What follows is an additional set of classes. I have not had an occasion to teach them yet -- they are pedagogical projects! Of course I would be delighted to teach again any of the courses mentioned in the Teaching Experience section, from beginners' French to advanced literature and culture classes.
Noble Savages, Western Perspectives: the Myth of "le bon sauvage" in 18th- and 19th-century France.
This class would focus on the “bon sauvage” figure in the late 18th and 19th centuries. We would first discuss 18th-century travel narratives and their influence on the philosophy of the period (excerpts from Abbé Prévost’s Histoire des Voyages and Rousseau’s Discours sur l’Origine/Bougainville's Voyage autour du monde and Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville); a second part of the course will be dedicated to 19th-century literary and visual renderings of the “sauvage” (Mérimée's Tamango, Eugène Sue’s Atar Gull, and a series of caricatures and portraits of Alexandre Dumas published in the 1830s and 40s). The third part of the class will focus on representations of women of color during the period (Claire de Duras’ Ourika, Baudelaire’s “A une dame créole,” and works of arts exhibited in Orsay during the Modèle noir exhibit in 2019).
This class would focus on the “bon sauvage” figure in the late 18th and 19th centuries. We would first discuss 18th-century travel narratives and their influence on the philosophy of the period (excerpts from Abbé Prévost’s Histoire des Voyages and Rousseau’s Discours sur l’Origine/Bougainville's Voyage autour du monde and Diderot's Supplément au voyage de Bougainville); a second part of the course will be dedicated to 19th-century literary and visual renderings of the “sauvage” (Mérimée's Tamango, Eugène Sue’s Atar Gull, and a series of caricatures and portraits of Alexandre Dumas published in the 1830s and 40s). The third part of the class will focus on representations of women of color during the period (Claire de Duras’ Ourika, Baudelaire’s “A une dame créole,” and works of arts exhibited in Orsay during the Modèle noir exhibit in 2019).
Public Bearings, Private Feelings: French Literature and the Civil Sphere (see sample syllabi)
This course will look at how the shifting conceptions of civility – both as a set of social rules and as a moral ideal – have affected the French novel of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. As the sentiment of the private grew with the rise of the bourgeoisie, the novel increasingly dramatized the tensions between public and private, between displays and concealments of emotions, between involuntary faux pas and calculated blunders. The question of affect – as both the subject’s capacity to affect the world and to be affected by it – is crucial to this literature and to the questioning that it operates about the circulation, exposure, and both verbal and bodily disclosure of emotions. While a whole tradition (going back to the eighteenth century and including sociologists like Norbert Elias) has looked at court and salon society as one that restricted the circulation and expression of affects, more recent studies (Joan DeJean’s work on comfort, civility, and the public sphere in particular) have enlightened different aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social practices, giving a more nuanced account of the relations between affects, civil life and the rational norms presiding over it. This class would focus mainly on novels and philosophical texts from the period, including texts by Descartes, Courtin, Furetière, Rousseau, Diderot, Balzac and Stendhal. Theoretical readings would include historical and sociological works (Elias, Taylor, Ariès, Duby, DeJean) as well as texts by Foucault and Deleuze on the body and the social/political.
Introduction. Bourdieu, Distinction (excerpt) / 19th-century manuels de politesse and Bertall's La Comédie de notre temps (excerpt)
Part 1. Etiquette and French Politeness
- National customs: Germaine de Stael, De l'Allemagne (excerpts)
- Nostalgia of a lost Art: Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave (excerpts)
Part 2. Balzac's world: Nouveaux Riches and Old Aristocracy (excerpts from Le Père Goriot).
Part 3. Imprisoned in Society: Julien Sorel and Emma Bovary (excerpts from The Red and the Black and Madame Bovary).
Part 4. Clothes and Jewels: Boundaries between the Self and the World
- Guy de Maupassant, "La Parure"
- Emile Zola, La Curée.
This course will look at how the shifting conceptions of civility – both as a set of social rules and as a moral ideal – have affected the French novel of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. As the sentiment of the private grew with the rise of the bourgeoisie, the novel increasingly dramatized the tensions between public and private, between displays and concealments of emotions, between involuntary faux pas and calculated blunders. The question of affect – as both the subject’s capacity to affect the world and to be affected by it – is crucial to this literature and to the questioning that it operates about the circulation, exposure, and both verbal and bodily disclosure of emotions. While a whole tradition (going back to the eighteenth century and including sociologists like Norbert Elias) has looked at court and salon society as one that restricted the circulation and expression of affects, more recent studies (Joan DeJean’s work on comfort, civility, and the public sphere in particular) have enlightened different aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social practices, giving a more nuanced account of the relations between affects, civil life and the rational norms presiding over it. This class would focus mainly on novels and philosophical texts from the period, including texts by Descartes, Courtin, Furetière, Rousseau, Diderot, Balzac and Stendhal. Theoretical readings would include historical and sociological works (Elias, Taylor, Ariès, Duby, DeJean) as well as texts by Foucault and Deleuze on the body and the social/political.
Introduction. Bourdieu, Distinction (excerpt) / 19th-century manuels de politesse and Bertall's La Comédie de notre temps (excerpt)
Part 1. Etiquette and French Politeness
- National customs: Germaine de Stael, De l'Allemagne (excerpts)
- Nostalgia of a lost Art: Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave (excerpts)
Part 2. Balzac's world: Nouveaux Riches and Old Aristocracy (excerpts from Le Père Goriot).
Part 3. Imprisoned in Society: Julien Sorel and Emma Bovary (excerpts from The Red and the Black and Madame Bovary).
Part 4. Clothes and Jewels: Boundaries between the Self and the World
- Guy de Maupassant, "La Parure"
- Emile Zola, La Curée.