The aim of the beginning French sequence (French 1101 and French 1102) is to help you to develop an active command of the language. Emphasis is placed on acquiring the four language skills--listening, speaking, reading and writing--within a cultural context, in order to achieve basic communicative proficiency.
The aim of the beginning French sequence (French 1101 and French 1102) is to help you to develop an active command of the language. Emphasis is placed on acquiring the four language skills--listening, speaking, reading and writing--within a cultural context, in order to achieve basic communicative proficiency.
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This course will further your awareness and understanding of the French language, culture and literature, provide a comprehensive review of fundamental grammar points while introducing more advanced ones, as well as improve your mastery of oral, reading, and writing skills. By the end of the course, you will be able to read short to medium-length literary and non-literary texts, and analyze and comment on varied documents and topics, both orally and in writing.
Prerequisites: FREN UN2121 Intermediate Conversation is a suggested, not required, corequisite Prepares students for advanced French language and culture. Develops skills in speaking, reading, and writing French. Emphasizes cross-cultural awareness through the study of short stories, films, and passages from novels. Fosters the ability to write about and discuss a variety of topics using relatively complex structures.
The course focuses on reading comprehension and translation into English and includes a grammar and vocabulary overview. It also addresses the differences between English and French syntax and raises questions of idiomatic versus literal translations.
We will be working on pronunciation, vocabulary acquisition, listening comprehension, and oral expression. Activities will include listening comprehension exercises, skits, debates, and oral presentations, as well as discussions of films, songs, short films, plays, news, articles, short stories or other short written documents. Although grammar will not be the focus of the course, some exercises will occasionally aim at reviewing particular points. The themes and topics covered will be chosen according to students’ interests.
We will be working on pronunciation, vocabulary, listening comprehension, and oral expression. Activities will include listening comprehension exercises, skits, debates, and oral presentations, as well as discussions of films, songs, short films, news, articles, short stories or other short written documents. Although grammar will not be the focus of the course, some exercises will occasionally aim at reviewing particular points.
Prerequisites: completion of the language requirement in French or the equivalent. Conversation on contemporary French subjects based on readings in current popular French periodicals.
Prerequisites: FREN UN2102 French socio-political issues and language through the prism of film. Especially designed for non-majors wishing to further develop their French language skills and learn about French culture. Each module includes assignments targeting the four language competencies: reading, writing, speaking and oral comprehension, as well as cultural understanding.
The course is taught in French and focuses on learning the French language via the study of theatre (through plays, scenes, theories, lecture/workshops by guests, as well as performing a series of activities). The course offers students the opportunity to have a better grasp of the variety of French theatres within the culture; and to perform the language through the body and mind. Its goal is to both introduce students to theatre and to explore how it challenges us physically and emotionally, as well as in intellectual, moral, and aesthetic ways. No previous acting experience is necessary but a desire to “get up and move” and possibly even go see plays as a class project is encouraged.
Prerequisites: FREN UN3405 Advanced Grammar and Composition or an AP score of 5 or the instructors permission. Reading and discussion of major works from the Middle Ages to 1750.
Prerequisites: FREN UN3405 Advanced Grammar and Composition or an AP score of 5 or the instructors permission. Reading and discussion of major works from 1750 to the present.
Prerequisites: FREN UN3405 must be taken before FREN UN3333/4 unless the student has an AP score of 5 or the director of undergraduate studies permission. The goal of FREN UN3405 is to help students improve their grammar and perfect their writing and reading skills, especially as a preparation for taking literature or civilization courses, or spending a semester in a francophone country. Through the study of two full-length works of literature and a number of short texts representative of different genres, periods, and styles, they will become more aware of stylistic nuances, and will be introduced to the vocabulary and methods of literary analysis. Working on the advanced grammar points covered in this course will further strengthen their mastery of French syntax. They will also be practicing writing through a variety of exercises, including pastiches and creative pieces, as well as typically French forms of academic writing such as “résumé,” “explication de texte,” and “dissertation.
Prerequisites: FREN UN3405 Advanced Grammar and Composition or an AP score of 5 or the director of undergraduate studies permission. Universalism vs. exceptionalism, tradition vs. modernity, integration and exclusion, racial, gender, regional, and national identities are considered in this introduction to the contemporary French-speaking world in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Authors include: Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sedar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé.
Prerequisites: FREN UN3333 or UN3334 and UN3405, or the director of undergraduate studies permission. Based on readings of short historical sources, the course will provide an overview of French political and cultural history since 1700.
Prerequisites: the director of undergraduate studies permission. Required for majors wishing to be considered for departmental honors. This course may also be taken at Reid Hall. Recommended for seniors majoring or concentrating in French and open to other qualified students. Preparation of a senior essay. In consultation with a staff member designated by the director of undergraduate studies, the student develops a topic withing the areas of French language, literature, or intellectual history.
