The department’s 300-level courses represent a variety of approaches to advanced work in French studies and thus reflect the diversity within the field of French today. Specific offerings under the general rubrics change from year to year. Prerequisites for all 300-level courses are two of the following: FREN-215, FREN-219, or FREN-225. Students who do not have the stipulated prerequisites must consult the department chair or the course instructor.
FREN-101 Elementary French I
Learn to speak, understand, read and write authentic French in record time. We will use a multimedia approach that accesses language via video, audio and text. The immersive environment students experience will equip them to make active use of the language and provide insight into French and Francophone cultures. Students will have the opportunity to work on language skills in sessions with a language assistant.
FREN-102 Elementary French II
Students will develop their speaking, understanding, reading and writing skills in French. The multimedia approach will provide students with an immersive environment where they will engage actively with the language and culture.
FREN-201 Intermediate French
Communication and culture in the global French-speaking world. We will explore different media and documents that will enable students to express themselves both orally and in writing in a wide variety of contexts. Students will consolidate and expand their skills and engage in creative activities in literary as well as colloquial French.
FREN-203 Advanced Intermediate French
This course will improve students' writing and speaking skills in French and develop their ability to read and discuss texts. Course materials include authors and films representing cultures of the French-speaking world. Written and oral expression are strengthened through weekly essays, class discussion, and comprehensive grammar review.
FREN-215 Intermediate Level Courses in Culture and Literature: Introduction to the Literature and Culture of France and the French-Speaking World
This course introduces students to literature and culture from a variety of perspectives. It will increase confidence and skill in writing and speaking; integrate historical, political, and social contexts into the study of literary texts from France and the French-speaking world; and bring understanding of the special relevance of earlier periods to contemporary French and Francophone cultural and aesthetic issues. Students explore diversified works -- literature, historical documents, film, art, and music -- and do formal oral and written presentations.
FREN-219 Intermediate Level Courses in Culture and Literature: Introduction to the French-Speaking World
This course introduces the literatures of French-speaking countries outside Europe. Readings include tales, novels, plays, and poetry from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, and other areas. Discussions and short papers examine the texts as literary works as well as keys to the understanding of varied cultures. Students will be asked to do formal oral and written presentations.
FREN-225 Intermediate Level Courses in Culture and Literature: Introduction to Contemporary Culture and Media of France and the French-Speaking World
The primary purpose of this course is to familiarize students with contemporary issues in French culture as they are represented in French-speaking media of today. This course will introduce students to contemporary popular culture, through the study of texts, popular music, and feature films. Students will be asked to participate actively in class discussion, do oral presentations, and converse with an exchange partner.
FREN-295 Independent Study
FREN-311 Period Courses
Courses on social and political issues and critical approaches: The usual periodization of French literature and culture is by century. Some period courses focus on the characteristics of specific centuries. Others focus on artistic or intellectual movements: gothic, Renaissance, romantic. All period courses, whatever their conceptual framework, integrate texts and historical contexts.
FREN-311LM Period Courses: 'Les Misérables'
Hugo's epic masterpiece, written in exile, has everything: ceaseless adventures, crimes and punishments, love, hate, obsession, heroes, villains, the battle of Waterloo, and civil war. The sympathetic everyman, Jean Valjean, condemned to hard labor for stealing bread and relentlessly pursued by the pitiless policeman Javert, encounters other unforgettable characters. We will examine how Hugo situates Valjean's escapes within a framework of social injustice and good triumphing over evil, balancing his political and romantic ideas. Reading, discussion, film screenings.
FREN-321 Genre Courses
This interdisciplinary seminar will focus on a comparative study of Romance languages or literatures. Topics will vary from semester to semester. Seminar discussions will be conducted in English, but students wishing to obtain language credit are expected to read works in at least one original language. Papers will be written in either English or the Romance language of the student's choice.
FREN-321AV Genre Courses: 'About Vanguards and Revolutionary Ideas'
This course addresses cultural relations between Latin America and Romance languages and cultures through the concept of vanguard: the Latin American poetic vanguardias of the early twentieth century and controversies with the Italian and Spanish vanguardias; the influence of the Négritude anti-colonial movement in Latin American decolonial thinking and the political avant-garde movements and guerrillas of the '60s and '70s; the intersections between French surrealism and Latin American magic realism; and the emergence of the Cinema Novo and New/Third Cinema (the vanguard of political cinema in Latin America) in the context of Italian neo-realism and the French nouvelle vague.
