French
Humanities Quadrangle, 3rd floor, 203.432.4900
http://french.yale.edu
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
Chair
Maurice Samuels
Director of Graduate Studies
Jill Jarvis
Professors R. Howard Bloch, Dominique Brancher, Ardis Butterfield (English), Marlene Daut, Carolyn Dean (History), Alice Kaplan, Pierre Saint-Amand, Maurice Samuels
Associate Professors Morgane Cadieu, Thomas Connolly
Assistant Professor Jill Jarvis
Affiliated Faculty Carol Armstrong (History of Art)
Fields of Study
Fields include French literature, criticism, theory, and culture from the early Middle Ages to the present, and the French-language literatures of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Maghreb.
Special Requirements for the Ph.D. Degree
- Candidates must demonstrate proficiency in two languages (in addition to English and French). Proficiency is defined as the successful completion of one year of study at the college level or reading proficiency at the graduate level. Students must fulfill one language requirement no later than the beginning of their third term of study. The second language requirement must be satisfied before the prospectus can be approved.
- During the first two years of study, students normally take fourteen term courses. These must include Old French (FREN 610) and at least two graduate-level term courses outside the department. They may include one term of an approved language course taken as a means of fulfilling one of the language requirements, and as many as four graduate-level term courses outside the department. Methods and Techniques in the Italian and French Classroom (FREN 670) is also required for students in their second year. At the end of the first year of study, a grade of Honors must be obtained in at least two graduate term courses taught by core faculty within the French department. By the end of the second year, a grade of Honors must be obtained in at least four graduate term courses taught by core faculty within the French department. The total required number of Honors in French department courses taught by core faculty is thus four. (Core faculty are faculty appointed in French, as opposed to affiliated faculty.)
- A qualifying oral examination takes place during the sixth term. The examination is designed to demonstrate students’ mastery of the French language, their knowledge and command of selected topics in literature, and their capacity to present and discuss texts and issues.
- After having successfully passed the qualifying oral examination, students are required to submit a dissertation prospectus for approval, normally no later than the end of the term following the oral examination.
In order to be admitted to candidacy for the Ph.D., students must complete all predissertation requirements, including the prospectus. Students must be admitted to candidacy by the end of the seventh term.
Teaching is considered an integral part of the preparation for the Ph.D. degree, and all students are required to teach for at least one year. Opportunities to teach undergraduate courses normally become available to candidates in their third year, after consideration of the needs of the department and of the students’ capacity both to teach and to fulfill their final requirements. Prior to teaching, students take a language-teaching methodology course.
Combined Ph.D. Programs
The French department also offers three combined Ph.D.s: one in French and African American Studies (in conjunction with the Department of African American Studies), one in French and Early Modern Studies (in conjunction with the Early Modern Studies Program), and one in French and Film and Media Studies (in conjunction with the Film and Media Studies Program). Students in all of these combined degree programs are subject to all the requirements for a Ph.D. in French, with exceptions noted below. In addition, they must fulfill certain requirements particular to the combined program.
French and African American Studies
This program is most appropriate for students who intend to concentrate in and write a dissertation on the literature of the francophone Caribbean. Students take sixteen term courses, including Theorizing Racial Formations (AFAM 505), which is a required course for all first-year graduate students in the combined program, and three other graduate-level African American Studies courses: (1) a history course, (2) a social science course, and (3) a course in African American literature or culture. Ten of the remaining twelve courses are devoted to the full spectrum of periods and fields in French and francophone literature and culture; the two remaining courses can be in any field. Students in the combined degree program should fulfill the French department’s language requirements by gaining proficiency in either a Creole language of the Caribbean or Spanish, as well as by demonstrating competence in a second foreign language that is directly relevant to the study of the Caribbean. The students’ oral examinations normally include two topics of African American content. The dissertation prospectus must be approved by the director of graduate studies (DGS) both in the French department and in African American Studies, and final approval of the dissertation must come from both departments. For further details see African American Studies.
French and Early Modern Studies
The Department of French offers, in conjunction with the Early Modern Studies Program, a combined Ph.D. in French and Early Modern Studies. For further details see Early Modern Studies.
French and Film and Media Studies
For students in the combined Ph.D. program in French and Film and Media Studies, the oral examination will normally include one topic on film theory and one on French film. Both the dissertation prospectus and the final dissertation must be approved by the French department and the program in Film and Media Studies. In addition, Film and Media Studies requires a dissertation defense. For further details see Film and Media Studies.
Master’s Degrees
M.Phil. See Degree Requirements under Policies and Regulations.
M.A. Students who withdraw from the Ph.D. program may be eligible to receive the M.A. degree if they have met the requirements and have not already received the M.Phil. degree. For the M.A., students must successfully complete one of the language requirements and eight courses, of which at least six are in French. Two grades of Honors in French are required, and the remaining grades must average High Pass.
Program materials are available on the department’s website at http://french.yale.edu/academics/graduate-program.
