Graduate courses in French General

(Same as ITALGEN 204.) Medieval love lyric in the old Occitan, Italian, middle high German, and Galician-Portuguese traditions, focusing on deictic address, corporeal and metaphysical subjectivity, the female voice, dialogue songs of ambivalent gender, and the modern translation and reception of the troubadour tradition. Poets include Sappho, Bernart de Ventadorn, La Comtessa de Dia, Walther von der Vogelweide, Dante, Petrarch, Pound, Larkin, and Neruda.

3-5 units, Aut (Galvez, M)

FRENGEN 215. Gottfried Benn and Francis Ponge: Mid-20th-Century European Poetry and the Problem of the Referent

(Same as COMPLIT 215A, GERLIT 215.) Comparative readings of the two poets in their respective national contexts, with attention to biographical and poetological frameworks. Canonic status and scholarly reception histories. Renewed interest in their work with regard to their distinctive practices of connecting prosodic form and extra textual referents. Prerequisite: reading knowledge of German or French.

3-5 units, Aut (Gumbrecht, H)

FRENGEN 219. The Renaissance Body

The body as locus for desire, pleasure, disease, mortality, sexuality, and gender; and as canon of beauty and reflection of cosmic harmony. How literature responded to the development of an anatomical gaze in arts and medicine; how it staged the aesthetic, religious, philosophical, and moral issues related to such a promotion or deconstruction of the body. Does literature aim at representing the body, or use it as signifier for intellectual, emotional, and political ideas? Readings from Rabelais, Ronsard, Labé, Montaigne; medical texts and archival documents from http://renaissancebodyproject.stanford.edu.

3-5 units, Spr (Alduy, C)

FRENGEN 232. Time of Latency: Western Cultures in the Decade After 1945

(Same as COMPLIT 232A, ITALGEN 232.) Retrospective accounts and contemporary experience converge in the description of the decade following 1945 as a period of quietude that seemed to repress an unknown trauma. Goal is to reconstruct the mood of this historical moment and its relationship to the early 21st century. Sources include canonical texts and everyday documents from different national and cultural contexts. Advanced undergrads require consent of instructor.

3-5 units, Aut (Gumbrecht, H)

FRENGEN 233. The Afterlife of the Middle Ages

Literary works that evoke a medieval past in contrast to a historical present, and critical texts that treat aspects of the medieval or medievalism. How does the concept of medievalism emerge and evolve through the ages? The impact of the Reformation and romanticism, the study of Gothic architecture, and the use of the term medieval in modern political discourse. Authors include Hugo, Grimm brothers, Flaubert, Mâle, Pound, de Rougemont, Eco, Bataille, and Holsinger; films by Bresson and Pasolini.

3-5 units, Win (Galvez, M)

FRENGEN 265. The Problem of Evil in Literature, Film, and Philosophy

(Same as POLISCI 338E.) Conceptions of evil and its nature and source, distinctions between natural and moral evil, and what belongs to God versus to the human race have undergone transformations reflected in literature and film. Sources include Rousseau's response to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake; Hannah Arendt's interpretation of Auschwitz; Günther Anders' reading of Hiroshima; and current reflections on looming climatic and nuclear disasters. Readings from Rousseau, Kant, Dostoevsky, Arendt, Anders, Jonas, Camus, Ricoeur, Houellebeck, Girard. Films by Lang, Bergman, Losey, Hitchcock.

3-5 units, Spr (Dupuy, J)

FRENGEN 285. The Gaze of Medusa: Literature and Photography and the Case of Michel Tournier

The effect of the invention of photography and its optical and chemical technologies on the literary imagination. A new language and a new set of metaphors. Anthropological, religious, and cultural attitudes toward the reproduction of the human image. Michel Tournier's essays on photography, his books in collaboration with famous photographers, and his novels and stories. Analogies and differences. Readings from Henry James, Julio Cortázar, Antonio Tabucchi. In English.

3-5 units, Win (Ceserani, R)

FRENGEN 288. Decadence and Modernism from Mallarmé to Marinetti

(Same as ITALGEN 288.) How the notion of decadence, initially a term of derision, shapes and underlies the positive terms of symbolism and modernism. Readings include theories of decadence and examples of symbolist and modernist texts that attempt to exorcise decadent demons, such as lust, mysticism, and the retreat into artificiality. Authors include Huysmans, Poe, Mallarmé, Nietzsche, Nordau, d'Annunzio, Valry, Ungaretti, Marinetti, and Breton.

3-5 units, Spr (Wittman, L)

FRENGEN 367. Violence: The Sacred and Rights of the Dead

(Same as ANTHRO 337A.) The politics of dead bodies as key issue in the humanities during recent decades that link scholars from various disciplines. Contemporary examples of reburial practices of indigenous people, exhumation of disappeared bodies in Latin America, exhibitions of human remains, representation of dead bodies in art, and recent developments in the funerary practices (LifeGem, Biopresence). Rene Girard's theory of the relationship between violence and the sacred.

3-5 units, Spr (Domanska, E)

FRENGEN 369. Introduction to Graduate Studies: Criticism as Profession

(Same as COMPLIT 369, ITALGEN 369, GERLIT 369.) Major texts of modern literary criticism in the context of professional scholarship today. Readings of critics such as Lukács, Auerbach, Frye, Ong, Benjamin, Adorno, Szondi, de Man, Abrams, Bourdieu, Vendler, and Said. Contemporary professional issues including scholarly associations, journals, national and comparative literatures, university structures, and career paths.

5 units, Aut (Berman, R)

FRENGEN 395. Philosophical Reading Group

(Same as COMPLIT 359A, ITALGEN 395.) Discussion of one contemporary or historical text from the Western philosophical tradition per quarter in a group of faculty and graduate students. For admission of new participants, a conversation with H. U. Gumbrecht is required. May be repeated for credit.

1 unit, Aut (Gumbrecht, H), Win (Gumbrecht, H), Spr (Gumbrecht, H)

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Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09

Stanford Bulletin, Archive 2008-09

Alphabetical Index

Bulletin Archive

Graduate courses in French General