Jason Earle

At first glance, the grouping of these three French female writers might seem just to be the arbitrary product of alphabetical order. They come from three different generations, after all, and their works perhaps present more aesthetic differences than similarities. Thus, part of our goal in this class will be to understand the unique role that each has played in the history of modern French literature. The preeminent woman of letters of the first half of the 20th century, Colette, depicted the social and sexual mores of her time in a sophisticated and wry prose. Marguerite Duras, one of the most significant writers and intellectuals of the postwar era, pushed the boundaries of the novel’s form through experimentations in dialogue, character, and narrative. Annie Ernaux, the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, has long dissected the nature of personal memory with an approach closer to sociology than creative literature. A separate aim of the course will be to understand the connecting threads between and among the three. Most significantly, we will see how Colette, Duras, and Ernaux all draw on the material of their own lives in their writing, blurring the line between autobiography and fiction. We will also explore a set of shared preoccupations in their work, including the tensions of domestic life, the enduring influence of maternal figures, the power of female sexuality and desire, the transformations of the aging body, the relationship between memory and history, and the determinative role of social class. We will ask, finally, why each of these authors has been regarded as “scandalous” in some way and also why each is having a “translation moment” of sorts in the present-day anglophone world. We will read full works in English translation; qualified students of French may read works in the original and do their conference work in French.

The surrealist movement emerged in France in the early 1920s, when a group of writers questioned the narrative of reason, progress, and tradition that had long defined European culture. In exploring the potential of the unconscious, the surrealists endeavored to create an avant-garde artistic and political revolution motivated by desire, madness, and dreams. The concepts and techniques developed by the French surrealists would go on to have an enormous influence on writers, artists, and filmmakers across the globe. This course will explore some of the key ideas, practices, and figures in the history of surrealism. The first portion of the semester will focus on the group’s origin in France: We will read several of its foundational texts and study many of the strategies that the surrealists invented for artistic creation. From there, we will examine the legacy of surrealism in a variety of locations—from Latin America and the Caribbean to Egypt, Japan, and the United States—in order to see how the movement’s message of revolution and nonconformity has been adopted and adapted by writers and artists up through the present day. Topics addressed will include automatic writing, dream work, mad love, the marvelous, games and chance, urban flânerie, gender and surrealism, anticapitalist and anticolonial surrealism, and reality itself. Although our first focus will be on the literature of surrealism, this will be a very interdisciplinary course: Students will see how surrealists made use of many types of media and expression (drawing, painting, collage, photography, film). For conference, students will follow the collective model of the movement and pursue small-group projects that will carry on the creative and critical legacy of surrealism.

This course will explore how French and francophone writers in the postwar era have used literature as a means of writing their identities, memories, and life narratives. We will study how writers made use of both traditional genres of life writing (such as autobiography, diaries, and memoirs) and more experimental and hybrid forms of narrative. We will see how authors constructed their identities on the page through the lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, or history. Theoretical readings on memory, trauma, and testimony will allow us to explore the fraught relationship between fact and fiction when writing the self. Topics to be addressed will include the representation of childhood and the family, women’s autobiography, confessional narratives, witnessing and testimony, intellectual development, language and learning, authenticity and documentation, and the relationship between self and other. Students will read both excerpts from longer texts and several works in their entirety. Authors studied could include Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Hervé Guibert, Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, Annie Ernaux, Patrick Modiano, Nina Bouraoui, Emmanuel Carrère, Marie NDiaye, and Edouard Louis. We might also screen several autobiographical films that help us understand the relationship between memory and media. In conference, students may undertake a critical or creative autobiographical project of their own or study other aspects of modern and contemporary French and francophone literature and culture. Alongside our study of literary texts, we will review some key lessons in French grammar and composition.

