Dr. Lorraine Denman Mon 2:30-5:00PM
This course provides graduate student teaching assistants/fellows/instructors with the knowledge and skills needed to teach an elementary- or intermediate-level foreign language class in an institution of higher education (i.e., language and literature departments at the University of Pittsburgh). Students will learn about contemporary theories and research on foreign and second language learning and acquisition, but much of the course content will focus on praxis and strategies related to classroom-based language teaching. Topics will include contextualized language instruction, communicative and task-based instruction, content-based instructional methods, equitable and inclusive teaching practices, and strategies for teaching grammar, vocabulary, and linguistic competencies (reading, writing, listening, speaking). Students will be assessed via practice-based projects and self and peer evaluations.
This course is taught in English, but speakers of all linguistic backgrounds are welcome, and examples will be taken from a wide variety of languages offered at Pitt.
Pre-requisites: None, but students should have graduate standing in a language and literature department at the University of Pittsburgh. Other students interested in this course should contact the professor directly (denman@pitt.edu).
ITAL 2701 Special Topics: The Media of Italian Colonialisms
Dr. Rachel Love Wed 3:15-5:40PM
This course examines the texts, sights, and sounds of colonialism, anti-colonial activism, and postcolonial hybridities in Italy. Primary sources include the cinema of empire including Cabiria (Pastrone 1914) and Lo squadrone bianco (Genina 1936), Italian media produced about the Algerian struggle for independence like The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo 1966) and Racconti di bambini di Algeria (Pirelli 1962), and literature, documentary films, and music of contemporary postcolonial Italy. We will explore how these media produce imperial ideologies and fantasies, as well as possibilities of transnational solidarities, resistance, and belonging. Throughout the course, we will make transhistorical connections and question how Italy's imperial past emerges in contemporary reckonings with mobility, race, and identity.
Course materials will be in Italian and English. In-class discussions will take place in English and Italian, depending on student proficiency and needs.
Research Networks: Film and Media ; Nation/Transnation
FR 2605 Novel Thinking/La Pensée du Roman
Dr. Giuseppina Mecchia Wed 3 :30-6 :00PM
What does it mean to think about the novel as a thinking tool? The decades between World War I and the 1970s saw the reshaping of French Novel and its cultural, critical and philosophical concerns. This seminar examines how the novel in France started to be conceived no longer as a representational tool, nor merely in terms of realism or direct political intervention. Beginning with Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and continuing with writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras and Georges Perec, we will consider the novel as a thinking tool, by which new apprehensions of philosophical notions such as Time, Death, Gender, and History could be thought in unique ways. This is also a time when an unthought issue comes to the fore around questions of French coloniality and race relations, issues that are not directly treated by the writers in questions, but which seep into them through their peculiar use of language. We will read the theoretical and narrative works of the writers mentioned above, and we will make use of the theoretical insights of thinkers such as Jacques Rancière, Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze, as well as a varied array of literary critics.
Seminar taught in French.
Research networks: Gender and Sexuality; Nation/Transnation
FR 2649 Cinema, Television, and Streaming Platforms in France
Dr. David Pettersen Thurs 2:30-5:00PM
This seminar will examine the relationships between cinema, television, and platforms in France from StudioCanal’s early efforts at making “Quality TV” series like Spiral and Mafiosa in the mid 2000s up to present-day collaborations between French studios and American streamers such as Lupin and Becoming Karl Lagerfeld. While there has been a wealth of research on global television in the age of streaming over the past several years, French television remains an underappreciated object of study both in France and the US. France’s strong sense of cultural and linguistic identity as embodied in the protectionist regulations that historically structure its film and media industry make it one of the best case studies to investigate new struggles over localization and internationalization in the age of global streaming platforms. This course will introduce students to recent scholarship in streaming and television studies, especially subfields like platform studies, localization studies, and media industry studies, and it will help them to apply these emerging approaches to the French context. It will enable students understand the extent of which older debates about national and regional identity do and do not matter in the contemporary media ecology. While the producers and companies we will study come from France and often develop series in the French language, students from other departments are welcome to develop final research projects that draw on series, producers, companies, or platforms in other regional areas so long as their project is in dialogue with the research approaches studied in the seminar.
