"Writing the Child in French and Francophone Literature." In this course, our objective is to study ways of writing and reading the child in modern and contemporary French and Francophone literature. Given that throughout history literature has sought to articulate the place of the subject, we will examine accounts of the child's experience of language and the world. First, as background to this study, we will analyze historical transformations in the status of the child in relation to the family in Michel de Montaigne's and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thought as well as in Philippe Ariès's history of childhood. The emphasis will be placed on ways of reading key 20th-century texts that offer readers a poetics of the child's discovery of family, memory, the body, and the sensible world. For instance, we study works in which autobiography and the fictional dovetail, as in Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Nathalie Sarraute, Patrick Chamoiseau, Scholastique Mukasonga, and avant-garde film director François Truffaut. We will also include other relevant articles by philosophers, psychoanalysts, and cultural historians.