Please check back for updates.

Description

This one-hour course will introduce first-year Plan II students to UT faculty and resources that will allow them to make a successfultransition to college life. The class will be organized on a model of alternating Conversations,presented bytwo or more faculty members to the entire class,followed the next week by smaller group (12-16 student) discussions or activities led by campus organizations (CMCH, Voices Against Violence, CCE) along with Plan II Peer Mentors. This format will allow thefreshman class the chance to gather collectively with the larger cohort on a bi-weekly basis and to build relationships in smaller pods or clusters. The semester will be divided into six2-week units, covering key issues, ideas, and values for the Plan IIcommunity. The course will include reading and discussing a novel by campus author Oscar Cácares, attending lectures, discussion groups, workshops, campus tours, and participating in a civic engagement project. Students must attend every class (with one excused absence) and submit 4ReflectionPapers to receive credit for the course.

Texts/Reading

The materials will come from different sources and will be posted in Canvas. They include works from author Oscar Cásares, including the book Where We Come From.

Grading

This is a CR/NC course. To receive CR, students must have NO MORE THAN ONE EXCUSED ABSENCE and submitat least fourout of sixpossibleReflectionPapers (1-2 pp) during the course of the semester. Unexcused absencesand/or fewer than 3response papers will result in a grade of NC.

In this course we will consider eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels about women and their twentieth-century interpretations as films.  Focusing on questions of gender, representation, genre, translation, and narrative form, we will examine these various texts through a variety of critical filters, including history (social, political, literary, filmic), contemporary documents (i.e., Diderot’s essay on “La Femme,” transcripts of the Madame Bovary obscenity trial, etc), and critical theory from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reading knowledge of French is required; discussions will be held in English.  May be cross listed with WGS as well.

Required Texts

Balzac, Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu and Sarrasine

Dumas, La Dame aux camélias

Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Maupassant, La Maison Tellier. Partie de campagne

Zola, La Bête humaine

Mirbeau, Journal d’une femme de chambre

Maroh, Le Bleu est une couleur chaude

Monaco, How to Read a Film

Required Films

Carné, Les Enfants du paradis

Rivette, La Belle Noiseuse

Cukor, Camille

Zeffirelli, La Traviata

Chabrol, Madame Bovary

Minelli, Madame Bovary

Renoir, Une Partie de campagne

Ophuls, Le Plaisir

Renoir, La Bête humaine

Buñuel, Le Journal d’une femme de chambre

Kechiche, Le Bleu est une couleur chaude

Grading:

Participation:             20%

In-Class Presentation: 20%

Short paper:            20%

Final paper:            40%

Description:

In this seminar we will investigate the cultures of the Caribbean, focusing on the questions of power, identity, race, gender, hybridity, créolité, language, and revolution as they are negotiated in the post-colonial context. In our readings from diverse authors and nations, we will also study the colonial history of the Caribbean islands and the on-going complexities of each island’s relationship with England, France, Spain, and the U.S. in the past as well as in the present. Writing from the space between North America and Europe, the Caribbean author occupies a unique position from which to reflect on the dueling forces of contemporary cultural hegemonies. In conjunction with the novels we will see several films (The Harder They Come; Sugar Cane Alley; Before Night Falls; I Am Cuba; Buena Vista Social Club) and read criticism by C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Edouard Glissant, and Gayatri Spivak as it relates to our themes. 

Texts/Readings:

Anglophone Caribbean

V.S. Naipaul, A Way in the World

Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven

Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John and A Small Place

Francophone Caribbean

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism and A Tempest

Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones

Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo the Magnificent

Hispanophone Caribbean

Julia Alvarez, In the Time of Butterflies

Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican

Juno Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean

Requirements:

Each student will be expected to come to each class fully prepared to discuss the day’s reading. Students will give two in-class group presentations—one on the social/political history of a Caribbean nation we are studying and a second leading discussion of one of the films. During the course of the term, each student will select a Caribbean novel or film not included on our syllabus for a final project. In consultation with the professor, s/he will submit a prospectus for the final research paper, followed by an outline, before submitting the 15-page paper the last day of class. The last week of class we will hold a mini-conference in which students present their work in brief oral exposés in preparation for the Senior Thesis Symposium.

