Course conducted in French.

In this ecocritical class, we’ll look at the representation of rivers, lakes, and seas in French and Francophone literature, art, and film from the Middle Ages to the present. We’ll begin with sacred and enchanted aquatic spaces in medieval texts, before examining early modern maps and seafaring accounts, romantic poetry’s contemplation of lakes and seas, and the symbolic and formal affordances of water in impressionist painting. In the second half of the course, we’ll examine scientific and aesthetic visions of the ocean, colonial and postcolonial crossings, and contemporary reflections on memory, maternity, and indigeneity. Throughout we’ll explore how water is entangled with, and is creatively used to rearticulate, issues of ecology, gender, race, and history. Works will likely include poetry by Lamartine and Hugo, Painlevé’s marine documentaries, Duras’s “L’Amant,” Diop’s “Atlantique,” Hadžihalilović’s “Évolution,” and Chantal Spitz’s “Et la mer pour demeure.” With Nina Léger’s “Mémoires sauvées de l’eau,” our course naturally concludes with the waters of California. show less