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 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

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-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

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 - French through News, Current Events, and International Relations

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 history of the Francophone world is riddled with cold cases: political scandals, investigative enigmas, and cover-ups that either remain unanswered today, or that look decades to finally be "solved";: Who killed Patrice Lumumba? How did Maurice Audin 'suddenly' disappear in Algiers? In this course, we will examine some of the most haunting political assassinations, disappearances, and cover-ups, through public media, political essays, histor7, but also through fiction and film. We will grapple with how the 'truth' becomes the locus of political struggle, but also the means to justice, and potential repair. The course fulfills the Francophone requirement.

Full details for FREN 2695 - Cold Cases:Crime, Politics, Truth

I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep is a famous quote of 18th C. French writer Beamarchais;it presents a durable trait of French culture, where laughter used to be - and still remains - a powerful way to interact socially. From humour bon enfant to comedic transgressions, from biting irony to conservative strategies fueling the fear of ridicule, laughter in France is neither marginal nor anodyne. Our course will bring together literary texts from the 15th C. onward (theatrical plays as well as poetic satires or novels) with visual media (including political caricatures from the French Revolution up to Charlie Hebdo, or 20th C. movies). Studied authors could include: Rabelais, Moliere, Voltaire, Jarry, Bergson. Conducted in French.

Full details for FREN 3270 - French Laughter: Comedic Literature, films and Caricature (15th-21st C)

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.

Full details for FREN 3460 - Intellectuals: A French History

This course will examine how monster stories are told, from medieval tales of giants and dragons to modern horror films. We will discuss why these stories are often monstrous in their form, disorient the reader with disorderly narratives. What are strategies the authors deploy to unsettle us, rhetorical strategies like silence, euphemism, hyperbole, and chronological and perspectival disruptions? We will examine the complex meanings of these tales, often torn between acceptance of radical difference (corporeal or cognitive) and rejection of the other. Texts will include: Le Chevalier au Lion, Le Fantome de l'Opera, Les Revenants, and horror stories by Maupassant.

Full details for FREN 3535 - Monstrous Narrative

Discussions surrounding controversies about gender often exclude intersex, perpetuating the assumption that nonbinary gender is not "natural". We will examine the social and political stakes of including intersex in our thinking about gender, guided by the work of Hil Malatino, David Rubin, Iain Morland, and others, as well as by early modern theories of intersex and transgender elaborated by Ambrois Pare, Michel de Montaigne, and Jacques Duval, who recognized intersex as a natural variation. Intersex theory will be linked to George Canguilhem's critique of the concepts of normal and abnormal and contrasted with John Money's problematic theories of gender.

Full details for FREN 3545 - Every Body: Theories of the Body from the Sixteenth Century to the Present

Practice makes perfect, the old saying goes, but the nature of that connection remains opaque. This course, conducted in English and intended as a sequel to FREN 3540 - On Paying Attention, gives students the opportunity to engage with everyday material and spiritual practices, and to reflect upon the kids of things these practices make. What is the place of routine and repetition in our lives? How can we open a conversation about our habits? We'll look for models to the long history of writing on the subject, largely but not exclusively by Christian thinkers (e.g. Augustine, Benedict, Aelred, Francis, Ignatius), even as we develop new ways of accounting for, and developing, the practices that make our lives meaningful. Artists, athletes, and introverts especially welcome.

Full details for FREN 3770 - On Practice and Perfection

Readings in French and Francophone philosophy and theory, from the 16th century to today. Themes may vary each offering, but can include questions of: death and finitude, gender, existence, affect, literature, art, and aesthetic, humanism and posthumanism, ecology, responsibility, ethics politics, violence, slavery, education, capitalism,and colonialsim.Texts from numerous authors, such as: Montaigne, Derrida, Irigaray, Deleuze, Rousseau, Fanon, Pascal, De Beauvoir, Blanchot, Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Debord, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Levinas, Cixous, Mbembe, Descartes, Badiou, Latour, Althusser, Weil, and others.

Full details for FREN 3790 - French Thought

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

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6390 - Special Topics in French Literature

Full details for FREN 6485 - Kissing Books: Queer Romance

This seminar will offer a critical examination of the literature of perversion (sadism, masochism, fetishism), with readings drawn from major texts of the libertine or S/M traditions (Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Lautreamont, Reage, Flanagan), as well as recent works of philosophy that share with these writers an investment in what I will term writing the real. We will consider works of perversion not merely as literary or clinical cases, therefore, but as illuminating how the discourse of perversion, broadly understood, posits or constructs the real-its cases or modes of postulation or figuration. We will focus our attention on three modes of construction that purport to straddle the alleged gap between language and its real-figure, fetish, and formalization-considering in each case their relation to the problematic of the drive. In addition to the authors mentioned above, readings will include selections from Badiou, Freud, Deleuze, Ferenczi, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Meillassoux, Perniola, and Zizek.

Full details for FREN 6580 - The Case of the Perversions

This course is a broad survey of the theoretical and aesthetic movements that have attempted to grapple with trans-cultural or multicultural contexts, in contact zones produced 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 Caribbean and Indian Ocean intellectual traditions negotiate their own multi-racial identities through, respectively, Creoleness and Coolitude? How do more recent forms of trans-cultural identity, like Afropolitanism, renegotiate between multiple identities? Includes woks by Senghor, Cesaire, Chamoiseau, Glissant, etc.

Full details for FREN 6940 - Hybridity, Creoleness, Coolitude