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New Courses in French and Italian This Fall

***ITALIAN 347: Visual and Literary Culture in Italy (Marco Ruffini) In perhaps no other European country are art and literature so deeply intertwined as in Italy. To better understand this vivid dialectic between texts and images, this course emphasizes reading and looking as complementary practices for interpreting Italian culture, by posing provacative questions and by comparing pairs of artist-authors such as Dante/Giotto, Michelangelo/Vittoria Colonna, Caravaggio/Galilei, Goldoni/Canaletto, Fellni/Flaiano.

FRENCH 366: France and East Asia (Christopher Bush) This course offers an introduction to French-Japanese cultural relations and to the influence of Japanese aesthetics on a variety of French literary and artistic forms. Our survey extends from the mid-nineteenth century Japanophilia of the age of Impressionism to contemporary French manga, by way of travel narratives, haiku about the First World War, and New Wave film. Through discussions of these diverse works (which range from popular culture to the avant-garde), we will explore broader questions about the relationship between cultural difference and artistic practice in modern France. The course includes a required trip to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Prerequisite: 271, 272, 273 or instructor consent

FRENCH 396: Je est un autre: Difference in Modern French Thought (Doris Garraway) In this course, we examine the emergence of difference as a category through which French intellectuals have critiqued dominant identity formations and philosophical universalisms from the Revolution to the present. Although the French Revolution embraced a universalistic model of republican citizenship, the question of how to define and police the boundaries of national identity gained prominence in the nineteenth century with the re-emergence of racialist thinking and French imperial expansion. With the events of the Occupation, the Holocaust, decolonization, globalization, and multicultural immigration in the twentieth century, however, writers and intellectuals from France and the Francophone world devised new theoretical models for thinking critically about the role of differences—cultural, religious, gender, and racial— within identity formations, often in dialogue with the philosophical developments of existentialism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and poststructuralism. Looking at a series of widely influential theoretical texts produced by political theorists, philosophers, and literary critics, we will compare and contrast the figures of alterity they contain, asking what models exist in France today for conceptualizing sameness and difference, universalism and particularism, and the often paradoxical relations between the terms of these binary oppositions.