Mon 1:25-3:55, Dey Hall 209
Prof. Ellen Welch (erwelch@email.unc.edu)

A modern idea of “fashion” emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, profoundly marking the culture of Ancien Régime France. Key aspects of the modern fashion industry, such as fashion journalism and the idea of “seasons,” began in this era. The French government enacted policies to encourage an international public to view France as a fashion capital. Above all, a significant discourse about fashion developed, with critics worrying about its effects on questions of subjectivity, social relations, temporality, and value. In this seminar, we will explore fashion’s impact on the culture of Ancien Régime France, focusing especially on its representations in plays, novels, fairy tales, the periodical press, essays, and social criticism, as well as its manifestation in unique “literary fashion objects” such as Caraccioli’s Livre de quatre couleurs. We will discover how the discourse on fashion influenced other aesthetic debates of the period such as the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. We will analyze how writers treated fashion as the exemplar of a new consumer economy, intersecting with colonialism, slavery, social hierarchies and inequalities, and the politics of global trade. And we will explore how the phenomenon of fashion illuminated philosophical tensions between desire and necessity, frivolity and utility, timelessness and timeliness.

This course is a discussion-based seminar for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Class discussions will be in French with accommodations for students from other disciplines.
Please feel free to contact Prof. Welch with any questions: erwelch@email.unc.edu

The period of anthropogenic climate change that scholars have alternately termed the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, or the Chthulucene has revealed the deep entanglement of the categories we denote as “Nature” and “society,” the separation of which has long been central to Western thought and literature. With this imbrication of geos and Anthropos, of Earth and the human, the Anthropocene poses practical and conceptual problems that require new modes of thinking across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Joining the study of French literature, art, and film from the Revolution to the present with an examination of recent work in the environmental humanities by thinkers such as Latour, Serres, Morton, Moore, Crist, Povinelli, and Haraway, this course explores how literature from the past and the present helps us perceive climate change and make sense of our entanglement with the Earth. Literary texts and films will span from Romanticism to Naturalism, from sci-fi to “cli-fi,” including authors such as Chateaubriand, Sand, Tristan, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Zola, Flammarion, Gracq, Lévi-Strauss, Ligny, Darrieussecq, Houellebecq, Varda. Course may be conducted in French or in English, depending on enrollment; reading knowledge of French is required. Open to both undergraduates and graduate students.

This course looks at the ways in which prostitution and its regulation shaped 19^th-century France, with an emphasis on the evolving place of prostitution in modern Paris and its fictional representations. Through the study of literary works by authors including Dumas fils, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Zola, Maupassant, and Aziz, along with paintings, historical documents, memoirs, treatises, and popular culture, we will explore how venal sex became the object of efforts to impose order in a time of rapid change and upheaval, both for administrators and for novelists and artists. Our readings of 19^th-century texts will be complemented by contemporary visual media (television, film, exhibitions) focused on prostitution from the period, as well as historical and theoretical works by Corbin, Foucault, and Rancière. We will also discuss current French debates about the legalization of prostitution, as we consider why the “prostitution problem” has surfaced at particular moments in French history. Course is conducted in French. Open to both undergraduates and graduate students.