Courses

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 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

Working on pronunciation improves your ability to communicate in two ways. First, learning to distinguish and produce all of the sounds of French increases both your ability to understand the spoken language and your ability to make yourself understood when speaking. Second, it allows you to diminish the foreign accent that can distract some listeners and prevent you from getting your message across even if you speak quite fluently. This course focuses specifically on accent reduction and should interest anyone intending to use French in such professional arenas 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 semester 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

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

The French Revolution was one of the most dramatic upheavals in history, sweeping away centuries of tradition and ushering in the political and cultural modernity we arguably still live in today. Although often remembered for mass executions by guillotine and the rise of Napoleon, it was much more. Between 1789 and 1815, the French people experimented with virtually every form of government known to the modern world: absolutist monarchy, constitutional monarchy, representative democracy, radical left-wing republicanism, oligarchy, and right-wing autocracy. This course explores the rapidly changing political and social landscape of this extraordinary period, the evolution of political culture (the arts, theater, songs, fashion, the cult of the guillotine), and shifting attitudes towards gender, race, and slavery.

Full details for FREN 2860 - The French Revolution

Part theory, part textual analysis, and part creative writing, this course aims to help students develop a richer, more nuanced understanding and command of both the spoken and written language. As students refine their understanding of style and learn techniques for characterizing stylistic varieties, they apply these concepts both to the reading of a singular (and yet very plural) literary text. Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style, and to the writing of new exercices de style of their own. We also consider the relevance of stylistics to translation and of translation to Queneau's text.  Seminar-style participation in class discussions and activities is expected.

Full details for FREN 3120 - French Stylistics

This course will introduce students to some of the highlights of France's contributions throughout its long history in art, architcture, 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 and study romanesque and gothic architecture.  The imposition of absolute monarchy will lead to discussion of Classicism idealized drama and painting.  Finally, we will introduce the important French thinkers of the Enlightenment whose political theories were in large part adopted by the farmers of the U. S. Constitution.  All this while keeping in mind Walter Benjamin's remarks on the often hidden cost of the great contributions of Western civilization."There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."  What and who was sacrificed in order to create French civilization?

Full details for FREN 3240 - French Classics

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.

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

The course is a survey of Feminist Islamic thinkers from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, and their diaspora, featuring both French and Arabic texts in English translation. The purpose of the course is to critically explore the competing treatment of major gendered tropes in a Muslim context (the veil, the harem, polygamy, etc.) by North African thinkers, through their examination of qur'anic surats/hadiths, the evolution of tafsirs (tradion of qur'anic exegesis) as well as their conflicting approaches to secular western feminism. Readings might include: Fatema Mernissi, Asmaa Lamrabet, Qasim Amin, Naguib Mahfoud, Assia Djebar, Mona Eltahawy, and Nawal El-Saadawi.

Full details for FREN 3685 - Feminism and Islam in North Africa

The class is an introduction to reading and interpreting women's stories as they are represented, written, and at times erased before being recovered in French and Francophone history and cultures. The course will analyze several figures/icons/images from the Old Regime to our time. The goal of the course is to familiarize students with the analyses of different strategies and techniques of representation (esthetic, historical, scientific, autobiographical and fictional).  The corpus of works studied will include fictional and historical writing as well as paintings and films. Examples of such case studies could include: Joan of Arc, Marguerite de Valois, Marie-Antoinette, heroines of fairy tales, Camille Claudel, unknown women workers, or well known contemporary women authors such as Marguerite Duras, Marjane Satrapi, or Condé.

Full details for FREN 3710 - Women's Stories I

This course is a broad survey of theoretical and aesthetic works that have emerged within the context of postcolonial studies, decolonial and critical race theories in an attempt to grapple with trans-cultural forms of racial and national identity that characterize the conact zones produced both historically by colonialism, slavery, and indenture labor, and more recently by migration. The seminar will ask the following questions: How did theories of hybridity emerge in the colonial context, and how did they evolve in their postcolonial enunciation? How did Carribean and Indian Ocean intellectual traditions interact with and refute hybridity through respectively, Creoleness and Coolitude? How do more recent decolonial approaches rearticulate questions of race in settle colonial contexts

Full details for FREN 3930 - Hybridity, Creoleness, Coolitude

"Is love an art? Then it rquires knowledge and effort," writes Erich Fromm in the first chapter of The Art of Loving. His question (from 1956) is not a new one. This course engages with the long tradition of thinking about love as an art, not merely something one falls into or out of, but something one does or fails to do.  We'll start with Plato's Phaedrus Ovid's ironic Art of Love before proceeding to three great medieval depictions of love: Andreas Capellanus' On Love, Bernard of Clairvaux's On Loving God, and Chrétien de Troyes Lancelot. We'll also look at some of the more provocative modern arts of love, from Fromm to Foucault, Barthes to Gillian Rose.

Full details for FREN 4050 - The Art of Love

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4190 - Special Topics in French Literature

A number of well-known French novels have been adapted, appropriated, and reimagined, giving them a life well beyond France and beyond the time in which they were produced. We will explore how one novel can serve various, sometimes contradictory, purposes in different times and cultures by examining the context in which it was written, the text itself, and the variations that have arisen over time.

Full details for FREN 4265 - One French Novel

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4290 - Honors Work in French

The myth of landscape as a natural, external space for human contemplation, gradually ruined by technology, stubbornly refuses to die. How should we read works from a preindustrial past? Is there a precise moment in history when technology comes into what soil scientist Peter Haff calls the postcard picture of landscape? Reading in the original languages where possible, we will begin with foundational pastoral and bucolic texts from the classical, early modern, and Romantic periods before moving to contemporary science/speculative fictions. we will also read recent critical works on the "botanic turn," terraforming, posthuman ruins, and infrastructure.

Full details for FREN 6000 - Landscape and Technology

"Is love an art? Then it rquires knowledge and effort," writes Erich Fromm in the first chapter of The Art of Loving. His question (from 1956) is not a new one. This course engages with the long tradition of thinking about love as an art, not merely something one falls into or out of, but something one does or fails to do. We'll start with Plato's Phaedrus Ovid's ironic Art of Love before proceeding to three great medieval depictions of love: Andreas Capellanus' On Love, Bernard of Clairvaux's On Loving God, and Chrétien de Troyes Lancelot.  We'll also look at some of the more provocative modern arts of love, from Fromm to Foucault, Barthes to Gillian Rose.

Full details for FREN 6050 - The Art of Love

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6390 - Special Topics in French Literature