Class participation:                                         20%

1st presentation:                                             15%

2^nd presentation:                                             15%

Prospectus, outline, & oral exposé:                25%

Final paper:                                                     25%

About the Professor:

Professor Alexandra Wettlaufer was educated at Princeton University (B.A., Comparative Literature), Columbia University (M.A., French; Ph.D. French/Comparative Literature). She has also been a Research Fellow at the Reid Hall Graduate Research Institute in Paris. She is currently a faculty affiliate of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies as has been a Trice Professor in Plan II.

After serving as the Plan II Associate Director since 2005, Dr. Alexandra K. Wettlaufer became Director of Plan II in 2017. She is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature, specializing in 19th-century literature, visual arts, culture, and gender studies. A recipient of a 2014-15 Guggenheim Fellowship, Dr. Wettlaufer is currently working on a book project entitled "Reading George: Sand, Eliot and the Novel in France and Britain, 1830-1900." She is the author of three previous books: Pen vs Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac and the Myth of Pygmalion in Post-Revolutionary France (2001), In the Mind's Eye: The Visual Impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin (2003), and Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800-1860 (2011).  She has published numerous articles on Balzac, Sand, Baudelaire, Zola, Manet, Ruskin, Turner, Berlioz, Grandville, and Flora Tristan; her article "She is Me: Tristan, Gauguin, and the Dialectics of Colonial Identity" (Romanic Review,2007) was awarded the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Essay Prize, Honorable Mention.  

Dr. Wettlaufer has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, ACLS, Bourse Marandon, the Clark Art Institute, and the National Humanities Center.  Her teaching awards include a President's Associates' Teaching Award, the Blunk Memorial Professorship in Teaching and Advising, a Raymond Dickson Centennial Endowed Teaching Award, a Liberal Arts Council Teaching Award, and University Coop Award for Undergraduate Thesis Advising.  She is the Co-Editor of Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal and serves on the Editorial Boards of European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Studies, George Sand Studies, and Dix-Neuf. Dr. Wettlaufer has also served on the Advisory Boards of the American Comparative Literature Association, Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, and on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association.  Dr. Wettlaufer is a core faculty member of Comparative Literature, Women's and Gender Studies, and European Studies.

FR 390M/CL 391

METROPOLITAN VISIONS:

SEEING, SUBJECTIVITY, MODERNITY

Alexandra K. Wettlaufer

In “Metropolitan Visions: Seeing, Subjectivity and Modernity” we will consider representations of subjectivity and the urban landscape of Paris in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French novels, poetry, painting, photography, and film, with a focus on the changing politics and poetics of vision, place, space, and the scopic regimes of power from 1830 to 2000.  In units centering on “Romantic Paris: Panoramic Visions,” “Old and New Paris: Haussmannisation,” “Naturalist Paris: Capitalist Visions,” “Modern Paris: Deconstructed Visions,” “Occupied Paris and Lieux de mémoire,” and “Diasporic Paris: Vision and Invisibility,” we will read works by Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola, Apollinaire, Aragon, Duras, Modiano, Sebbar, and Charef, among others, along with critical essays by Foucault, David Harvey, Soja, Nora, Hargreaves, and others.  As we trace the ways in which Paris is depicted in Realist, Naturalist, Symbolist, Surrealist, Post-Modern, and Post-Colonial texts, we will at the same time considering visual representations of the city in painting, drawing, caricature, physiologies, maps, illustrations, photography, and film.  Theories of gender, mobility, migration, and subjectivity will be central to our discussions as we investigate the concrete and symbolic ways in which the city figures forth social constructions of French identity in these various genres and periods. 