The seminar will be taught in English, series will have English subtitles, and the vast majority of readings will be available in English.
Research Networks: Film and Media ; Nation/Transnation
One-Credit Seminars:
FR/ITAL 2000 Proseminar Tues 1:00-1:50PM
FR 2601 Dissertation Workshop Tues 2:00-2 :50PM
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FR 2970/ITAL 2970: Teaching of French/Italian, Fall 2023, Dr. Lorraine Denman
This course provides graduate student teaching assistants/fellows/instructors with the knowledge and skills needed to teach an elementary- or intermediate-level foreign language class in an institution of higher education (i.e., language and literature departments at the University of Pittsburgh). Students will learn about contemporary theories and research on foreign and second language learning and acquisition, but much of the course content will focus on praxis and strategies related to classroom-based language teaching. Topics will include contextualized language instruction, communicative and task-based instruction, content-based instructional methods, equitable and inclusive teaching practices, and strategies for teaching grammar, vocabulary, and linguistic competencies (reading, writing, listening, speaking). Students will be assessed via practice-based projects and self and peer evaluations. This course is taught in English, but speakers of all linguistic backgrounds are welcome, and examples will be taken from a wide variety of languages offered at Pitt.
Pre-requisites: None, but students should have graduate standing in a language and literature department at the University of Pittsburgh. Other students interested in this course should contact the professor directly (denman@pitt.edu).
FR 2710/ITAL 2710: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Fall 2023, Dr. Bella Grigoryian
In this course intended for beginning graduate students in the modern languages, students will survey major movements and concepts in literary and cultural theory of the 20th/21st centuries. These theories have provided us important ways to think about how to read and interpret literature, film, and other cultural artifacts, and, as such, are an important aspect of graduate studies in the humanities. This course is meant to provide students a general background in theory that they can further develop in certain areas as they continue their studies. The course will be taught in English, and all readings will be available in English.
FR 2505: Gendered Monies: Affective and Sexual Regimes in 19th Century France , Fall 2023, Dr. Giuseppina Mecchia
In the first half of the nineteenth century, France slowly underwent a radical shift in affective and sexual semiotics. From a feudal socio-economic regime and signifying system, and its attendant model of gendered behaviors and expectations, the culture slowly started to incorporate the imperative of the capitalist form of social organization in its affective functioning. Literature, and the novel in particular, is the exemplary form of expression for this changing semiotics, at all levels: commercial production, creative processes, audience building and social circulation. We will study this essential passage in five novels dating from about 1820 until 1860, by authors such as Madame de Charrière, Madame de Duras, Stendhal and Honoré de Balzac. Our critical insights will be mostly framed in 21st century post- Marxist cultural criticism, gender studies and the work of Jacques Rancière.
Course taught in French. Cross-listed with GSWS and Cultural Studies.
FR 2767: African Feminisms, Fall 2023, Dr. Astou Gueye
“We Should All Be Feminist” claimed Nigerian writer and feminist activist Chimamanda Adichie, but what does it mean to be feminist in Africa? How do African writers, cultural critics, and activists relate to feminism? What does “gender” mean in this context? African feminism(s) is an interdisciplinary seminar at the intersection of Cultural studies and Gender and Women’s studies that uses a transmedial approach to reflect on Feminism in Africa. The seminar centers African perspectives to investigate the socio-political and cultural implications of feminist discourse and practice on the African continent and its diaspora. We will engage theoretical texts, examine authors whose work embraces feminist politics, and discuss the praxis of feminist activism to contextualize feminist studies in Africa.
Course taught in English. Cross-listed with GSWS.
