Courses

Course ID	Title	Offered
FREN1220	Elementary French FREN 1210-1220 is a two-semester sequence. This is the second half of the sequence designed to provide a thorough grounding in French language and an introduction to intercultural competence. French is used in contextualized, meaningful, and critical thinking activities to provide practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Development of analytical skills for grammar leads students toward greater autonomy as language learners. Students continue developing their writing skills by writing and editing compositions. Readings are varied and include literary texts and a short novel. Full details for FREN 1220 - Elementary French	Spring.
FREN1230	Continuing French FREN 1230 is an all-skills course designed to improve oral communication, listening comprehension, and reading ability, to establish a groundwork for correct writing, and to provide a substantial grammar review. The approach in the course encourages the student to see the language within the context of its culture. Full details for FREN 1230 - Continuing French	Fall, Spring, Summer.
FREN2090	French Intermediate Composition and Conversation I This intermediate-level course is designed for students who want to focus on their speaking and writing skills. Emphasis is placed on strengthening of grammar skills, expansion of vocabulary and discourse levels to increase communicative fluency and accuracy. The course also provides continued reading and listening practice as well as development of effective language learning strategies. Full details for FREN 2090 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation I	Fall, Spring.
FREN2095	French Intermediate Composition and Conversation II This advanced-intermediate course is highly recommended for students planning to study abroad as it aims to develop the writing and speaking skills needed to function in a French speaking university environment. A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated with the study of selected texts (short stories, literary excerpts, poems, articles from French periodicals, videos) all chosen for thematic or cultural interest. Students write weekly papers, participate in class discussions of the topics at hand, and give at least one oral presentation in class. Full details for FREN 2095 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation II	Fall, Spring.
FREN2180	Advanced French In this course, furthering oral communication skills and writing skills is emphasized. A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated through a variety of topics such as social unrest and inequality, immigration crisis, social and geopolitical issues within and outside the Eurozone, post-Brexit, cutting-edge technology, media, environment, and pop-culture via short stories, literary excerpts, videos, poems, and articles fromFrench magazines or newspapers, all chosen for thematic or cultural interest. Students write weekly papers (essays and translations), have daily conversations focusing on the topics at hand, and give at least one presentation in class. Full details for FREN 2180 - Advanced French	Fall.
FREN2310	Introduction to French and Francophone Literature and Culture This course, designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to an array of literary and visual material from the French and Francophone world. It aims to develop students' proficiency in critical writing and thinking, as well as presenting students with the vocabulary and tools of literary and visual analysis. Each section of FREN 2310 will have a different focus-for example, colonialism and the other, or the importance of women and sexual minorities in French and Francophone history, performance in literature and film, or image and narrative-but all sections of FREN 2310 will emphasize through writing assignments and in-class discussions, the development of those linguistic and conceptual tools necessary for cultural and critical fluency. Full details for FREN 2310 - Introduction to French and Francophone Literature and Culture	Fall, Spring.
FREN2320	Introduction to French and Francophone Film This course designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to key cinematic techniques used in analysis of films and to major movements in the twentieth century French cinema. Students will view a broad range of French and Francophone films spanning from 1945-2004 that includes canonical as well as contemporary works. Topics studied include: the evolution of gender representation in French and Franophone films, the depiction of decolonization, and the films de banlieu genre. The class will combine discussion, presentations, class scene analysis and readings from journalistic and film criticism texts, and will be conducted in French. Full details for FREN 2320 - Introduction to French and Francophone Film	Spring.
FREN3160	Translating French: Theory and Practice In this course, both seminar and workshop, students discuss writing about translation, mostly in French, and practice translating from French to English. The theoretical texts studied represent a variety of perspectives and the French texts translated, a variety of literary and non-literary genres. Students will investigate ways of addressing various types of difficulties they encounter in the process of translating across languages and cultures with the aim of developing their own principled approach to translating. Full details for FREN 3160 - Translating French: Theory and Practice	Spring.
FREN3210	Readings in Modern French Literature and Culture This course is designed to teach ways of reading and understanding works created from the Romantic period to the present day, in their cultural context. A range of texts from various genres is presented, and students refine their analytical skills and their understanding of various methodologies of reading. Texts by authors such as Balzac, Baudelaire, Cixous, Duras, Genet, Mallarmé, Michaux, Proust, Rimbaud, Sarraute, and Sartre. Full details for FREN 3210 - Readings in Modern French Literature and Culture	Spring.