FR 390L

DISPLACEMENTS:

MOBILITY AND IDENTITY

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH FICTION

Spring 2019

Professor Alexandra K. Wettlaufer

Required Readings:

Staël, Corinne

Chateaubriand, Atala

Duras, Ourika

Balzac, Le Père Goriot

Sand, Indiana

Tristan, Pérégrinations d’une paria

Flaubert, Trois Contes

Fromentin, Une Année dans le Sahel

Zola, Nana

Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus

            In this course we will consider the idea of displacement and its many implications in relation to concepts of mobility and the construction of identities in nineteenth-century French literature. As we examine Romantic, Realist, Idealist, Orientalist, Naturalist, and Decadent texts, our readings will focus on the ways in which national identities, gender identities, social identities, physical/psychological identities, and artistic identities become tied to space and place, movement and stasis, sameness and difference, migration and diaspora within and beyond the borders of France. Each novel will be paired with critical readings from 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st-century, including Michelet, Renan, Foucault, Bhabha, Butler, Anderson, Rancière, Schor, Yee, and others.   

Description:

In this seminar we will investigate the cultures of the Caribbean, focusing on the questions of power, identity, race, gender, hybridity, créolité, language, and revolution as they are negotiated in the post-colonial context. In our readings from diverse authors and nations, we will also study the colonial history of the Caribbean islands and the on-going complexities of each island’s relationship with England, France, Spain, and the U.S. in the past as well as in the present. Writing from the space between North America and Europe, the Caribbean author occupies a unique position from which to reflect on the dueling forces of contemporary cultural hegemonies. In conjunction with the novels we will see several films (The Harder They Come; Sugar Cane Alley; Before Night Falls; I Am Cuba; Buena Vista Social Club) and read criticism by C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Edouard Glissant, and Gayatri Spivak as it relates to our themes. 

Texts/Readings:

Anglophone Caribbean

V.S. Naipaul, A Way in the World

Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven

Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John and A Small Place

Francophone Caribbean

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism and A Tempest

Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones

Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo the Magnificent

Hispanophone Caribbean

Julia Alvarez, In the Time of Butterflies

Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican

Juno Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean

Requirements:

Each student will be expected to come to each class fully prepared to discuss the day’s reading. Students will give two in-class group presentations—one on the social/political history of a Caribbean nation we are studying and a second leading discussion of one of the films. During the course of the term, each student will select a Caribbean novel or film not included on our syllabus for a final project. In consultation with the professor, s/he will submit a prospectus for the final research paper, followed by an outline, before submitting the 15-page paper the last day of class. The last week of class we will hold a mini-conference in which students present their work in brief oral exposés in preparation for the Senior Thesis Symposium.

Class participation:                                         20%

1st presentation:                                             15%

2^nd presentation:                                             15%

Prospectus, outline, & oral exposé:                25%

Final paper:                                                     25%

About the Professor:

Professor Alexandra Wettlaufer was educated at Princeton University (B.A., Comparative Literature), Columbia University (M.A., French; Ph.D. French/Comparative Literature). She has also been a Research Fellow at the Reid Hall Graduate Research Institute in Paris. She is currently a faculty affiliate of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies as has been a Trice Professor in Plan II.

After serving as the Plan II Associate Director since 2005, Dr. Alexandra K. Wettlaufer became Director of Plan II in 2017. She is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature, specializing in 19th-century literature, visual arts, culture, and gender studies. A recipient of a 2014-15 Guggenheim Fellowship, Dr. Wettlaufer is currently working on a book project entitled "Reading George: Sand, Eliot and the Novel in France and Britain, 1830-1900." She is the author of three previous books: Pen vs Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac and the Myth of Pygmalion in Post-Revolutionary France (2001), In the Mind's Eye: The Visual Impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin (2003), and Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800-1860 (2011).  She has published numerous articles on Balzac, Sand, Baudelaire, Zola, Manet, Ruskin, Turner, Berlioz, Grandville, and Flora Tristan; her article "She is Me: Tristan, Gauguin, and the Dialectics of Colonial Identity" (Romanic Review,2007) was awarded the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Essay Prize, Honorable Mention.  

