French grad seminar description Fall 2026
420:500 Introduction to Rhetorical and Stylistic Analysis
Reading Twentieth-Century French Literature
Thursday 3:50-6:50 – ABW 4190
Prof. Carole Allamand
This course has been designed for first and second-year M.A. and Ph.D. students. It combines an introduction to French theory and literary analysis with a preparation for written and oral exams based on the French Department’s 20th-century reading list.
French thinkers figured prominently in the structuralist and poststructuralist movements that dominated the academic humanities from the 1960s to the end of the century. This seminar proposes a rigorous overview of their contribution to the study of literature with a focus on narratologie, sémiologie, textanalyse, and déconstruction.
Works by Beauvoir, Beckett, Breton, Céline, Duras, Gary, Michaux, Perec, Ponge, Pozzi, Proust, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, and Sartre.
Theory and criticism by Barthes, Bellemin-Noël, Benveniste, Derrida, Genette, Jakobson, Kristeva, Macherey, Pingaud, Sartre, Saussure, and Todorov.
420:501 – Introduction to Literary Theory
Monday 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm – ABW 4052
Prof. James Swenson
This course begins from the premise that a synoptic introduction to literary theory (based on a series of influential texts and a succession of schools) is no longer possible. We will instead take our point of departure from the observatoin (which is itself contestable) that literary study today is fundamentally historicist, even and perhaps especially in the case of contemporary literature. What I mean by this is that the meanings of literary texts are to be situated with respect to social factors that are themselves not primarily literary, and that themselves need to be situated in historical contexts. Historicism in this sense appears around the time of the French Revolution, in the writings of Mme de Staël and other romantics, in Hegel’s Aesthetics, and in the appearance of philology as a science of language.
After reading in the history of this invention, we will examine the concepts that form the fundamental building blocks of literary history: the concepts of mode, genre, and period. We will then turn to two sets of exemplary problems in literary history: the relation between lyric and modernity, and the theory of the novel, where we will be particularly attentive to the relation between the development of the genre across the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and its world-wide relevance today. We will conclude by looking at some recent work in the sociology of literature.