French Literature - Spring 1999

Instructor: Carla Freccero

From Aristotle's opposition between the citizen and "women and slaves" to the current Affirmative Action focus on "women and minorities," European discourse has produced an opposition between "man" on the one hand, and women and cultural "others" on the other. This course will explore cultural constructions of otherness in early modern France, beginning with medieval texts such as *La Chanson de Roland* and *Aucassin et Nicolette* and continuing through the 16th century and the early period of European expansion to India, Africa, and the Americas. We will look at the ways in which same/other oppositions are mapped onto "others" within European culture (women, "witches," Jews, homosexuals, Moors, Islamic persons) as well as how constructions of otherness affect the European's perception of New World peoples. The course will also explore the interrelations of the discourse on "woman" and the discourse on the cultural other. The course will be conducted in French; readings of primary texts will be in French; some secondary material in English may also be assigned.

Instructor: Richard Terdiman

In the early 19th century in Europe, it seems to have become both possible and necessary to imagine the representation of society--its diversity and variety, its dominant patterns and structures, its hidden inner mechanisms--in (perhaps even _as_) a text. This seminar will consider this cultural development, centering its re-examination in one of the classic pairings in European cultural history: the linking of Balzac and Marx as canonical analysts of social life.

For an older Marxist criticism, typified by the work of Georg Lukacs, Balzac and Marx formed a natural alliance (it is a fact that Marx had read Balzac with fascination, and cited him repeatedly in _Capital_; toward the end of his life Engels, no doubt reflecting Marx's own views, wrote a celebrated letter to Margaret Harkness in which he said that he and Marx had learned more from Balzac than from all of the century's social scientists). How does that classic alliance look from the perspective of today and of today's critical theory? What can it tell us about the complex relationship between novel writing and social science as paradigms for textual production and cultural understanding?

Now that the revolutions of 1989-90 have transformed the political world, it has become easier to look at Marx's writing from the perspective of contemporary theories of textuality. Most contemporary criticism focuses upon _language_. But what happens when we use the work of Balzac and Marx to examine how texts related to _materiality_: to the structures and tensions of social existence--particularly in the period of early capitalism, at the opening of the period of historical development that today has brought us to multinational capitalism, globalization, and postmodernism?

This seminar will read Balzac and Marx with and against each other, and with and against today's theories of language and of texts.

Readings will include:

Balzac: _The Peasants_

_Gobseck_

_Lost Illusions_

Marx: _Capital, Volume I_

_Grundrisse_ introduction

_Class Struggles in France_ and _The Eighteenth

Brumaire_ (Selections)

Lukacs: _Studies in European Realism_; _The Historical

Novel_

Jameson: _The Political Unconscious_

Macherey: _Theory of Literary Production_

Derrida: _Specters of Marx_

Spivak: "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value"

Marx readings will be done in English (students knowing German should read Marx in the original). Balzac readings can be done in either French or English. Students taking the seminar toward fulfillment of the second literature requirement should indicate this at the beginning of the seminar, and will do the Balzac and appropriate critical readings in French. Seminar discussion in English. A seminar paper will be expected within one quarter of the conclusion of the seminar.

Revised 8/3/04.