FREN3295	Bankers, Gamblers, Hustlers Modern capitalism is intimately connected to the ethics of play. Through French and Francophone literature, this course explores a host of capitalist players and the vexed moral questions they raise from casino gamblers and roulette addicts to bankers who invented speculative finance by domesticating fortune through probability, a middle-class founded on ruinous debts, and hustlers who create an informal economy in order to make their own luck in the capitalist game. Readings may include: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Guitry, Mabanckou, Carrere, among others. Full details for FREN 3295 - Bankers, Gamblers, Hustlers	Spring.
FREN3485	Cinematic Cities Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called "city films," combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of "knowing" a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice. Full details for FREN 3485 - Cinematic Cities	Spring.
FREN3780	What is a People? The Social Contract and its Discontents When Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced the concept of the "general will" in his classic text The Social Contract, he made what was then an unprecedented and scandalous claim: that the people as a whole, and not an individual agent, could be the subject of political will and self-determination. This claim was all the more revolutionary in that historically "the people" [ie peuple] named those poor masses who had no political representation, and who were subjects of the state only to the extent that they were subject to the will of a sovereign monarch. What then is "the people," and how is it constituted as a collective subject? How does a people speak, or make its will known? Can that will be represented or institutionalized? Do all people belong to the people? How inclusive is the social contract? This course will examine crucial moments in the constitution of the people from the French Revolution to the present day, considering the crisis of political representation they have alternately exposed or engendered and the forms of the social contract to which they have given rise. Our discussions will range from major political events (the French and Haitian Revolutions, the Paris Commune, colonialism and decolonization, May '68) to contemporary debates around universalism, secularism, immigration, and "marriage for all". Readings by Rousseau, Robespierre, L'Ouverture, Michelet, Marx, Freud, Arendt, Balibar, and Rancière. Full details for FREN 3780 - What is a People? The Social Contract and its Discontents	Fall.
FREN4200	Special Topics in French Literature Guided independent study of special topics. Full details for FREN 4200 - Special Topics in French Literature	Spring.
FREN4300	Honors Work in French Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information. Full details for FREN 4300 - Honors Work in French	Spring.
FREN4334	Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations. Full details for FREN 4334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries
FREN4689	Sex, Gender, and the Natural World in Medieval Culture Seemingly timeless concepts of natural sex and gender have a history. In fact, they have many histories, some of which are only just starting to be written. This class examines the relationship between the (human and non-human) natural world and concepts of sex-gender variance in pre- modernity. It asks: How might crossing pre-modern conceptions of sex and gender with those of our contemporary moment lead us to approach cultural objects from the past differently? And what can pre-modern sources reveal about the histories behind the sex-gender diversity of today's natural world? We will pursue these questions through readings of contemporary scholarly literature on the topic and through the analysis of historical examples comprised of visual and textual materials studied in translation. Full details for FREN 4689 - Sex, Gender, and the Natural World in Medieval Culture	Spring.
FREN6250	Psychoanalysis and the Human How does psychoanalysis conceive the human, and what does it offer humanity at the crossroads where we find ourselves today? These questions animate the work of Haitian-Quebecois psychoanalyst Willy Apollon, who in recent years has developed the Freudian metapsychology away from its traditional focus on neurosis, the ego, and Oedipus Complex. Apollon advances that the clash of different civilizations that is so ubiquitous today attests not only to their decline, but to the emergence of something that transcends all civilizations. Beyond the man and the woman that cultureproduces to assure its own reproduction, or the specific iteration of the human that each civilization promotes as superior to all the others, he argues that pyschoanalysis must place itself in the service of this (re)emergent humanity. Works studied include Freud, Fanon, Lacan and Safouan as well as recent scholarship by Lucie Cantin, Sheldon George, and Ranjana Khanna. Full details for FREN 6250 - Psychoanalysis and the Human	Fall.
FREN6300	French Reading for Graduates Designed for those with little or no background in French. Aims primarily to develop skill in reading French. Covers grammar basics, extensive vocabulary, and strategies for reading in a foreign language. Some flexibility in selecting texts according to fields of interest. Full details for FREN 6300 - French Reading for Graduates	Spring.
FREN6334	Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations. Full details for FREN 6334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries
FREN6400	Special Topics in French Literature Guided independent study for graduate students. Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature	Spring.
FREN6689	Sex, Gender, and the Natural World in Medieval Culture Seemingly timeless concepts of natural sex and gender have a history. In fact, they have many histories, some of which are only just starting to be written. This class examines the relationship between the (human and non-human) natural world and concepts of sex-gender variance in pre- modernity. It asks: How might crossing pre-modern conceptions of sex and gender with those of our contemporary moment lead us to approach cultural objects from the past differently? And what can pre-modern sources reveal about the histories behind the sex-gender diversity of today's natural world? We will pursue these questions through readings of contemporary scholarly literature on the topic and through the analysis of historical examples comprised of visual and textual materials studied in translation. Full details for FREN 6689 - Sex, Gender, and the Natural World in Medieval Culture	Spring.

