FREN 381 - Twentieth-Century French Poetry and Poetics

This course will focus on poets since Mallarmé and the theoretical, aesthetic, and ethical projects of poetry in the context of modernity. We will explore approaches to reading figurative language and its challenges to representation and referentiality; relationships of poetic language to ordinary speech; the structure of lyric address; selfhood and the modern lyric subject; and the emergence of a poetics of the nonhuman in late modernity. First and foremost, this course aims to develop the skills of close rhetorical reading as the foundation for all analysis and theoretical commentary. Authors studied include Apollinaire, Reverdy, Desnos, Eluard, Ponge, Bonnefoy, Guillevic, Réda, Leiris, and Roubaud. Conducted 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).