Dr. Wettlaufer has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, ACLS, Bourse Marandon, the Clark Art Institute, and the National Humanities Center.  Her teaching awards include a President's Associates' Teaching Award, the Blunk Memorial Professorship in Teaching and Advising, a Raymond Dickson Centennial Endowed Teaching Award, a Liberal Arts Council Teaching Award, and University Coop Award for Undergraduate Thesis Advising.  She is the Co-Editor of Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal and serves on the Editorial Boards of European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Studies, George Sand Studies, and Dix-Neuf. Dr. Wettlaufer has also served on the Advisory Boards of the American Comparative Literature Association, Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, and on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association.  Dr. Wettlaufer is a core faculty member of Comparative Literature, Women's and Gender Studies, and European Studies.

Please check back for updates.

Description:

In this course we will examine representative works from 19th and 20th-century French literature, from Balzac's Realism of the 1830s to Beckett's Theatre of the Absurd of the 1950s. We will consider literature in its relation to history, with special attention both to form and style in the development of narrative, prose poetry and avant-garde theatre. All students will be expected to give one in-class presentation on an aspect of French culture and history related to one of the works we are reading, and this presentation will be turned into a brief (5-7 page) paper. A final paper on a French novel from this period not included on the syllabus will be due the last day of class.

Grading/Assignments:

Class participation: 20%

In-class presentation: 20% Short paper: 25%

Final paper: 35%

Texts:

Balzac, Old Goriot Baudelaire, Spleen de Paris Flaubert, Madame Bovary Proust, Swann 's Way Colette, The Vagabonde

Camus, Exile and the Kingdom

Sartre, No Exit

Becket, Waiting for Godot

Gender, Genre, Power:

The Novel in France and the Politics of Difference,

1700-1900

Required Reading

Montesquieu, Les Lettres persanes (1721)

Graffingy, Les Lettres d’une péruvienne (1747)

Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782)

Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie (1788)

Sand, Indiana (1832)                                                                   

Balzac, La Cousine Bette (1846)

Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)

Zola, La Curée (1872)

Colette, La Vagabonde (1910)

            In this course we will examine the development of the novel as an aesthetic and political form in France over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As we trace the evolution of the fledgling genre from the Ancien Régime to the fin-de-siècle, we will consider questions of narrative form, structure, voice, representation, and authority through literary, social, historical, and aesthetic lenses, focusing specifically on the ways in which the novel both reflects and shapes evolving constructions of gender, class, power, identity, subjecthood, nationhood, and difference in French culture. Supplemental readings will include theories of the novel, gender/sexual difference, class, power, and national identity from the 18^th through the 21^st centuries.

Grading:

Class participation: 20%

In-class presentation: 20%

Short paper: 20%

Final paper: 40%

The study of literary periods, aspects of periods, or movements from a comparative point of view; topics include mystical literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance humanism.

Prerequisite: Graduate standing and consent of instructor and the graduate adviser.

Course number may be repeated for credit when the topics vary.

FC 349

Fictions of the Self and Other

Description:

            This course focuses on representative works from 19^th- and 20^th-century French fiction, from Balzac’s Realism to the present. We consider literature in its relation to history, culture, and society, with special attention to both form and style in the development of the novel, poetry, and theatre.  The class includes a visit to the Blanton Museum and a session at the HRC examining rare books and manuscripts by the authors we are studying.

Texts:

Balzac, Le Père Goriot

Sand, Gabriel

Baudelaire, The Parisian Prowler (Spleen de Paris)

Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Colette, The Vagabond

Proust, Swann’s Way

Sartre, No Exit

Camus, Exile and the Kingdom

Duras, The Lover

Grading:

Participation:   20%

In-Class Presentation: 20%

Short paper: 20%

Final paper outline: 10%

Final paper: 30%

FR 390M

DANDIES, DIVAS AND DEMI-MONDAINES:

IDENTITY AND PERFORMANCE

IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

Professor Alexandra K. Wettlaufer

Readings:

Staël, Corinne

Duras, Ourika

Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin

Balzac, Le Père Goriot

Sand, La Petite Fadette

Barbey d’Aurevilly, Du Dandysme

Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale

Zola, Nana

Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus

Course Description:

            In this course we will investigate the performance of identity and gender in a wide variety of texts, from Romanticism, to Art for Art’s Sake, Realism, Naturalism, and Decadence.  Works will be read in the historical and cultural context of the many social and political upheavals of nineteenth-century France, and we will examine these texts through the filters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of self/other, gender, nation, race, and class. 

