Advanced French: Writing the Modern Self: Autobiography, Autoportrait, and Autofiction

Catalog description

Prerequisite: Intermediate French II (FREN 3750), relevant global education experience, or appropriate score on French placement test This course will explore how French and francophone writers in the postwar era have used literature as a means of writing their identities, memories, and life narratives. We will study how writers made use of both traditional genres of life writing, such as autobiography, diaries, and memoirs, alongside more experimental and hybrid forms of narrative. We will see how authors constructed their identities on the page through the lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, or history. Theoretical readings on memory, trauma, and testimony will allow us to explore the fraught relationship between fact and fiction when writing the self. Topics will include the representation of childhood and the family, women’s autobiography, confessional narratives, witnessing and testimony, intellectual development, language and learning, authenticity and documentation, and the relationship between self and other. Students will read both excerpts from longer texts and several works in their entirety. Authors studied may include Simone de Beauvoir, Jean- Paul Sartre, Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Hervé Guibert, Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, Annie Ernaux, Patrick Modiano, Nina Bouraoui, Emmanuel Carrère, Marie NDiaye, and Édouard Louis. Several autobiographical films might also be screened to help understand the relationship between memory and media. In conference, students may undertake a critical or creative autobiographical project of their own or study other aspects of modern and contemporary French and francophone literature and culture. Alongside the study of literary texts, we will review some key lessons in French grammar and composition. Courses offered in related disciplines this year are listed below. Full descriptions of the…