Upcoming Courses

Becoming a scholar in French and Francophone Studies requires gaining a broad understanding of the field, its range of methods and subjects, its interdisciplinarities and heated debates, and its uncharted terrains. What are some of the tools and methods of analysis scholars take up in the study of French and Francophone cultures in the academy today? How are scholars at USC engaging in the research and study of French and Francophone cultures? How do different research units and centers around the world produce thought about French and Francophone cultures? This pro-seminar will serve as an introduction to the current state of French and Francophone studies as well as its evolution and latest trends, considering everything from critical methods of research in literature and cultural studies to the history of French studies and contemporary issues in the profession. Led by a faculty member from the Department of French and Italian, it will feature guest speakers from other units and programs at USC as well as our partner institutions in the SoCal area. The course will culminate with two faculty roundtables where our guest speakers willoutline new directions in the field of French and Francophone Studies.

Offered every fall, FREN 500 is a required course for students in the French and Francophone Studies track of the PhD in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture. The course is conducted in English, and is open to students in other tracks and adjacent PhD programs. Readings are in English and French.

In this course, we will study the eighteenth-century fascination with the conjunction of pleasure and illusion. If pleasure is in some sense our “truth,” as many authors of the period would suggest, why does it emerge precisely and intensely at moments of deception? We will approach this question as an entry point into some of the most crucial debates of the Enlightenment—around aesthetics, ethics, and politics, certainly, but also around the emergence of publics, both feminine and masculine, who sought out new modes of sensation and new forms of experience—in the novel and at the theater, in the pursuit of knowledge and in the critique of orthodoxies…. Authors we will read will include: Charrière, Crébillon fils, Diderot, Du Châtelet, La Mettrie, Montesquieu, Riccoboni, and Rousseau. Course is taught in French but students from all disciplines are welcome.

This seminar investigates the figure of the Amérindien in French literature and thought from the sixteenth century to the present. We will explore the production of the myth of the “noble savage” in a corpus that stretches from Montaigne (16c), Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot (18c), and Chateaubriand (19c), before turning to “salvage ethnography” (20c) and the paradoxical “Indianism” of French nativist discourses in the aftermath of decolonization (21c). Against the grain of French Indianism, we will read Francophone indigenous writings by An Antane Kapesh, Joséphine Bacon, and others to explore new directions in Francophone indigenous studies. Readings will be available in French and in English translation.

“What to think of translation?” Some form of this question has been asked non-stop for many centuries, but it found new resonance in the past century, after Walter Benjamin’s now canonical essay, “The Task of the Translator” (1923). This seminar is going to reflect on a small selection of work on translation in the wake of this famous essay. Besides Benjamin, we’ll read texts by, among others, Jakobson, Derrida, and Blanchot, as well as eminent translation studies scholars Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti. For background to these more contemporary theories, we will also probe the German tradition out of which Benjamin’s thinking emerges, beginning with Martin Luther and the Romantics, especially Schleiermacher. Students will engage with the seminar topic in their papers and in-class presentations. And they will be enjoined to think about how their own future research will have to remain engaged with issues of translation. The seminar will be conducted in a confusion of tongues.