FREN-321LT Genre Courses: 'Romance Languages Translate'
This seminar explores Romance languages, literatures and cultures through the prism of translation. By comparing translations from Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian between each other and into English, we will map out the boundaries, intersections and middle grounds of this language family. Students will engage with the different traditions of translation studies in these languages and critically analyze translators' paratexts. Selecting an individual translation project in a Romance language of their choice, through a process of revision and collaboration, each student will produce both a polished translation and a commentary explaining challenges and choices.
FREN-321MT Genre Courses: 'The Mind of the Traveler: Journeys, Expeditions, Tours'
Travel literature has always been a precious source for the study of culture, politics, arts and, last but not least, people. From Tacitus to Marco Polo, from Stendhal to Camilo Jose Cela, we will read and discuss authors who traveled for political, personal, and recreational reasons. We will also pay special attention to tales of emigration and immigration in the third millennium.
FREN-331 Courses on Social and Political Issues and Critical Approaches
These courses examine a definable phenomenon--an idea, a movement, an event, a mentality, a cultural structure or system, an historical problem, a critical mode--relevant to the civilization of France or of French-speaking countries. Readings from a variety of disciplines shed light on the particular aspect of thought or culture being studied.
FREN-331FE Courses on Social and Political Issues and Critical Approaches: 'Fabulous Feasts: French Cuisine and Food Culture'
UNESCO recognized French culinary culture as "a social custom aimed at celebrating the most important moments in the lives of individuals and groups" (2010). We will explore the historical, sociological and cultural aspects of meals, étiquette and the culinary arts and the culture that embodies them through different media (recipe collections, guides, literary texts, essays, plays, films and TV shows). We will examine the development of French cuisine from medieval banquets to markets to grande cuisine and nouvelle cuisine and its influences. We will also investigate gastronomic traditions, regional and local culinary character and gastronomy in order to understand and reflect upon French food culture.
FREN-331LF Courses on Social and Political Issues and Critical Approaches: 'Publishing 'la Francophonie': The Distribution and Reception of Texts from the Antilles, Africa, and Beyond'
This course decolonizes French literary study by focusing on the history of Francophone publishing against the dominance of Paris as cultural capital. Reading authors such as Césaire, Chauvet, Tadjo, and Laferrière, our analyses will include the material conditions that shape stories. From the innovative publisher Présence Africaine to Littérature Monde, and from small presses like LEGS Éditions to transnational co-productions, we'll consider the aesthetic and political cultures determining literary distribution and reception. Exploring the effects of literary prizes, grants, and subsidies, we'll go beyond the text to ask how market networks that grant access and attention impact narratives.
FREN-331LM Courses on Social and Political Issues and Critical Approaches: 'Reading "Le Monde"'
Founded in 1944, Le Monde is the premier French newspaper, renowned for its in-depth analysis and thought-provoking opinion pieces. In this seminar we will explore the editorial line of the paper, its uncompromising independence, and its evolution from a Paris-centered evening publication to a multi-media enterprise with 24/7 global coverage. For each session, thanks to our online subscriptions, we will examine a wide variety of topics including national and international politics, social and cultural affairs, economics, science and the environment. Students will gain a distinct perspective on current affairs, advance their language skills and develop their communicative competence.
FREN-331NW Courses on Social and Political Issues and Critical Approaches: 'The French New Wave'
The New Wave was a series of films made in the late 1950s and in the 1960s by a group of Cinémathèque-loving pioneers who had seen almost every movie ever produced and particularly admired American and Russian cinema. This creative explosion won an aesthetic and political victory against an increasingly affluent, self-satisfied society, bringing about a revolution in the film industry that still echoes today.
FREN-331RE Courses on Social and Political Issues and Critical Approaches: 'Revolutions'
We will examine a wide variety of documents, ranging from key historical texts to insurgents' posters, in order to explore the concept of revolution and to analyze how France was dramatically changed by overarching societal, historical, and artistic developments. We will focus on France's relations with racial minorities in times of upheaval at the local, national, and global levels.
FREN-341 Courses in Francophone Studies
These courses study nonmetropolitan French-speaking cultures and literary works written in French outside Europe. Areas of focus are one or more of the following regions: Africa, the Caribbean, or Canada.
FREN-341AF Courses in Francophone Studies: 'Tales and Legends of French-Speaking Africa'
Since the advent of fiction writing in French-speaking Africa in the 1920s, the study of African literatures has been mainly limited to poems, novels, short stories, and plays written by a French-educated elite. In this course we will explore samples of African oral literatures including tales, epic songs, and legends from different African regions. Through translations by writers such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Birago Diop (Senegal), Djibril Tamsmir Niane (Guinea), and Bernard Dadié (Ivory Coast) we will try to view African societies from "within" and gain an understanding of the genealogy of modern African literature in European languages.
