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 course is specifically designed for premed students and students at large with an interest in medical related topics who wish to be better equipped with language skills that will enable them to convey more empathy and multicultural sensitivity while communicating with diverse patient populations throughout the Francophone world. This course aims as well to prepare students to engage in global health equity and promote awareness of language barriers in today's medical field, both domestically and abroad. This is a mid-intermediate level course, and as such, it will continue to develop and reinforce writing, reading, speaking, listening and presentational skills via an array of communicative tasks based on real-life situations.

Full details for FREN 2070 - Medical 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

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

This course adopts an interdisciplinary lens to reflect on how we can think difference productively in our current global condition, through examining some of the challenges that traditionally normative legislative systems (French secularism, shari'a laws in Francophone muslim countries) come up against when faced with increasingly multi-ethnic and pluralistic societies. We will examine a wide array of contemporary issues in the French metropole and the Francophone sphere, as well as their particular histories. Combining an interdisciplinary approach, we will look at a set of current events, legislations, and public debates, such as the burqa ban, terrorism, the same-sex marriage debate (marriage pour tous), and immigration 'queston'.

Full details for FREN 2692 - Thinking Difference in the 21st Century

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

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

If humanistic research consists of finding consensus positions, articulating simple expressions, summarizing texts, standardizing identities, or doing passable translations, then this it: we arrived at the place where artificial intelligence is able to accomplish these missions to a convincing degree. However, we erred if we ever thought such tasks would constitute the humanities. Combining theory and practice, this interdisciplinary class aims to show what AI can generate, and capture… and what the humanities can create, and think. A critique of AI is essential, but it needs to be both scientifically sound and scholarly robust. Our course will look at key issues about language, cognition, textuality, or creativity, while taking advantage of ongoing research and editorial projects hosted by the Humanities Lab.

Full details for FREN 3526 - Humanities in the Time of AI

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4190 - Special Topics in French Literature

This course studies philosophical, literary, and scientific conceptions of nature and the ethics and politics of human-nonhuman relations. We will cover a wide array of texts and global issues-such as animal cruelty, indigenous ecological thought, climate justice, plant ecologies, and ecological sovereignty-while trying to trace a history of French and Francophone ecological thought, from the 16th century to today. Our readings will address a number of related questions: what is our responsibility to nonhuman beings? How must our conceptions of nature, humanity, ethics, and politics change to become more ecological? And are these issues contemporary or have they been with us for centuries, even millennia? Students will closely study and collectively discuss texts while undertaking assignments ranging from the analytic to the experimental.

Full details for FREN 4250 - Ecological Thinking: Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics Beyond the Human

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4290 - Honors Work in French

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Edouard Glissant (1928-2011). We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought.

Full details for FREN 4368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

Feminism has a long history in France, from the work of Christine de Pizan (1364-1431), which instigated the centuries-long discussion of women's rights and women's status known as the Querelle des femmes (the Quarrel about women), through Louise Labé and Marie de Gournay in the sixteenth century and Olympe de Gouges in the eighteenth, to modern and postmodern feminists such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, and more recently, Mona Chollet. The work of these authors will be seen in the light of premodern and modern misogyny, witchcraft theory, queer theory, (Foucault and Judith Butler) and political theory (theories of sovereignty from Jean Bodin to the present). This course will be conducted in French.

Full details for FREN 4456 - French Feminisms

This seminar will focus on the writings of the polymorphous Martinican poet and thinker, Edouard Glissant (1928-2011). We will attend to the historical context of French colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, that gives his writing part of its impetus and to the anticolonial intellectuals with whom he engages (chiefly Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon) as well as to his major self-professed influences (William Faulkner, Saint-John Perse, Hegel) and to an array of interlocutors and fellow-travelers as well as a few dissenters. The seminar will examine the main preoccupations of Glissant's writing (world histories of dispossession and plantation slavery, creolization, Relation, opacity, flux, transversality, Caribbean landscapes as figures of thought, the All-World, etc.) but our focus will be on reading Glissant and attending carefully to the implications of his poetics and of his language for decolonial thought.

Full details for FREN 6368 - Reading Édouard Glissant

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6390 - Special Topics in French Literature

This seminar considers the transformative ingress of ecological concerns into a number of fields, from philosophy and deconstruction to anthropology and literary studies. While acknowledging the unprecedented events - e.g., anthropogenic global warming-that have precipitated this eco-turn, our course will also sample millenary pre-history of environmental philosophy in the West and place it into dialogue with ecological thought and ethics from Caribbean and other non-Western, especially American indigenous culture. Our trajectory is threefold: we will study philosophical, literary, and scientific conceptions of nature, nonhuman beings, and human-nonhumans relations; we will grapple with the how to articulate the ontology and phenomenology of the environmental conditions; and we will investigate a handful of subfields of ecocriticism (such as animal studies, plant studies, and cold studies).

Full details for FREN 6848 - Environmentality: Being Ecological in Philosophy, Criticism, and Ethics