Courses
FREN 668b / ENGL 979b / HSAR 668b, Ekphrasis and Art Criticism Carol Armstrong
Ekphrasis in its ancient Greek sense refers to the vivid description of an object, animal, person, place, scene, or event undertaken as an exercise in oral rhetoric. In that original context, the practice of ekphrasis was meant to “paint” a picture in the mind of the listener, and thus pointed to both the imagistic capacities of verbal language, and the integral link between the image and the imagination. In the twentieth century, ekphrasis acquired a narrower meaning: poetry addressed to or modeled on works of visual art. While informed by both of those understandings, this seminar considers ekphrasis both more broadly, in terms of genre, and more narrowly, in relation to a partial history of art criticism as a modern form of writing in the anglophone and European worlds, with a focus on the eighteenth through the twentieth century. It treats the different writerly modes now understood to be embraced by the term ekphrasis: not only poetry, but also the prose poem and the novel, as well as the Salon and art review. It also touches on such issues as the Renaissance inversion of the phrase ut pictura poesis; the competition between the arts of word and image; the presence or absence of illustrations; the modern relations between genres and mediums and the question of mediation; and the address of the different arts to the subjectivity of the reader/spectator. In addition to weekly presentations, a short preliminary paper, and a final research paper, students organize and contribute to a workshop on ekphrasis based on their own ekphrastic exercises, undertaken in the Yale Art Gallery. (Some class time is devoted to those exercises.) This seminar is the second of two (the first is HSAR 667); our hope is that students from both seminars will collaborate on this final event.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm
FREN 785b / HIST 823b, Haiti in the Americas Anne Eller and Marlene Daut
This course broadens the temporal parameters of Atlantic history to consider the formation and impact of colonial Saint-Domingue, the import of revolutionary Haiti, and the trajectory of state making on the island through imperial projects of the twentieth century. The course engages with scholarship from the circum-Caribbean, the United States, France, and the greater Atlantic African diaspora.
T 9:25am-11:15am
FREN 802b / CPLT 582b / ENGL 6545b / MDVL 502b, Chaucer and Translation Ardis Butterfield
An exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400), brilliant writer and translator. Using modern postcolonial as well as medieval theories of translation, memory, and bilingualism, we investigate how texts in French, Latin, and Italian are transformed, cited, and reinvented in his writings. Some key questions include: What happens to language under the pressure of crosslingual reading practices? What happens to the notion of translation in a multilingual culture? How are ideas of literary history affected by understanding Chaucer’s English in relation to the other more prestigious language worlds in which his poetry was enmeshed? Texts include material in French, Middle English, Latin, and Italian. Proficiency in any one or more of these languages is welcome, but every effort is made to use texts available in modern English translation, so as to include as wide a participation as possible in the course. Formerly ENGL 545.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm
FREN 844a, Inventories and Inventions: Cabinets de Curiosité and the Writing of Singularity Dominique Brancher
A seminar on "cabinets de curiosités" and the stories told about the objects they contain, whether real or invented. We pay close attention to catalogues, as modes of exhibition in their own right, as products of a collection, as well as vectors for the dissemination of a given collection of objects. We see how the catalogue is a textual crossroads, able to absorb, integrate, and sometimes correct developments in scholarly or travel writing. The catalogue is often also the pretext to parodic or fictional forms. For example, some might claim to present imaginary collections. Others present themselves as real catalogs while exhibiting the signs of fabrication. Catalogues include “Le Cabinet de M. de Scudéry” (1646), “Musaeum clausum” or “Bibliotheca abscondita” by Thomas Browne (1684), and the fictitious catalogue included in Francis Bacon's “La Nouvelle Atlantide” (1627). This course includes readings in relevant critical and theoretical literature, as well as visits to museums and libraries in New Haven. Readings and discussions in French. For each session, critical readings (complementary texts, articles, excerpts) are proposed on the server in PDF or HTML format.
M 3:30pm-5:20pm
FREN 861a / EMST 661a, Margins of the Enlightenment Pierre Saint-Amand
This course proposes a critical examination of the French Enlightenment, with a focus on issues of progress, universalism, empire, and race. We confront these notions with approaches that have emerged in the postcolonial field of studies as well as gender and sexuality studies. Canonical authors are reinterpreted in that light along with lesser-known works. We are assisted by contemporary historians and critics of the Enlightenment, principally Michel Foucault, Lynn Hunt, and Robert Darnton. Readings by Mme. de Graffigny, Mme. de Stael, Mme. de Duras, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, Raynal and Cugoano. Conducted in French.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm
FREN 900b / HIST 667b / WGSS 667b, History of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Europe Carolyn Dean
An introduction to the various lines of inquiry informing the history of sexuality. The course asks how historians and others constitute sexuality as an object of inquiry and addresses different arguments about the evolution of sexuality in Europe, including the relationship between sexuality and the state and sexuality and gender.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm
FREN 930a / CPLT 734a, Fiction and the Archives Alice Kaplan
What can be learned about 20th-century French literature from literary archives? This course investigates fiction by Proust, Céline, Guilloux, Sartre, Sarraute, Wittig, studying finished books in the light of manuscripts, letters, and historical sources. An exploration in particular of the idea of the "genesis" of a literary work. A number of classes will take place in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Conducted in English.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm
FREN 969a / AFST 969a / CPLT 985a, Islands, Oceans, Deserts Jill Jarvis
This seminar brings together literary and theoretical works that chart planetary relations and connections beyond the paradigm of francophonie. Comparative focus on the poetics and politics of spaces shaped by intersecting routes of colonization and forced migrations: islands (Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Martinique), oceans (Indian, Mediterranean, Atlantic), and deserts (Sahara, Sonoran). Prerequisite: reading knowledge of French; knowledge of Arabic and Spanish invited. Conducted in English.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm
FREN 970b, Directed Reading Pierre Saint-Amand
By arrangement with faculty.
HTBA
FREN 971b, Independent Research Pierre Saint-Amand
HTBA