FREN 332 - Early Modern French Literature and Culture

This course will take “time and narration” as its principal area of inquiry. We will examine French works of literature from the early modern and Enlightenment periods (as well as a few works from the twentieth century that are inspired by these thinkers) that engage with one of the major philosophic questions of the period: the nature of temporality and its relation to representation. We will look especially at the work of Montaigne, Pascal, Racine, Mme de Lafayette, and Rousseau in an effort to discern how their experiments with representing time and the nature of becoming (rather than just being) inspire later twentieth-century thinkers such as Sartre, Deleuze, and Beckett. Discussion in French.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): FREN 212 or equivalent
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2023-24
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).