Graduate
PhD in French
Literature and the Arts
It is increasingly difficult to think about and study literature in isolation from other aspects of the culture of its time and place. One way to provide literary studies the cultural coordinates that contextualize literature and make it meaningful is by studying its relation to the other arts. To do this, the study of literature will need to take into account issues of style and periodization from the field of esthetics, and it also means that issues of epistemology can be explored by studying the ways different cultures translate between different media or arts.
How does literature express color and shape; what does the literature of a given time and place find important enough to describe? To what extent can illustration aid in interpreting a literary text? The ambiguity of words designating colors in earlier times teaches us how imprecise the discrimination was between different colors in earlier societies, and how rare were the vibrant colors that we now take for granted in everyday life.
The way that 19th-century French culture illustrated Shakespeare's plays or Rabelais, or Ariosto, both in editions of them, and in independent paintings, tells a great deal about the way French society read, and, more important, visualized, the works of the Renaissance at that time.
Studying literature and art in relation to each other can reveal not only elements of the mechanics of creation, but also of the reception of works in different media by the people for whom they were created. The candidate working in this interdisciplinary track will write a dissertation that works between two or more of the arts.
The rest of the PhD program should prepare the candidate to conceive and execute a dissertation of a high degree of theoretical sophistication, and with some in-depth knowledge of at least two fields. One of these fields will be French literature, and some area of French literature will provide the central focus of the dissertation. The other field could be the visual arts, and most generally painting. But it could also be cinema, opera, or theater, understood as spectacle rather than literature. Specific dissertation topics might deal with illustration, with such combinations of picture and text, as technopaegma, emblems, calligrams, or concrete poetry. Or the literary text could be studied as it is transformed into a stage or operatic production.
For a student with particularly strong skills in art-historical analysis it might be appropriate to study the literary background of paintings, say from the second school of Fontainebleau of the Romantic movement in the first half of the 19th century.
Finally, this interdisciplinary track can provide a stimulating and novel perspective from which graduate students in French can approach the relations between cinema and literature.
Students should make a decision to pursue this interdisciplinary track early in their graduate studies, and not later than the end of the first year of PhD course-work. Ideally, the candidate for this interdisciplinary track will already have done some work in art history, musicology, or cinema before entering the program. And during residency the student will take two or three courses in one of these fields in another department, in addition to the eight 2000-level courses required for the PhD in French.
Appropriate courses might include:
- English 2118: Allegory and Iconography
- English 2451: Film History/Theory
- English 2460: Film and Literature
- German 2884: Weimar Cinema
- HAA 2330: Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts
- HAA 2310: Art and Politics in 17th Century Rome
- Music 2411: Medieval and Renaissance Notation
- Philosophy 2370: Aesthetics
Among the courses in French, the candidate will take one core course that will either be offered every two years or will be available as a directed study and that offers an overview of the issues involved in this concentration: an introduction to the idea of style and the problems involved in defining a period style across more than one art form (this section will include the study of one of two examples of period style, e. g., Baroque, Romanticism and Realism, surrealism, emblems and emblematics; ut pictura poesis, the problem of ecphrasis and description; the illusion of that natural sign; Lessing's Laocoon, the staged representation of texts or oral/formulaic compositions such as epic recitation or commedia dell'arte illustration; Mallarmé, Benjamin on reproduction, Ruskin on engraving; illustrated books like Gide's Voyage d'Urien; poets who were also artists, like Henri Michaux and Michel Butor; poems on/for paintings or engravings; examples from Henri Baude, Ronsard, Baudelaire, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jacques Rancière; spectacle and literature; literature and film, literature and performance; music and literature; opera; program music.
In addition, the student will wish, according to the period specialization, to be alert for courses on medieval manuscript illustration in the art history department or cinema and contemporary French culture either in our department or some other.
The candidate will also meet all other requirements for the PhD in French, including both those set by the department and those that are FAS University-wide.