This course will focus on French and francophone women writers from 1945 to the present. Whereas women’s writing as conventionally considered in the first half of the 20th century is singularly identified with Colette, the postwar and postcolonial eras produced an explosion of artistic expression by women across a broad range of genres. In this course, we will concentrate primarily on fiction and memoir by women writing in French from locations such as Algeria, Guadeloupe, Senegal, and Quebec, as well as France. We will examine the various ways in which women under certain conditions exemplified aesthetic and social transgression by writing at all, foregrounding the rapport between orality and textuality. The writers studied will allow us to explore how sexual and racial politics figure in language itself, often through formal innovation and experimentation. A critical component of this course will consist of selections by feminist thinkers such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig, who interrogated the relationship between gender and genre/sex, writing and the (female) body, and language and (feminine) desire. Alongside readings, we will also screen several films by significant women filmmakers, such as Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, Agnès Varda, and Céline Sciamma. Texts will be read in English translation, students of French will have the opportunity to read texts in the original, and we will analyze the correlation between the works’ translation history and their position in the global literary marketplace. Writers studied could include Mariama Bâ, Simone de Beauvoir, Nicole Brossard, Maryse Condé, Assia Djebar, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Linda Lê, Lydie Salvayre, Nathalie Sarraute, and Leïla Slimani.

This class is designed primarily for students who haven’t had any exposure to French and will allow them to develop an active command of the fundamentals of spoken and written French over the course of the year. We will use grammar lessons in order to learn how to speak, read, and write in authentic French. In class, emphasis will be placed on activities relating to students’ daily lives and to French and francophone culture. The course will rely heavily on the study of songs, cinema, newspaper articles, poems, and short stories from various French-speaking locations, including France, Senegal, Algeria, Quebec, and the Caribbean. During the spring semester, students will be able to conduct a small-scale project in French on a topic of their choice. There are no individual conference meetings for this level. The class meets three times a week, and a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant(e) is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. Students who successfully complete a beginning and an intermediate-level French course are eligible to study in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

This course will cover the normal language content over the course of the year but will have different thematic content each semester. Fall: The Writing of Everyday Life (Jason Earle) This French course is designed for students who already have a strong understanding of the major aspects of French grammar and language but wish to develop their vocabulary and their grasp of more complex aspects of the language. Students are expected to be able to easily read more complex texts and to express themselves more abstractly. A major part of the fall semester will be devoted to the study and discussion of literary texts in French. In a challenge to his readers,“Question your soupspoons,” Georges Perec summed up, in his unique manner, a particular strain of 20th-century French letters—one that seeks to turn literature’s attention away from the extraordinary, the scandalous, and the strange toward an examination of the ordinary makeup of everyday life. This course will examine some of the aesthetic and theoretical challenges that the representation of the quotidian entails. Does the everyday hide infinite depths of discovery, or does its value lie precisely in its superficiality? How do spaces influence our experience of everyday life? How can (and should) literature give voice to experiences and objects that normally appear undeserving of attention? How does one live one’s gender on an everyday basis? Can one ever escape from everyday life? We will review fundamentals of French grammar and speaking and develop tools for analysis through close readings of literary texts. Students will be encouraged to develop tools for the examination and representation of their own everyday lives in order to take up Perec’s call to interrogate the habitual. Readings will include texts by Proust, Breton, Aragon, Leiris, Perec, Queneau, Barthes, the Situationists, Ernaux, and Calle. Spring: French Romanticism and Nature (Nicole Asquith) The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris, a public garden built over a city dump in the 1860s, gives us a visual representation of the change in how people conceived of their relationship to the natural world that coincided with the shift from the French Classicism of the 17th and 18th centuries to the French Romantic movement of the 19th century. With its imitations of a mountain landscape, replete with artificial lake, grotto, rustic bridges and secluded groves, the park expresses a totally different desire with respect to the natural world than the highly formal classical gardens we associate with the gardens of Versailles, created by André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV. In this semester, we will study French Romanticism as a way to make sense, more broadly, of the ways in which culture expresses and shapes our relationship to the natural world. To this end, we will use a wide range of materials, including photographs of gardens, paintings, music, and literature. We will also consider how Romantic attitudes toward nature inform contemporary thinking on the environment. What are the limitations of the Romantic idealization of nature in the age of the Anthropocene? Conversely, in what ways are environmentalists today interested in recapturing certain ideas of the Romantics? How did Romantics gender nature, and how did they exploit the colonized in their depictions of the natural world? We will consider topics such as the Romantics’ reactions to the Enlightenment, Industrialization and Urbanization, the ethics of our relationship to the natural world, Orientalism, and the Gothic. Readings will include excerpts and works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, François-René de Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand, Aimé Césaire and Louise Colet. The Intermediate I and II French courses are specially designed to help prepare students for studying in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year. 