ITAL 2701: Special Topics: Machiavelli in Context, Fall 2023, Dr. James Coleman
In this course a close study of the works of Niccolò Machiavelli will serve as a point of entry for an interdisciplinary exploration of Renaissance Italy from the late fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries. We will study Machiavelli's contributions to numerous fields -- political theory, historiography, theater, epistolography, linguistics, etc. -- in relation to those of his contemporaries. Students will gain a deep understanding of Machiavelli's radically innovative ideas, the cultural and political context that shaped his works, and the violent controversies that they provoked. Open to graduate students in a range of fields; Italian proficiency is not required.
FR 2715: "Gender & Sexuality in the French Renaissance". Spring 2023, Prof. Todd Reeser
What does it mean when a group of Renaissance explorers accidentally “discover” a lost island populated entirely by “hermaphrodites”? When Marie (who was assigned female at birth) one day accidentally sprouts “des membres virils” in a small village in eastern France? When Louise Labé conveys her poetic ecstasy? When male poets write lengthy poems in the voice of a woman in love with another woman? When Rabelais’s male characters attach enormous decorated codpieces to their outfits? When Marguerite de Navarre’s women characters seem unable to talk directly about sexual assault?
These kinds of textual questions will lead us to ask some big questions about historical approaches to gender and sexuality: How do today’s concepts of “queer,” “feminist,” “gender fluidity,” “trans*,” “intersex,” “masculinity,” “sexuality,” “homosexuality,” “heterosexuality,” and “gender” relate to early modern France? Can we even use these terms and the concepts they designate to talk about the Renaissance in the first place? In this graduate seminar, we will examine and interrogate key cultural constructs of gender and sexuality conveyed in texts of the sixteenth century. How do they resemble—and not resemble—our own? When and how do they presage the constructs that we live with in the 21st century?
This central issue will lead us to consider many of the main cultural and literary currents of the period—such as Humanism, Neoplatonism, the querelle des femmes, marriage, medicine, friendship, kingship—and thus provide students with little or no background in Renaissance studies an understanding of the century’s context. No previous knowledge of the Renaissance will be assumed. We will read both canonical and non-canonical writers, but we will also use various cultural discourses to organize our thinking (e.g. medicine, travel narratives, poetry). The course thus aims to give students the opportunity to think about how to go about studying questions of gender and sexuality when such questions are at the fore in the Humanities and in popular culture. Taught in French, primary texts all read in French. Non-French graduate students have the option of writing final papers in French or English.
FR 2715: "Animality, Sex, Gender". Spring 2023, Prof. Kaliane Ung
In recent years, we have come to realize that our destiny as humans is closely linked with that of the bee, the earthworm, or other animals. How should we consider gender and sexuality in this new paradigm, when cloning appears as a possible option for the preservation of species? This graduate seminar focuses on recent theoretical, literary, and cinematic texts that put animality into relation with gender and sexuality. Queer studies, gender studies, feminist studies, and trans studies have been radically rethought through the category of animality. How, for instance, is the category of woman linked with animals as a tentative gesture to redefine the “female” seventy years after Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work The Second Sex? The critical apparatus will allow us to open the word “female” to a plurality of meanings, freeing it from the constraints of a female body often characterized by the violence it is subjected to (Catherine Malabou). Thinking of oneself as an animal also means changing one’s perception of the world and finding new ways to care for it. Students will be introduced to foundational thought in ecocriticism (Rachel Carson, Stéphanie Posthumus), in which “ecology is composed through histories of interaction, relationality, interconnection, and materiality” (Eva Hayward). Starting with Deleuze’s notion of “becoming-animal,” we will study animals as beings of language, but also as ontological beings larger than the metaphors and allegories with which they are associated, in order to approach animal studies and queer studies as drafting an “ethics of difference”(Donna Haraway) and redefining our idea of Nature (Bruno Latour). Primary materials might include French, German, Latin American, and American texts read in English, as well as films (Boon Joon-ho, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Jean Cocteau, Wes Anderson).