A one-semester survey of seventeenth-century French literature, with an emphasis on the relationship between literature and the major cultural, philosophical, and religious developments of the period.
The objective of this course will be to tease out Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s complex and often contradictory ideas on women and gender difference in nature and society, to examine his own gender construction in his autobiographical writings, and to determine how women writers from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries have responded to these aspects of his work. Readings of Rousseau’s works (in French) will include the
Discours sur l’inégalité
,
Émile,
the
Lettre à d’Alembert
and the
Confessions
. Other authors will include Louise d’Épinay, Isabelle de Charrière, Olympe de Gouges, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marie-Jeanne Roland de la Platière, George Sand and Monique Wittig, along with contemporary feminist criticism on Rousseau. The course will be taught in French with most readings in French, but papers may be written in English for non-majors or graduate students from other departments. This course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the French major and the 18th Century requirement for the MA or PhD in the French Department. By the end of the course students should be conversant in the major arguments, themes and motifs Rousseau develops with respect to women and gender difference in the state of nature and society. They should have gained a nuanced understanding of the ways gender and sexuality are constructed in the
Confessions
and in the autobiographical works of women authors inspired by it. They should be able to characterize the diverse ways that various women writers, from Rousseau’s time to the present, have responded to his depiction of women and gender. They should have gained the ability to speak with fluency in French about these complex issues, and to develop in their written work, in French or in English, coherent and original arguments about Rousseau, women and gender. Above all, students will be expected to develop their own point of view on a central paradox of Rousseau’s corpus: how is it that a writer often derided in his own time and our own as misogynist has had such an outsized influence on successive generations of women writers?
This course explores overlaps and interconnections between history and literature. It introduces students to the ways in which literary scholars examine the historical dimension of texts and, conversely, historians grapple with the literary qualities of their narratives. In spring 2020 the course will focus on the methodological challenges and epistemological effects of working at small scales of analysis: in psychoanalytic case studies; ethnographic fieldwork; microhistorical research; and genre-defying narratives that weave together biography, sociological study, and the author’s implication (ethical, political) in the object of study. Course open to graduate students and advanced undergraduate students. All classes and readings in English.
This course deals with French foreign policy. It is designed for students who have a good French level (the whole course is taught is French, so there are minimal requirements) and are interested by international relations and France. It aims at improving students knowledge of French diplomacy : the vision and values it carries, its history, its logic, its strenghts, its weaknesses, the interrogations and challenges it faces. Though it is not a language course (there will be no grammar), it will also shapren students mastering of French (especially useful for those considering an exchange at Sciences Po, or wanting to work in places such as the United nations where it is useful to master some French diplomatic vocabulary).
This course aims to introduce graduate students to classic and more recent literature on the intellectual and cultural history of the long eighteenth century. The field has expanded far beyond the cohort of free-thinking
philosophes
around which it was initially conceived to encompass the broader cultural, economic, and religious preoccupations. Given these tendencies, how has the significance of the Enlightenment shifted as a historical period and interpretive framework? In what ways do scholars explicate its origins, outcomes, and legacies? In response to such questions, the readings trace the development of Enlightenment thought and practices from their early manifestations in Britain and the United Provinces, before shifting attention to France, which became the geographical focal point of the movement by mid-century. Topics to be addressed include the relationship of traditional political authorities to an emerging public sphere, the rise of society as a means of mediating human relationships, the entrepreneurial and epistemological innovations made possible by new media, the struggles of the
philosophe
movement for legitimacy, debates surrounding luxury consumption and commercial society, and arguments between Christian apologists and radical atheists over traditional religious doctrines and practice.
This seminar is a step-by-step introduction to scholarly research in the field of History and Literature. In the course of the seminar, students will carry out the initial research and draft the prospectus for their MA thesis.
This course analyzes the ideologies of nationalism and cosmopolitanism from 1789 to the present.
Designed for first-year graduate students. An introduction to the conceptual and practical tools of literary research.
I This course explores configurations of the feminine as force of disorder in the largely masculinist literary universe of the twentieth-century French-speaking Caribbean. How do certain kinds of female characters reflect the disconcerting realities that plague the communities in which they are embedded? What alternative modes of being might women’s non- or even anti-communal practices of freedom suggest? How do such freedom practices disrupt North Atlantic theorizations of the individual in/and community? How capable are we, as Global South scholars, of maintaining commitments to read generously in the face of anti-sociality or moral ambiguity? What ordering codes do we inadvertantly perpetuate through our own reading practices? Over the course of the semester, we will look closely at the “troubling” heroines presented in prose fiction writing by authors of both genders in order to identify the thematic points of intersection and common formal strategies that emerge in their work. We will consider the symbolic value of the “witch,” the “zombie,” the “goddess,” the “old maid,” and other disturbing or disturbed women as so many reflections on – and of – social phenomena that mark the region and its history.