French 370 - Sem: Imagining Freedom

Real and metaphorical confinement has inspired novels, plays, poetry, films, testimonials, and works of art in France and the French-speaking world. How have writers, filmmakers, and artists represented the experience of material, psychological and metaphysical constraints? How have they imaginatively transcended and transformed closed spaces such as prisons, convents, asylums, Romantic malaise, colonial rule, the 'univers concentrationnaire,' illness, and the limits of the human condition? In what ways do the discourses of literature, art and cinema intersect with those of the laws and ideologies underlying institutions of social control? Works will span different centuries and cultures.

Prereq: 12 credits including two courses at the advanced level