FR2765 "Mapping Afropea: Afropea, Afropolitans, and the African Diaspora in Europe.", Spring 2023, Prof. John Walsh
In Habiter la frontière, the French-Cameroonian writer, Léonora Miano, writes: “Afropea is, in France, the mental locale that those who are unable to claim the privilege of French stock give to themselves.” Miano claims that Afropea remains an imaginary construct, superimposed over harsh realities experienced by immigrants and migrants. This seminar explores the mapping of “Afropea” in the works of writers and filmmakers of African descent who explore the many cultural translations that occur between Africa and Europe. We will study a range of texts and film that shed light on the lived experiences of multiple generations of Africans who have transformed, and have been transformed by, Europe. The course will engage critical debates generated by discourses on “Afropeans” and “Afropolitans,” especially questions about race, gender and sexuality, belonging and citizenship, and migration.
The course will be taught in French or English, depending on enrollments.
FR2715: The French-speaking Mediterranean, Spring 2022, David Pettersen
This seminar brings a Mediterranean perspective to the French-speaking world as a means of investigating how regional approaches to the study of cultures, languages, literatures, and media challenge the national approaches that have long defined scholarship on the countries surrounding the middle sea. This seminar will survey some of the key scholarly works that have theorized the Mediterranean, from Fernand Braudel to the present. We will examine how scholars have understood some the key topoi that have defined the field, including sun, sea, food, cities, ports, trade, tourism, warfare, translation, borders, migration, and refugees. Our approach will be diachronic, and we will examine competing images of the Mediterranean in works of literature and cinema from the Early Modern period to the present, especially the flows of cultures, goods, and human beings throughout the Mediterranean and the conflicts between its countries and peoples. Finally, we will go beyond questions of representation to consider how culture industries operate around the sea, especially the publishing, media production, and film festival industries.
FR2402: Early Modern Adaptations
Spring 2020, Chloé Hogg
Literature to screen (but how about screen to literature?). Book to bande dessinée. Oral tradition to elite literary practice to children’s lit to video game. Fan fiction. Revivals. Vulgarization. TV series. Podcasts. Adaptation is everywhere in our hypermediated media worlds. And as Thomas Leitch writes in the inaugural issue of the journal Adaptation (2008), “Adaptation studies are on the move.” This seminar takes a transmedial, diachronic approach to study the cultural production and media of early modern France as the processes and products of adaptation (Hutcheon). How did early modern writers, artists, artisans, and audiences adapt the stories and material of Antiquity—culturally prestigious, yes, but also tasteless, outdated, obscene, and shocking to early modern publics? How did early modern cultural productions adapt media forms and protocols to incorporate popular traditions, new technologies, and expanding global contacts? And what can we learn from the processes of adapting “the early modern”—stories, figures, images, texts—in contemporary cultural production from Versailles (the TV series) to La Princesse de Clèves (the graphic novel)? What does it mean to study early modern (as) adaptations? Do we always have to read the book to study the film? This course draws on critical readings in adaptation studies, media theory, media archeology, film studies and literary studies; our seminar corpus includes texts, images, gaming, films, fan fiction, graphic narratives, television, theater, radio/audio, and digital media. Students will produce an adaptation case study; a teaching unit or lesson; and/or a creative or critical adaptation of their research. Course taught in French primarily.
FR2703: Metropoles-Megacities
Spring 2020, John Walsh
This seminar explores the urban environmental imaginaries of writers and filmmakers of the Global South. What do their depictions reveal about contemporary and historical forms of the urban? How do they make sense of globalizing ideologies of urbanization, especially neoliberalism and its consequences for social and environmental justice? More broadly, how do literary representations intervene in and contribute to wider debates at the intersection of urban studies, postcolonial theory, and the environmental humanities? These questions serve as a critical backdrop for the study of the ways in which these imaginaries generate new and unexpected geographies of urban experience, shaped by intertwining political and ecological phenomena, including inequality, poverty, migration, pollution, and climate change. The course will be conducted in French or English, depending on enrollments. We will read a variety of fiction (Chamoiseau, Begag, Lahens, Mabanckou, Charles) and theory (Lefebvre, Harvey, Westphal, Mbembe, Sarr, Roy, Brenner). We will also view films by Sembène, Farès, Benyamina, and Peck.