FREN-341CM Courses in Francophone Studies: 'Through African Eyes: Intro to African Cinema'
With the rest of the world, in 1995 filmmakers from the whole African continent met in Ouagadougou to celebrate the Century of world cinema. This also gave African filmmakers an opportunity to reflect on their 30 years of film practice. Today, only a year after most former French colonies in Africa have celebrated the 50th anniversary of their independence, African cinema is also entering its fifties. This course will introduce students to a half a century of African cinema with a special attention to its history and its search for survival and self identity within world cinema.
FREN-341FS Courses in Francophone Studies: 'Women and Writing in French-Speaking Africa'
This course explores writings by women in French-speaking Africa from its early beginnings in the late 1970s to the present. Special attention will be given to social, political, gender, and aesthetic issues.
FREN-341HT Courses in Francophone Studies: 'The Haitian Literary Tradition: Revolution, Diaspora, and Writing in French Now'
This course engages with the rich tradition of French writing from Haiti. Beginning with Émeric Bergeaud's Stella (1859), the first novel of the first Black republic, we explore the history of Haitian writing across literary genres and movements, including the Indigénisme that anticipated Négritude. Diasporic authors from the Duvalier dictatorship period include Marie Vieux- Chauvet, author of the cult classic, Amour, Colère, Folie, and Dany Laferrière, famous as both the first Haitian and first Quebecois to enter the Académie française. In Haiti's contemporary literary scene, we focus on writers such as Yanick Lahens and Marie-Célie Agnant.
FREN-341NE Courses in Francophone Studies: 'Revisiting the Negritude Movement: Origins, Evolution, and Relevance'
In the interwar period, 1920-1940, black students from Africa and the Caribbean met in Paris to pursue their education. Galvanized by the colonial situation at home and the political situation in France, Aimé Césaire (Martinique), Léopold S. Senghor (Sénégal), and Léon Damas (French Guyana) formed the cultural movement called Négritude. This course will survey the emergence, goals, evolution, achievements, and legacies of that movement. Discussions will be based on major texts by the founders. Their influence on the works of a new generation of African and Caribbean writers will also be examined.
FREN-341PA Courses in Francophone Studies: 'Paris dans l'Imaginaire Africain'
The relation between colonizer and colonized is two-fold. On the one hand, we have a visible, concrete and immediate form of domination. It is military, economic, social and political. It constrains the body. On the other hand, we have the ideological, less visible, subtler and yet more destructive colonization: that of the mind. This course will have two components: First, we will briefly summarize how, through its educational system and its major narratives (textbooks, essays, literature, and film) the colonizer constructed and controlled both his own image and that of its "silenced" colonized other. Second, we will more substantively explore how, after WW1, through the early 1960s, the colonized, breaking his silence, used "the barrel of the pen" and the camera to account for his own lived experiences of the "Metropole" (Paris and France as a whole).
FREN-341SE Courses in Francophone Studies: 'Ousmane Sembene: A Rebel with a Camera'
Born in 1923 in Senegal, the writer/filmmaker Ousmane Sembène is one of the rare witnesses of the three key periods of contemporary African history: the colonial period; the period of struggle for political and economic independence; and the period of effort to eliminate neocolonialism though the rehabilitation of African cultures. This course is entirely devoted to the works of Ousmane Sembène and will explore the key moments of his life, his activism in European leftist organizations, his discovery of writing, and most of all the dominant features of his film work.
FREN-351 Courses on Women and Gender
These courses explore cultural, literary, and social issues relating to women and gender identities in France and French-speaking countries. Topics may include women's writing, writing about women and men, the status of women, feminist criticism, and
FREN-351QU Courses on Women and Gender: 'Une Philosophe, Qu'est-ce? Thinking with French Women Philosophers from Simone de Beauvoir to Catherine Malabou'
This course focuses on French women writers of philosophy. We start with the existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir, author of the founding text of second wave feminism, Le deuxième sexe. We'll consider écriture féminine with the French Feminism triad Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, as an antecedent of contemporary écriture inclusive. After exploring Barbara Cassin's project to define philosophical terms multilingually, we'll have a special focus on Catherine Malabou whose meditation on plasticity resonates with the gender fluidity of our time and whose recent study of anarchism offers a new critique of domination.
FREN-395 Independent Study
