Department of French and Italian

This course will seek to provide a roughly chronological exploration of 20^th- and 21^st-Century lyric and narrative poetry in French, in its diverse relations to sites of social, historic and material culture. Among other activities, we’ll wander the foggy streets of London with Apollinaire’s forlorn “mal- aimé” in Alcools, 2013; ponder life and death from Valéry’s cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean in Charmes, 1922; view Surrealist works at the Eskenazi art museum through the perspectives of Breton, Eluard and Aragon; re-visit Surrealism in the 50s with Foucher’s irreverent and rollicking Anna de Hore (1955); attempt to shoplift adult volumes with Belgian poet Guy Goffette  in Un manteau de fortune, 2001; buy late-night convenience-store French fries with Cécile Coulon in Les ronces, 2018; and endeavour to foist inherited silver spoons on our reluctant relatives with Noémi Lefebvre in Parle, 2021. Including poems by Québécoise Anne Hébert as well as “Prix Goncourt de la Poésie” winners (Yves Bonnefoy; Egyptian-born Lebanese poet Andrée Chédid; and Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet), our readings will be challenged and extended through a variety of critical texts and perspectives. Given the nature of poetry, assignments for each session will be crafted to encourage in-depth (as opposed to page-turning) study.