  These lectures deal with: (1) a brief review of the theory of flexible random
manifolds (with fixed intrinsic metric), connected to the physics of
polymerized membranes, and of the effect of extrinsic curvature (crumpling
transitions); (2) a discussion of the effect of self-avoidance and its
renormalization group treatment in term of a non-local field theory (this last
part is not much different from cond-mat/9509096).
