FREN 1210-FREN 1220 is a two-semester sequence.  FREN 1210 is the first 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 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 develop their writing skills by writing and editing compositions.  Readings are varied and include literary texts.  Daily preparation and active participation are required.

Full details for FREN 1210 - Elementary 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

This course will introduce English speakers to highlights of France's contribution in art, architecture, music, philosophy, political theory and literature to Western civilization. We will consider works from the Middle Ages to the Revolution. We will read texts from epic poems of the medieval period, study romanesque architecture and continue through the imposition of absolute monarchy. Classicism and the important thinkers of the Enlightenment whose political theories were in large part adopted by the framers of the U. S. Constitution.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS, HST-AS)

Full details for FREN 1720 - French Classics

This intermediate conversation and composition French course is designed for students interested in business fields such as Hospitality, Business Management, and Marketing, those looking for an internship or a job in French-speaking businesses or students interested in exploring the language and cultures of the French-speaking business world.  The course will focus on improving oral and written skills through the acquisition of specific vocabulary and the review of essential grammatical structures commonly used in business.  Students will use authentic written, visual and listening materials and engage in interactive activities relevant to the professional world and its intercultural dimension.

Full details for FREN 2080 - French for Business

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

Reducing your foreign accent improves your ability to communicate in two ways: learning to distinguish and to produce clearly the full inventory of sounds in French increases both your ability to understand the spoken language and your ability to make yourself understood when speaking.  Because it distracts many listeners, a heavy foreign accent can prevent you from getting your message across even if you speak quite fluently.  This course focuses specifically on accent reduction and will interest anyone intending to use French in professional arenas such as international business, law, and project management, the import-export and hospitality industries, art restoration and curation, secondary and post-secondary teaching, or the performing arts.  By the end of the course students will achieve noticeably improved pronunciation, greater fluency, improved aural comprehension, and increased self-assurance in spoken French.

Full details for FREN 2092 - Pronunciation of Standard French

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

In this course, furthering oral communication skills and writing skills is emphasized. A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated with short stories, literary excerpts, videos, poems, and articles from French 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 last one presentation in class. This course is highly recommended for students planning to study abroad in a French speaking university.

Full details for FREN 2180 - Advanced French

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.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

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

This 1-credit optional course aims to expand the students' vocabulary, and advance their speaking and reading skills as well as enhance their knowledge and deepen their cultural understanding by supplementing non-language courses throughout the University.

Full details for FREN 3020 - French Foreign Language Across the Curriculum (FLAC)

This course is designed to familiarize students with works from the Renaissance, the Classical period, and the Enlightenment, as well as the cultural and historical context in which these texts are created, reflecting a dynamic period of significant change for France. Texts by such authors as Rousard, du Bellay, Montaigne, Molière, Marquerite de Navarre, Corneille, Diderot, de Lafayette, Racine, Perrault, Rousseau. Students may read texts in the original languages or in translation.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

Full details for FREN 3220 - Readings in Early Modern French Literature and Culture

The concept of "intellectual" - the writer or scholar who takes a political commitment - was born in France at the end of the nineteenth century.  From the Dreyfus Affaire to the recent polemics on French "identity," passing through Vichy, the Algerian War and May 68, intellectuals established a symbiotic relationship between culture and politics, becoming a sort of national brand, object of both admiration and contempt outside of the country.  The aim of this course is to revisit some crucial moments of this history, focusing on different attempts to define the nature and function of the intellectual, from Emile Zola to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Simone de Beavoir to Michel Foucault.

Catalog Distribution: (HA-AS, ALC-AS, ETM-AS)

Full details for FREN 3460 - Intellectuals: A French History

This course will offer an overview of theoretical and historical responses to bodily and cognitive difference.  What was the status of people with (dis)abilities in the past, when they were called monsters, freaks, abnormal?  How are all of these concepts related, and how have they changed over time?  How have we moved from isolation and institutionalization towards universal design and accessibility as the dominant concepts relative to (dis)ability?  Why is this shift from focusing on individual differences as a negative attribute to reshaping our architectural and more broadly social constructions important to everyone?  Authors to be studied include: Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, and Jasbir Puar.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for FREN 3520 - (Dis)ability Studies: A Brief History