Grading:

Participation:               20%

In-Class Presentation

   & 5 page paper:        30%

Final Paper:                 50%

In “Metropolitan Visions: Seeing, Subjectivity and Modernity” we will consider representations of subjectivity and the urban landscape of Paris in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French novels, poetry, painting, and film, with a focus on the changing politics and poetics of vision, place, space, and the scopic regimes of power from 1830 to 2000.  In units centering on “Panoramic Paris,” “Haussmann’s Paris,” “Modern Paris,” “Occupied Paris,” and “Diasporic Paris,” we will read works by Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola, Apollinaire, Aragon, Duras, Modiano, Sebbar, and Pineau, among others.  As we trace the ways in which Paris is depicted in Realist, Naturalist, Symbolist, Surrealist, Post-Modern, and Post-Colonial texts, we will at the same time considering visual representations of the city in painting, drawing, caricature, physiologies, maps, illustrations, photography, and film.  Theories of gender, mobility, migration, and subjectivity will be central to our discussions as we investigate the concrete and symbolic ways in which the city figures forth social constructions of French identity in these various genres and periods.  

FR 390M

REVOLUTIONS IN GENDER AND GENRE

IN 19^th-CENTURY FRANCE

Chateaubriand, Atala

Staël, Corinne

Hugo, Hernani

Balzac, Le Père Goriot

Sand, Indiana

Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris

Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Zola, Nana

Huysmans, A rebours

Course packet of critical texts

            In this course we will consider representative texts from the major nineteenth-century movements—Romanticism, Realism, Idealism, Naturalism and Decadence—in terms of their revolutionary form and content, with special attention to the ways in which each of these authors addresses the questions of self and other in society.  We will read novels, a play, and prose poetry, as well as critical texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Grading:

Participation:                           20%

In-class presentation:              20%

Short paper (5-7 pp):               20%

Final paper (20 pp):                 40%    

In this course we will examine representative works from 19th and 20th-century French literature, from Balzac’s Realism of the 1830s to Duras’s post-modern novel of the 1980s.  We will consider literature in its relation to history, with special attention both to form and style in the development of narrative, prose poetry and avant-garde theatre.  All students will be expected to give one in-class presentation on an aspect of French culture and history related to one of the works we are reading, and this presentation will be turned into a brief (5-7 page) paper.  A final paper on a French novel from this period not included on the syllabus will be due the last day of class.

Gendered Geographies:

Space, Place, and Identity in 19^th-Century France

Required Texts:

Staël, Corinne, ou l’Italie

Chateaubriand, Atala

Duras, Ourika

Sand, Indiana

Balzac, Le Père Goriot

Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris

Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale

Zola, Nana

Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus

Course packet of critical texts

            In this course we will consider the questions of gender, genre, space, and place in nineteenth-century France.   In our readings of texts from the Romantic movement through Realism, Naturalism, and Decadence, we will focus on the various ways male and female authors use the ideas of nation, home, city, country, center, and periphery to delineate identities and the ways in which these places and spaces become gendered.  Moreover, we will consider ideas of travel, mobility, circulation, geography, mapping, the exotic/erotic, home, and “away” an in each of these works, both through nineteenth-century critical texts (including excerpts from Staël’s De l’Allemagne, Baudelaire’s Le Peintre de la vie moderne,  Zola’s Le Roman expérimental, etc) as well as readings from contemporary critics such as Foucault, Bourdieu, Bachelard, Benjamin, Terdiman, and Bhabha.

Course Requirements and Grading:

            Class Participation:                 20%

            In-class presentation:             20%

            Short paper:                           20%

            Final paper:                            40%

Description :  In this course we will examine representative works from 19th and 20th-century French literature, from Balzac’s Realism of the 1830s to Duras’s post-modern novel of the 1980s.  We will consider literature in its relation to history, with special attention both to form and style in the development of narrative, prose poetry and avant-garde theatre.  All students will be expected to give one in-class presentation on an aspect of French culture and history related to one of the works we are reading, and this presentation will be turned into a brief (5-7 page) paper.  A final paper on a French novel from this period not included on the syllabus will be due the last day of class.