FR2703: Animality, Gender, Sex
Spring 2020, Kaliane Ung
In recent years, we have come to realize that our destiny as humans is closely linked with that of the bee, the earthworm, or other animals. How should we consider gender and sexuality in this new paradigm, when cloning appears as a possible option for the preservation of species? This graduate seminar focuses on recent theoretical, literary, and cinematic texts that put animality into relation with gender and sexuality. Queer studies, gender studies, feminist studies, and trans studies have been radically rethought through the category of animality. How, for instance, is the category of woman linked with animals as a tentative gesture to redefine the “female” seventy years after Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work The Second Sex? The critical apparatus will allow us to open the word “female” to a plurality of meanings, freeing it from the constraints of a female body often characterized by the violence it is subjected to (Catherine Malabou). Thinking of oneself as an animal also means changing one’s perception of the world and finding new ways to care for it. Students will be introduced to foundational thought in ecocriticism (Rachel Carson, Stéphanie Posthumus), in which “ecology is composed through histories of interaction, relationality, interconnection, and materiality” (Eva Hayward). Starting with Deleuze’s notion of “becoming-animal,” we will study animals as beings of language, but also as ontological beings larger than the metaphors and allegories with which they are associated, in order to approach animal studies and queer studies as drafting an “ethics of difference” (Donna Haraway) and redefining our idea of Nature (Bruno Latour). Primary materials might include French, German, Latin American, and American texts read in English, as well as films (Boon Joon-ho, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Jean Cocteau, Wes Anderson).
FR2710: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Offered annually
In this course intended for beginning graduate students in the modern languages, students will survey major movements and concepts in literary and cultural theory of the 20th/21st centuries. These theories have provided us important ways to think about how to read and interpret literature, film, and other cultural artifacts, and, as such, are an important aspect of graduate studies in the humanities. This course is meant to provide students a general background in theory that they can further develop in certain areas as they continue their studies.
FR2761: French Studies, Gender Studies
Fall 2019, Todd Reeser
To say “French studies and gender studies have much to say to each other” is an understatement. To do French studies without gender studies or to do gender studies without French studies is impossible (not to mention unwise). In the era of #MeToo and growing representation of transgender characters in media, this has never been more true. In this course, we will systematically put into dialogue primary texts in French and approaches/theories in gender studies. How can theoretical principles be adapted to primary texts? “Gender” will be taken in the fullest sense of the term, incorporating questions related to feminism, masculinity, transgender, cisgender, hetero/sexuality, queer, lesbian/gay/bisexual, etc.
The organization of the course will not be based on a single historical or temporal period, but on approaches to gender. In fact, we will take select cases from a variety of periods to consider how time and gender do/do not relate (e.g. What remains from pre-modern feminism in Simone de Beauvoir or in 21st-century feminist thought? To what extent can we talk of “trans” in early modern France? How does French colonialism presage current representations of North African masculinities?).
Central to the course, too, will be connections—or more likely, disconnections—between Anglo-American gender/sexuality studies and French-language theories and texts/contexts. What concepts in French cross over into English-speaking contexts, and what concepts do not? Why? What language about gender is used in each linguistic context? How does post-colonial thought factor in to these discussions? Also central to the course will be ways in which the all-important concept of “universalism” pertains to gender and sexuality. How is universalism a vexed concept? How is it helpful? What does it do to gender and gender constructions?
Texts taken include theory, manifestos, film, TV, theatre, poetry, autobiography, medical treatises, philosophy, conduct manuals, fairy tales, graphic novels, textbooks, music videos, and others. Students will finish the course able to think in more sophisticated terms about gender/sexuality and to better position interests in French in gender studies broadly (and vice versa). Students will be able to adapt the course content to their own interests and write final papers on topics related to areas of specialization (from medieval to 21st-century film and media, with all stops in between).