This French course is designed for students who already have a strong understanding of the major aspects of French grammar and language but wish to develop their vocabulary and their grasp of more complex aspects of the language. Students are expected to be able to easily read more complex texts and to express themselves more abstractly. A major part of the course will be devoted to the study and discussion of literary texts in French. In a challenge to his readers,“Question your soupspoons,” Georges Perec summed up, in his unique manner, a particular strain of 20th-century French letters—one that seeks to turn literature’s attention away from the extraordinary, the scandalous, and the strange toward an examination of the ordinary makeup of everyday life. This course will examine some of the aesthetic and theoretical challenges that the representation of the quotidian entails. Does the everyday hide infinite depths of discovery, or does its value lie precisely in its superficiality? How do spaces influence our experience of everyday life? How can (and should) literature give voice to experiences and objects that normally appear undeserving of attention? How does one live one’s gender on an everyday basis? Can one ever escape from everyday life? We will review fundamentals of French grammar and speaking and develop tools for analysis through close readings of literary texts. Students will be encouraged to develop tools for the examination and representation of their own everyday lives in order to take up Perec’s call to interrogate the habitual. Readings will include texts by Proust, Breton, Aragon, Leiris, Perec, Queneau, Barthes, the Situationists, Ernaux, and Calle. The Intermediate I and II French courses are specially designed to help prepare students for studying in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

This French course is designed for students who already have a strong understanding of the major aspects of French grammar and language but wish to develop their vocabulary and their grasp of more complex aspects of the language. Students are expected to be able to easily read more complex texts and to express themselves more abstractly. A major part of the course will be devoted to the study and discussion of literary texts in French. In a challenge to his readers,“Question your soupspoons,” Georges Perec summed up, in his unique manner, a particular strain of 20th-century French letters—one that seeks to turn literature’s attention away from the extraordinary, the scandalous, and the strange toward an examination of the ordinary makeup of everyday life. This course will examine some of the aesthetic and theoretical challenges that the representation of the quotidian entails. Does the everyday hide infinite depths of discovery, or does its value lie precisely in its superficiality? How do spaces influence our experience of everyday life? How can (and should) literature give voice to experiences and objects that normally appear undeserving of attention? How does one live one’s gender on an everyday basis? Can one ever escape from everyday life? We will review fundamentals of French grammar and speaking and develop tools for analysis through close readings of literary texts. Students will be encouraged to develop tools for the examination and representation of their own everyday lives in order to take up Perec’s call to interrogate the habitual. Readings will include texts by Proust, Breton, Aragon, Leiris, Perec, Queneau, Barthes, the Situationists, Ernaux, and Calle. The Intermediate I and II French courses are specially designed to help prepare students for studying in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