Required Texts

Balzac, Old Goriot

Baudelaire, Spleen de Paris

Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Proust, Swann’s Way

Colette, The Vagabond

Camus, Exile and the Kingdom

Sartre, No Exit

Duras, The Lover

Required of all first-year graduate students in the Department of French and Italian.  

The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

Description

In this course we will consider eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels about women and their twentieth-century interpretations as films.  Focusing on questions of gender, representation, genre, translation, and narrative form, we will examine these various texts through a variety of critical filters, including history (social, political, literary, filmic), contemporary documents (i.e., Diderot’s essay on “La Femme,” transcripts of the Madame Bovary obscenity trial, etc), and critical theory from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reading knowledge of French is required; discussions will be held in English.  May be cross listed with WGS as well.

Required Texts and Films

Diderot, La Religieuse (1780)

Rivette, La Religieuse (film,1966)

Balzac, Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (1832)

Rivette, La Belle Noiseuse (film, 1991)

Dumas, La Dame aux camélias (1848)

Cukor, Camille (film, 1936)

Zeffirelli, La Traviata (film, 1983)

Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)

Minnelli, Madame Bovary (film, 1949)

Chabrol, Madame Bovary (film, 1991)

Maupassant, “Une Partie de campagne” and “La Maison Tellier” (1881)

Renoir, Une Partie de campagne (film, 1936)

Ophuls, La Maison Tellier (film, 1952)

Mirbeau, Journal d’une femme de chambre (1900)

Renoir, Diary of a Chambermaid (film, 1946)

Buñuel, Diary of a Chambermaid (film, 1964)

Monaco, How to Read a Film

Course packet

Grading:

Participation:             20%

In-Class Presentation: 20%

Short paper:            20%

Final paper:            40%

Possible Texts:

Balzac, Old Goriot

Baudelaire, Spleen de Paris

Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Proust, Swann’s Way

Colette, The Vagabond

Camus, Exile and the Kingdom

Sartre, No Exit

Duras, The Lover

Description

In this course we will examine representative works from 19^th and 20^th-century French literature, from Balzac’s Realism of the 1830s to Duras’s post-modern novel of the 1980s.  We will consider literature in its relation to history, with special attention both to form and style in the development of narrative, prose poetry and avant-garde theatre.  All students will be expected to give one in-class presentation on an aspect of French culture and history related to one of the works we are reading, and this presentation will be turned into a brief (5-7 page) paper.  A final paper on a French novel from this period not included on the syllabus will be due the last day of class.

The Signature Course (UGS 302 and 303) introduces first-year students to the university’s academic community through the exploration of new interests. The Signature Course is your opportunity to engage in college-level thinking and learning.

Please check back for updates.

TC 603
Spring 2010

WORLD LITERATURE:
GODS AND MONSTERS
1800-2000


Professor Alexandra K. Wettlaufer
WCH 4.104
471-1442
akw@mail.utexas.edu

Office Hours: T/TH 2:00-4:00

Required Texts

Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Camara Laye, The Dark Child
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis


Syllabus

1/19: Introduction

Romanticism

1/21: Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

1/26: The Sorrows of Young Werther

1/28: Shelley, Frankenstein

2/2: Shelley, Frankenstein

2/4: Shelley, Frankenstein

2/9: Filmic Frankensteins: Condon’s Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein

2/11: Young Frankenstein and Gods and Monsters

Realism

2/16:  Balzac, Old Goriot
    Group Presentation 1: France 1789-1830

2/18:    Old Goriot  [Group 1 leads discussion]
    *Paper #1 due*

2/23:    Old Goriot


Naturalism/American Regionalism
2/25:    Kate Chopin, The Awakening
    Group 2 Presentation: America in the 1890s
3/2:    The Awakening [Group 2 leads discussion]
3/4:    The Awakening

Modernism
3/9:    Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
    Group 3 Presentation: Women and Society, 1850-1920

3/11:    To the Lighthouse [Group 3 leads discussion]
    