FREN1220

Elementary French

FREN 1210-1220 is a two-semester sequence. This is the second half of the sequence designed to provide a thorough grounding in French language and an introduction to intercultural competence. French is used in contextualized, meaningful, and critical thinking activities to provide practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Development of analytical skills for grammar leads students toward greater autonomy as language learners. Students continue developing their writing skills by writing and editing compositions. Readings are varied and include literary texts and a short novel.

Full details for FREN 1220 - Elementary French

Spring.

FREN1230

Continuing French

FREN 1230 is an all-skills course designed to improve oral communication, listening comprehension, and reading ability, to establish a groundwork for correct writing, and to provide a substantial grammar review. The approach in the course encourages the student to see the language within the context of its culture.

Full details for FREN 1230 - Continuing French

Fall, Spring, Summer.

FREN2090

French Intermediate Composition and Conversation I

This intermediate-level course is designed for students who want to focus on their speaking and writing skills. Emphasis is placed on strengthening of grammar skills, expansion of vocabulary and discourse levels to increase communicative fluency and accuracy. The course also provides continued reading and listening practice as well as development of effective language learning strategies.

Full details for FREN 2090 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation I

Fall, Spring.

FREN2095

French Intermediate Composition and Conversation II

This advanced-intermediate course is highly recommended for students planning to study abroad as it aims to develop the writing and speaking skills needed to function in a French speaking university environment. A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated with the study of selected texts (short stories, literary excerpts, poems, articles from French periodicals, videos) all chosen for thematic or cultural interest. Students write weekly papers, participate in class discussions of the topics at hand, and give at least one oral presentation in class.

Full details for FREN 2095 - French Intermediate Composition and Conversation II

Fall, Spring.

FREN2180

Advanced French

In this course, furthering oral communication skills and writing skills is emphasized. A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated through a variety of topics such as social unrest and inequality, immigration crisis, social and geopolitical issues within and outside the Eurozone, post-Brexit, cutting-edge technology, media, environment, and pop-culture via short stories, literary excerpts, videos, poems, and articles fromFrench magazines or newspapers, all chosen for thematic or cultural interest. Students write weekly papers (essays and translations), have daily conversations focusing on the topics at hand, and give at least one presentation in class.

Full details for FREN 2180 - Advanced French

Fall.

FREN2310

Introduction to French and Francophone Literature and Culture

This course, designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to an array of literary and visual material from the French and Francophone world. It aims to develop students' proficiency in critical writing and thinking, as well as presenting students with the vocabulary and tools of literary and visual analysis. Each section of FREN 2310 will have a different focus-for example, colonialism and the other, or the importance of women and sexual minorities in French and Francophone history, performance in literature and film, or image and narrative-but all sections of FREN 2310 will emphasize through writing assignments and in-class discussions, the development of those linguistic and conceptual tools necessary for cultural and critical fluency.

Full details for FREN 2310 - Introduction to French and Francophone Literature and Culture

Fall, Spring.

FREN2320

Introduction to French and Francophone Film

This course designed to follow FREN 2095, introduces students to key cinematic techniques used in analysis of films and to major movements in the twentieth century French cinema. Students will view a broad range of French and Francophone films spanning from 1945-2004 that includes canonical as well as contemporary works. Topics studied include: the evolution of gender representation in French and Franophone films, the depiction of decolonization, and the films de banlieu genre. The class will combine discussion, presentations, class scene analysis and readings from journalistic and film criticism texts, and will be conducted in French.

Full details for FREN 2320 - Introduction to French and Francophone Film

Spring.

FREN3160

Translating French: Theory and Practice

In this course, both seminar and workshop, students discuss writing about translation, mostly in French, and practice translating from French to English. The theoretical texts studied represent a variety of perspectives and the French texts translated, a variety of literary and non-literary genres. Students will investigate ways of addressing various types of difficulties they encounter in the process of translating across languages and cultures with the aim of developing their own principled approach to translating.

Full details for FREN 3160 - Translating French: Theory and Practice

Spring.

FREN3210

Readings in Modern French Literature and Culture

This course is designed to teach ways of reading and understanding works created from the Romantic period to the present day, in their cultural context. A range of texts from various genres is presented, and students refine their analytical skills and their understanding of various methodologies of reading. Texts by authors such as Balzac, Baudelaire, Cixous, Duras, Genet, Mallarmé, Michaux, Proust, Rimbaud, Sarraute, and Sartre.

Full details for FREN 3210 - Readings in Modern French Literature and Culture

Spring.

FREN3295

Bankers, Gamblers, Hustlers

Modern capitalism is intimately connected to the ethics of play. Through French and Francophone literature, this course explores a host of capitalist players and the vexed moral questions they raise from casino gamblers and roulette addicts to bankers who invented speculative finance by domesticating fortune through probability, a middle-class founded on ruinous debts, and hustlers who create an informal economy in order to make their own luck in the capitalist game. Readings may include: Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Guitry, Mabanckou, Carrere, among others.