What makes religious violence so intractable, and what has fostered the continuity of this form of conflict over such a long span of time? What is the role of aesthetics in literary descriptions of such horrific violence? Violence as a spectacle raises the question of personal responsibility, making those who observe it complicit even if they do not participate in it. Texts to be considered will include Maalouf's Les Croisades vues par les arabes. Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques, René Girard's La Violence et el sacré, Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et après, Shoshana Felman's and Dori Laub's work Testimony, Gillo Pontecorvo's La Bataille d'Algers, Franz Fanon's Les Damnés de la Terre, Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS, ETM-AS)

Full details for FREN 3730 - Religious Violence in French and Francophone Literature

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4190 - Special Topics in French Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4290 - Honors Work in French

We will read together a wide range of modern European texts-mostly but not exclusively by at least nominally Jewish authors, many of them working in the German intellectual tradition--accompanied by a range of works by Jacques Derrida that engage those thinkers and their texts. Authors will likely include Theodor w. Adorno, Saint Augustine, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Helene Cixous, Hermann Cohen, Sigmund Freud, Edmond Jabes, Emannuel Levinas, Claude Levi-Strauss, Karl Marx, and Gershom Scholem. We will thus be better able to participate in the current re-evaluation of Derrida's legacy, including his Jewishness, and we will read him, among other things, as a proponent of dialogue, sometimes loving and sometimes fiercely agonistic.

Catalog Distribution: (CA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for FREN 4428 - Reading Derrida and Others

This course will examine works (literary, ethnographic, juridical, historical, medical, theoretical....) from French and Francophone cultures where questions of sexuality and gender are put on trial or question the status quo of their contemporary social, political and ideological order.  Texts analyzed could include: Joan of Arc's trial documents; 16th and 17th Century Women's Fairy Tales and Witchcraft treastises: 18th Century erotic literature (Diderot's Le Religieuse); ethnographic travel literature (diderot's Le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville) Caribbean slave narratives (Maryse Condés Moi, Tituba Sorcière), modern feminist autobiographical fictions (Monique Wittig's L'Opoponax).

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS, ALC-AS)

Full details for FREN 4700 - Translating Gender Across Time and Cultures: Fantasms and Realities

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6390 - Special Topics in French Literature

We will read together a wide range of modern European texts-mostly but not exclusively by at least nominally Jewish authors, many of them working in the German intellectual tradition--accompanied by a range of works by Jacques Derrida that engage those thinkers and their texts. Authors will likely include Theodor w. Adorno, Saint Augustine, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Helene Cixous, Hermann Cohen, Sigmund Freud, Edmond Jabes, Emannuel Levinas, Claude Levi-Strauss, Karl Marx, and Gershom Scholem. We will thus be better able to participate in the current re-evaluation of Derrida's legacy, including his Jewishness, and we will read him, among other things, as a proponent of dialogue, sometimes loving and sometimes fiercely agonistic.

Full details for FREN 6428 - Reading Derrida and Others

This seminar will explore 20th and 21st century African literary narratives through Felwine Sarr's key concept of Afrotopias defined as an active and activist imaginary, both politically radical and culturally cosmopolitan.  The seminar will discuss how literary works by Ouologuem, Lab'ou Tansi, Yacine, Dib, Waberi , Miano, and others, operate as textual laboratories, using language as the experimental medium through which they create new political fictions. Their narratives range from political parables and bureaucratic dystopias, to Afrofuturism and ecological utopias.  We will examine how they articulate innovative forms of political life, beyond traditional models of the nation-state, citizenship, and democracy.  The texts will be paired with theoretical readings, including Ernst Bloch, Foucault, Balibar, Mbembe, and others.

Full details for FREN 6590 - Afrotopias

This course will examine the ideological prejudices that some of the major works of France's great period of artistic creation underly and structure what many consider the apogee of French culture.  At the same time we will look at the actual historical situation of women, particularly women in positions of power, (Catherine de Medicis, Marie de Medicis, La grande Mademoiselle, Anne d'Autriche, etc.) who were able to exercise political authority in a culture (legal and juridical) denied them any actual political role.

Full details for FREN 6600 - Nasty Woman: The Politics of Misogyny in Classical France