3/15-3/21:   Spring Break

3/23:    To the Lighthouse
    *Paper #2 due*

Colonial/Post-colonial Africa
3/25:     Camara Laye, Dark Child
3/30:    Dark Child

Magical Realism
4/1:    Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
    Group 4 Presentation: Colombia
4/6:    Chronicle of a Death Foretold [Group 4 leads discussion]

4/8:     Chronicle of a Death Foretold

4/11:    Plan II Thesis Symposium: Required Attendance

Post-Colonial/Post-modernism
4/13:     Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
    Group 5 Presentation: India and Pakistan
4/15:    Midnight’s Children [Group 5 leads discussion]
    *Paper # 3 due*
4/20:    Midnight’s Children
4/22:    Midnight’s Children
4/27:    Midnight’s Children


4/29:    Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
    Group 6 Presentation: Iran/Persia
5/4:    Persepolis [Group 6 leads discussion]

5/6: Course conclusion    


Course Requirements:

    This course will be conducted as a seminar; therefore students will be expected to attend every class fully prepared to participate in discussion of the texts. For each class meeting, students are required to post at least one question or comment on that day’s reading assignment on Blackboard no later than 10 am. Class participation, including Blackboard postings, will count for 20% of the final grade.  Each student will take part in a group presentation [no more than 10 minutes] providing historical/cultural background for one of the novels we are presenting.  The group will then lead discussion during the following class, linking some of what they have presented to the readings. A grade, assigned to the group, will count for 20% of the final course grade. Three short papers will be due during the course of the semester, one of which will be peer edited.  The grades for the papers and the peer editing will total 40% of the final grade.  A final paper, due during exam period, will be worth 20% of the course grade.  Late work will not be accepted.


Grading:

Participation and Blackboard postings:    20%
Group Presentation and discussion:        20%
3 short papers and peer edit:            40%
Final paper:                    20%


Writing Assignments:

    The writing assignments will be divided into four different kinds of papers: thematic analysis; textual analysis; stylistic analysis/pastiche; and comparative analysis.

1. Thematic analysis: The first paper, due 18 February, will be a 3-4 page thematic analysis in which you will trace the ways a certain theme is developed in one of the Romantic novels and what purpose that theme serves in the larger scheme of the book as a whole.  

2. Textual analysis: The second paper, due 23 March, will be a 4-5 page textual analysis/close reading of a passage or scene from one of the Realist or Naturalist texts. [You may not choose a passage we have worked on in class.]  Here you will focus on the ways in which the author structures a scene and uses language, tropes, metaphors, description, etc. to create a certain effect or meaning, and how that reflects larger themes of the novel.  This paper will be peer edited.  We will discuss techniques of peer editing in class.  Both the first draft with peer edits and the final draft will be submitted.  Each student will receive a grade for editing and for his/her own paper.

3. Stylistic analysis or pastiche: The third paper, due 15 April, will be 5-6 pages focusing on one of the author’s style.  Students may choose here to write an analytic paper or a stylistic pastiche, in which they narrate a fictitious episode in the style of one of the authors we have read.  This creative exercise is harder than it appears and demands an intimate knowledge of the way an author writes.  It is also, however, a great way to understand the way style ‘works.’

4. Comparative analysis:  The final paper will be due 10 May and will be an 8 page paper contrasting aspects of two of the novels we have read.  Here you will develop your argument using analysis of themes, passages and style, building from the techniques you have used in your previous papers.  Approval for your final paper topic must be obtained no later than 1 May.

    The first three papers may be rewritten once; rewrites are due within a week after the papers have been returned.  No late work will be accepted.  Please follow the MLA Handbook for your style sheet.
    You are strongly encouraged to use the resources of the Undergraduate Writing Center in FAC 211.  They can help you with drafts, editing and rewrites.  

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Interdisciplinary topics relating to Women's and Gender Studies.  Seats restricted to WGS MA and Portfolio students during early registration.  Check cross-listings for home departments and originating field of study.

Please check back for updates.

FLAGS:   GC

Interdisciplinary topics relating to Women's and Gender Studies.  Seats restricted to WGS MA and Portfolio students during early registration.  Check cross-listings for home departments and originating field of study.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.

Please check back for updates.