Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12202/7023
Title: | ENG1009: France And Its Others (CUOT) |
Authors: | Mesch, Rachel |
Keywords: | course syllabus Cultures Over Time (CUOT) English French culture |
Issue Date: | Sep-2020 |
Citation: | Mesch, Rachel. (2020, Fall). ENG1009: France And Its Others (CUOT), Yeshiva College. |
Series/Report no.: | Yeshiva College Syllabi;ENG1009 |
Abstract: | “Cultures Over Time” (CUOT) courses allow students to explore the distinctiveness of the past and how it relates to the present through an investigation of values, traditions, modes of thinking, and modes of behavior of one or more cultures, beginning before 1900. FRANCE AND ITS OTHERS While the notion of a cultural “melting pot” is central to American society, French society has been structured around a distinctly French notion of universalism: the idea that there are core universal values that must supersede those of any minority subculture. Thus, although Americans regularly embrace multiple identifications--as African-Americans, or Jewish Americans, for example--in France that double alliance is largely experienced as a tension. This class traces the roots of that tension by examining ways that otherness has inspired and troubled the French imagination through literary, historical and philosophical readings by major French writers from the 1500s to the present day. From Montaigne’s cannibals to the noble savages of Enlightenment texts, from Zola’s “J’accuse!” to the story of Babar, from the female other to the other as Jew to the other as Jewish female, we will explore the myriad ways through which France’s imagined others serve as manifestations of a cultural fascination with and anxiety about difference in its many forms. As we analyze the various intellectual conflicts that have arisen from the quest to understand what is deemed different, foreign, exotic or strange, we will also trace a struggle to define and circumscribe notions of French identity, selfhood and authority. Finally, at the semester’s end, we will use what we have synthesized from these thinkers to consider contemporary debates in French society about the place of religious and ethnic difference in the public sphere. |
Description: | Course syllabus / YU only |
URI: | https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12202/7023 |
Appears in Collections: | Yeshiva College Syllabi -- 2021 - 2022 courses (past versions for reference ONLY) -- ENG (English) |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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ENG1009_MESCH_Fall2020 OPT.pdf Restricted Access | 196.5 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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