Full details for FREN 3295 - Bankers, Gamblers, Hustlers

Spring.

FREN3485

Cinematic Cities

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called "city films," combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of "knowing" a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Full details for FREN 3485 - Cinematic Cities

Spring.

FREN3780

What is a People? The Social Contract and its Discontents

When Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced the concept of the "general will" in his classic text The Social Contract, he made what was then an unprecedented and scandalous claim: that the people as a whole, and not an individual agent, could be the subject of political will and self-determination. This claim was all the more revolutionary in that historically "the people" [ie peuple] named those poor masses who had no political representation, and who were subjects of the state only to the extent that they were subject to the will of a sovereign monarch. What then is "the people," and how is it constituted as a collective subject? How does a people speak, or make its will known? Can that will be represented or institutionalized? Do all people belong to the people? How inclusive is the social contract? This course will examine crucial moments in the constitution of the people from the French Revolution to the present day, considering the crisis of political representation they have alternately exposed or engendered and the forms of the social contract to which they have given rise. Our discussions will range from major political events (the French and Haitian Revolutions, the Paris Commune, colonialism and decolonization, May '68) to contemporary debates around universalism, secularism, immigration, and "marriage for all". Readings by Rousseau, Robespierre, L'Ouverture, Michelet, Marx, Freud, Arendt, Balibar, and Rancière.

Full details for FREN 3780 - What is a People? The Social Contract and its Discontents

Fall.

FREN4200

Special Topics in French Literature

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4200 - Special Topics in French Literature

Spring.

FREN4300

Honors Work in French

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4300 - Honors Work in French

Spring.

FREN4334

Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

Full details for FREN 4334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

FREN4689

Sex, Gender, and the Natural World in Medieval Culture

Seemingly timeless concepts of natural sex and gender have a history. In fact, they have many histories, some of which are only just starting to be written. This class examines the relationship between the (human and non-human) natural world and concepts of sex-gender variance in pre- modernity. It asks: How might crossing pre-modern conceptions of sex and gender with those of our contemporary moment lead us to approach cultural objects from the past differently? And what can pre-modern sources reveal about the histories behind the sex-gender diversity of today's natural world? We will pursue these questions through readings of contemporary scholarly literature on the topic and through the analysis of historical examples comprised of visual and textual materials studied in translation.

Full details for FREN 4689 - Sex, Gender, and the Natural World in Medieval Culture

Spring.

FREN6250

Psychoanalysis and the Human

How does psychoanalysis conceive the human, and what does it offer humanity at the crossroads where we find ourselves today? These questions animate the work of Haitian-Quebecois psychoanalyst Willy Apollon, who in recent years has developed the Freudian metapsychology away from its traditional focus on neurosis, the ego, and Oedipus Complex. Apollon advances that the clash of different civilizations that is so ubiquitous today attests not only to their decline, but to the emergence of something that transcends all civilizations. Beyond the man and the woman that cultureproduces to assure its own reproduction, or the specific iteration of the human that each civilization promotes as superior to all the others, he argues that pyschoanalysis must place itself in the service of this (re)emergent humanity. Works studied include Freud, Fanon, Lacan and Safouan as well as recent scholarship by Lucie Cantin, Sheldon George, and Ranjana Khanna.

Full details for FREN 6250 - Psychoanalysis and the Human

Fall.

FREN6300

French Reading for Graduates

Designed for those with little or no background in French. Aims primarily to develop skill in reading French. Covers grammar basics, extensive vocabulary, and strategies for reading in a foreign language. Some flexibility in selecting texts according to fields of interest.

Full details for FREN 6300 - French Reading for Graduates

Spring.

FREN6334

Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

Full details for FREN 6334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

FREN6400

Special Topics in French Literature

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature

Spring.

FREN6689

Sex, Gender, and the Natural World in Medieval Culture

Seemingly timeless concepts of natural sex and gender have a history. In fact, they have many histories, some of which are only just starting to be written. This class examines the relationship between the (human and non-human) natural world and concepts of sex-gender variance in pre- modernity. It asks: How might crossing pre-modern conceptions of sex and gender with those of our contemporary moment lead us to approach cultural objects from the past differently? And what can pre-modern sources reveal about the histories behind the sex-gender diversity of today's natural world? We will pursue these questions through readings of contemporary scholarly literature on the topic and through the analysis of historical examples comprised of visual and textual materials studied in translation.

Full details for FREN 6689 - Sex, Gender, and the Natural World in Medieval Culture

Spring.

Courses by semester

Courses for Spring 2024