France is often thought of as a nation of reason, the intellectual birthplace of Descartes’s philosophical method and the Enlightenment project of the 18th-century philosophes. Yet there exists an equally strong tendency in French literature toward the shadows, the irrational, and the occult. This seminar will explore that underbelly of French thought by focusing on three different periods. First, we will trace how a strain of “romantisme noir”—characterized by dreams, hauntings, ruins, and vampires—emerged in the 19th century as a reaction to the turmoil of the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution. The genres of the fantastic and cruel tales will be studied in depth as crucial counterpoints to realist fiction. Second, our attention will turn to the early 20th century and the Surrealists, who transformed the exploration of dreams and the unconscious into a revolutionary artistic project. Here, students will read manifestos, poems, and narrative works that contested the reign of rationalism by seeking out the aesthetic and political potential of madness and desire. Finally, we will read works by contemporary French writers who have revived the fantastic tradition in order to better understand how and why a literature of the strange and irrational persists to this day. Authors to be studied could include Maupassant, Gautier, Balzac, Nerval, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Lautréamont, Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Ndiaye, Darrieussecq, and Echenoz. Secondary readings will be drawn from feminist criticism, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory. In this course, students will also review the finer points of French grammar, improve their writing skills through regular assignments, and develop tools for literary analysis and commentary.

Exploring the history of the modern novel in French is often an investigation into the scene of a crime. Since the advent of modernity, authors have repeatedly turned to criminal acts in order to tell stories—using the framework of the detective hunt to construct and subvert narrative forms and exploring the motives of the actors involved to pose questions of morality and justice. By depicting modern techniques of policing and punishment, the representation of crime also serves as a way for authors to comment on the social, economic, and sexual politics of their day. At the same time, the recent global success of the Netflix series Lupin—an updating of the exploits of a popular, early 20th-century, French fictional master thief—testifies to the endless adaptability of these stories, as well as to their enduring appeal to their consumers. In this course, we will pursue an inquiry into the literature of crime by focusing on works of fiction from the 19th century to the present day. We will consider a variety of different types of criminal activity, from petty theft and shocking murders to conspiratorial plots and terrorist attacks, in order to examine the aesthetic, moral, and political implications of the representation of crime. Authors studied might include Honoré de Balzac, Albert Camus, Emmanuel Carrère, Maryse Condé, Virginie Despentes, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, André Gide, Alain Mabanckou, Patrick Modiano, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Albertine Sarrazin, Georges Simenon, Leila Slimani, and Emile Zola. Alongside our narrative readings, we will screen several films by prominent French and francophone filmmakers. Class will entail close readings of primary texts in English translation, and we will work on how to offer critical analyses of works in seminar discussions and class essays. This course will alternate biweekly individual conferences with biweekly small-group activities, including writing workshops, screenings, and field trips.

This course will explore the powerful hold that Paris exerted on literature in the 19th and 20th centuries, the period when the city became a world capital of artistic, intellectual, and political life. Our guiding focus will be on how writers use the geography of Paris—its streets, monuments, markets, and slums—to depict the complexities of modern life, posing the urban landscape as a place of revolution and banality, alienation and community, seduction and monstrosity. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which the representation of the city allowed writers to question the form and function of literature itself. We will begin with the 19th-century French novelists and poets who made Paris the site of epic literary struggles, including Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, and Émile Zola. We will see how the city provided fertile ground for the aesthetic experimentations of 20th-century literature in works by Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Colette, and Georges Perec. Our study will explore writers who have recorded the often violent and traumatic history of modern Paris, such as Marguerite Duras, Leïla Sebbar, and Patrick Modiano. Finally, we will analyze how Paris is experienced as a cosmopolitan space in works about expatriates, immigrants, exiles, and travelers from authors as varied as Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Alain Mabanckou, Faïza Guène, and Enrique Vila-Matas. Beyond our focus on close readings of literary texts, students will have the opportunity to read some historical and theoretical considerations of Paris. We will also watch several films where Paris features prominently. This class will alternate biweekly individual conferences with biweekly small group activities, including writing workshops, screenings, and field trips.

