Winter 2000
This information effective for Winter 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Instructor: Freccero
Winter 2000
This combined undergraduate and graduate course, conducted in French, will examine the relations between 16th century France and the American continents through the examination of selected texts that discuss the 'discovery' of the Tupinamba in the Bay of Rio by French cosmographers and missionaries. In addition, we will focus on the early modern French fascination with the specific racial, religious, and cultural differences represented by the indigenous inhabitants encountered, and two particular practices, cannibalism and polygamy, that captured the imagination of early modern Europeans. Among those texts to be studied are: Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil; Montaigne's Essais, André de Thevet's Singularitez de la France Antarctique; as well as secondary material (some of whichy may be in English) that provides historical and analytical background and commentary on this period of early modern encounters with alterity. Students will conduct research projects and give oral presentations on some aspect of pre- and early colonial and ethnographic history in addition to writing papers.
Required Texts:
Jean de Léry, Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du
Brésil
André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France
Antarctique
Montaigne, Les Essais (volume I)
Frank Lestringant, Le Cannibale and L'Atelier du
cosmographe
Denys Delâge, Le Pays renversé
Michel de Certeau, L'Ecriture de l'histoire
Bartolomé de las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies,
trans H Briffaut (The Johns Hopkins U Press,1992)
Recommended Texts:
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters
Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, eds., Cannibalism
and the Colonial World
Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World
Roger Céléstin, From Cannibals to Radicals
Stephen Greenblatt.ed., New World Encounters