9:30A-10:45A    TR
This section fulfills COAS requirement.
Above section meets with H226

This course looks at writings by women authors who wrote in French during
the past sixty years. The format of the class is discussion with some
brief introductions but no formal lectures. Students read novels and
memoirs written by women in which the central issue is the development of
a female narrative voice. Other central questions in this literature are
gender and sexuality, love, family, mother-daughter relations, coming of
age as a "smart girl" and education, to name but a few.

Since 1945, French literature has been dominated by women writers.
Beginning with Simone de Beauvoir in the 1940s (especially the publication
in 1949 of Le Deuxieme sexe [The Second Sex]), women writers have explored
a number of issues that had largely been neglected in previous,
male-dominated writing. These writers often took bold positions and wrote
a daring prose that blazed new paths in French literature, all the while
asking whether there was such a thing as ecriture feminine [women's
writing], whether the female voice in literature is different from the
male voice, and if so, how and why? These and many more questions will be
the topics of this class.

The writers I have chosen come from several national, ethnic and racial
backgrounds. From France: Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc, Marguerite
Duras, Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux; from Senegal: Mariama Ba; from
Algeria: Assia Djebar; from Guadeloupe: Maryse Conde; from Quebec: Anne
Hebert; and from Belgium: Jacqueline Harpman. What often emerges from this
literature is that, despite these diverse backgrounds, the authors show a
thematic and narrative commonality. Sutdents will also see the feature
film by the French New Wave director, Agnes Varda, titled Une Chante,
l'autre pas [One Sings, the Other Doesn't], that appeared in 1978, a
feminist manifesto on film.

Final grades will be based on student participation in class discussions
and on three papers written on topics generated by each student.

The following list of books is the order in which they will be read during
the semester:

Beauvoir, Simone de. She Came to Stay. Norton, 1954 [first     French
edition, 1943, L'Invitee]
Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. Harper Perennial, 1986 [first French
edition, 1984, L'Amant]
Leduc, Violette. La Batarde. Riverhead Books, 1997 [first French edition,
1964]