This course will focus on French and francophone women writers from 1945 to the present. Whereas women’s writing as conventionally considered in the first half of the 20th century is singularly identified with Colette, the postwar and postcolonial eras produced an explosion of artistic expression by women across a broad range of genres. In this course, we will concentrate primarily on fiction and memoir by women writing in French from locations such as Algeria, Guadeloupe, Senegal, and Quebec, as well as France. We will examine the various ways in which women under certain conditions exemplified aesthetic and social transgression by writing at all, foregrounding the rapport between orality and textuality. The writers studied will allow us to explore how sexual and racial politics figure in language itself, often through formal innovation and experimentation. A critical component of this course will consist of selections by feminist thinkers such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig, who interrogated the relationship between gender and genre/sex, writing and the (female) body, and language and (feminine) desire. Alongside readings, we will also screen several films by significant women filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, Agnès Varda, and Céline Sciamma. Texts will be read in English translation; students of French will have the opportunity to read texts in the original; and we will analyze the correlation between the works’ translation history and their position in the global literary marketplace. Writers studied could include Mariama Bâ, Simone de Beauvoir, Nicole Brossard, Maryse Condé, Assia Djebar, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Linda Lê, Lydie Salvayre, Nathalie Sarraute, and Leïla Slimani.

The object of this course is to give students a critical overview of the major developments in the novel written in French since World War II. Our guiding question will be how and why certain writers and movements come to shape both the form of the novel and various notions of “Frenchness” itself. Our point of departure will be Albert Camus’s The Stranger, a work of stylistic innovation and philosophical exploration that continues to serve for many readers as perhaps the emblematic French novel of the 20th century. Our eventual endpoint will be a contemporary text written in French by an Algerian writer: Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, which grapples with the legacy of Camus’s novel in postcolonial Algeria. In between those two bookends, we will explore a number of aesthetic, political, and philosophical questions crucial to the development of the postwar novel. How and why did authors continually seek to subvert traditional notions of plot, character, psychology, and genre? How did the traumas of World War II and France’s colonial past and present lead to a reconsideration of the relationship of fiction, history, and memory? How did the rise of consumer society affect the status of the novel and its attempts to represent everyday life? How did new voices for the novel emerge alongside political theories and practices? Finally, how might the novel provide us with different avenues for understanding contemporary French culture and society? Students will read works in their entirety in translation, alongside relevant theoretical texts. Additional authors to be studied could include Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Georges Perec, Marguerite Yourcenar, Monique Wittig, Annie Ernaux, Maryse Condé, Patrick Modiano, Patrick Chamoiseau, Jean Echenoz, Marie NDiaye, and Michel Houellebecq.

This course will explore the fraught relationship between representation and memory by focusing on French literature and film produced during and following World War II. After the fall of France in 1940, the country was divided into two parts: one half under German occupation; the other half ruled by a collaborationist regime headquartered in Vichy. Every aspect of life, including cultural and artistic production, was subject to authoritarian control. Means of political expression and dissemination came up against laws instituting surveillance, censorship, rationing, roundups, and deportations to internment and concentration camps. We will focus on the unique position of writers and filmmakers as witnesses to, and interpreters of, national humiliation, personal catastrophe, and collective shock. Artists, under both the occupation and the Vichy government, were forced to choose whether to speak out, join the resistance, collaborate, or keep silent. During the decades that followed liberation, writers proved integral to the (re)appraisals of France’s conduct during the war. The first half of this course will be devoted to texts and films produced from 1940-1945, while the second half will address postwar efforts to reconcile, contextualize, and, in some cases, justify a political and historical narrative that framed France as both heroic and resistant to Nazi oppression. Interspersed with primary texts and films will be secondary materials drawn from testimony, trauma theory, and memory studies. Texts will be read in English translation; students of French will have the opportunity to read texts in the original. Among the authors to be studied are Sartre, Duras, Beauvoir, Camus, Vercors, Némirovsky, Semprun, Céline, Modiano, Perec, and Salvayre. Filmmakers could include Truffaut, Malle, Lelouch, Melville, Chabrol, Carné, and Ophüls.