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.  Daily preparations and active participation are required.

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 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

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.

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

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

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 tets, and will be conducted in French.

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

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

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 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.

Catalog Distribution: (LA-AS)

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

This course is conceived as a critical introduction to a cultural and political debate that appeared in the years of Mitterrand's France and reached its climax in the last decade.  It will focus on a French society deeply shaped by immigration and globalization.  In which way do the youth of the "banlieue" - mostly formed by postcolonial Blacks and Muslims - create their own culture with the French culture?  How have literature, essays, movies, documentary films, "national identity" carried on by governments reacted to these transformations?  Selecting literary texts (by Maryse Condé, Zahia Rahmani, Adb El Malik) and other cultural productions, the course will explore the new expressions of France as an "imagined community".

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

Full details for FREN 3400 - French Identities: 21st Century Culture and Society in France

Psychoanalysis considers the human being not as an object of treatment, but as a subject who is called upon to elaborate an unconscious knowledge about what is disrupting her life, through analysis of dreams, symptoms, bungled actions, slips of the tongue, and repetitive behaviors.  Freud finds that these apparently irrational acts and behavior are ordered by the logic of the fantasy, which provides a mental representation of a traumatic childhood experience and the effects it unleashes in the mind and body-effects he called drives.  As "unbound" energies, the drives give rise to symptoms, repetitive acts, and fantasmatic stagings that menace our health and sometimes threaten social coexistence, but that also rise to the desires, creative acts, and social projects we identify as the essence of human life.  Readings will include fundamental texts on the unconscious, repression, fantasy, and the death drive, as well as case studies and speculative essays on mythology, art, religion, and group psychology.  Students will be asked to keep a dream journal and to work on their unconscious formations, and will have the chance to produce creative projects as well as analytic essays.

Catalog Distribution: (KCM-AS, ETM-AS, SSC-AS)

Full details for FREN 3560 - Freud and the Invention of Psychoanalysis

This survey course will trace narratives of sea crossings in Francophone literature from Africa and its diaspora across the three bodies of water that surround the continent: the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea. It will consider literary and cinematic depictions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, sea trading in the Caribbean, nuclear experiments in the Chagos islands, and the shipwreck of clandestine migrants in Lampedusa. Through forced displacement or willful journeys, exile or exploration, we will study how these aesthetic works articulate a global consciousness, which has radically redefined what it means to be African, cosmopolitan, and modern, from negritude to créolité and coolitude. Authors include Aimé Césaire, Fatou Diome, Shenaz Patel, Salim Bachi, and others.

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

Full details for FREN 3580 - African Sea Routes

Without literary theory, there is no idea of literature, of criticism, of culture. While exciting theoretical paradigms emerged in the late 20th century, including structuralism and poststructuralism, this course extends theoretical inquiry into its most exciting current developments, including performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, trauma theory, transgender studies, and studies of the Anthropocene. Taught by two Cornell professors active in the field, along with occasional invited guests, lectures and class discussions will provide students with a facility for close textual analysis, a knowledge of major currents of thought in the humanities, and an appreciation for the uniqueness and complexity of language and media. This course may involve presentation of performance art.  Course open to all levels; no previous knowledge of literary or cultural theory required.

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

Full details for FREN 3921 - Literary Theory on the Edge

This course examines how African writers, filmmakers, and internet media content creators engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, gender, queerness, genital surgeries, sex strike, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' commitment in highlighting forms of agency on the continent in addition to troubling longstanding and problematic colonialist tropes of pathologization of Africans. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious, yet empowering, nature of the body in the post-independence African experience. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (reaction papers, an abstract, and annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you to refine your understanding of body politics.

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

Full details for FREN 3975 - Body Politics in African Literature, Cinema, and New Media

Madness fascinates, mental illness frightens. They are realms of scholarship as well as objects of practical knowledge and representation for the arts and the social actors themselves. This seminar aims to explore the ways in which people who are affected by psychological disorders and strive to face them, are depicted in the 20th and 21st century popular culture. What relationship exists between the medical understanding of these disorders and their portrayals in literature, recovery narratives, cinema, TV series and documentaries? Do contemporary pictures of madness in fiction contribute to demystify and destigmatize mental illness, or do they reinforce negative stereotypes? Are there differences between French fictions and American ones? This seminar will examine each oeuvre as a case study with the resources of critical studies.

Catalog Distribution: (KCM-AS, ETM-AS)

Full details for FREN 4070 - Madness Narratives and Pop Culture in 21st Century

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4200 - Special Topics in French Literature

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4300 - Honors Work in French

In the last decades, "Holocaust Studies" witnessed an extraordinary expansion, covering different fields of scholarship, from history to literature, from philosophy to aesthetics.  This seminar will retrace the major steps of Holocaust history writing.  It will analyze the classical debates between "intentionalism" and "functionalism," the discrepancies between the analytical approaches focused on the perpetrators and those focused on the victims, the inscription of the Holocaust into the broader context of war violence, and its comparison with the genocidal violence of colonialism.  Finally, it will investigate some methodological problems concerning the place of testimony in history writing and the permanent connections, both fruitful and problematic, between history and memory.  This means taking into account the entanglement of the most productive areas of Holocaust scholarship (Germany, France and the United States) as well as the relationship between the historiography of the Holocaust and other disciplines (memory studies, postcolonial studies, etc.).

Full details for FREN 4375 - The Holocaust and History Writing

How might philosophy respond to catastrophe? The Wars of Religion in France and throughout Europe offered continual violence, trauma, and social upheaval. The Essais of Michel de Montaigne responded to this context by elaborating a new form of skepticism, which creates a space for more humane ethics (including some of the earliest discussions of religious and racial tolerance) and for freedom of thought (a relatively new concept in the western world), by means of a radical questioning of the functioning of political, religious, and intellectual authority. What Montaigne offers is both a practical and intellectual model for coping with extreme and omnipresent violence and social conflict, a model that presents difference as a necessary condition of physical and psychic survival.

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

Full details for FREN 4540 - Montaigne and the Philosophy of Catastrophe

This course, offered entirely in English, is open to advanced undergraduates and graduates who want to learn more about the relations of politics to art in general and the cultural politic of "autonomia" more specifically. This movement, primarily associated with Italy, continues to have widespread influence around the globe. During the 1960s and 70s in Italy and elsewhere, workers, and intellectuals began to think collectively about a social terrain outside of dominant structures such as the State, the political party or the trade union. How does their "refusal to work" shape culture and vice versa? What kinds of cultural productions can come "outside of the State" or from constituent power? We will begin the course by tracing the term autonomy (self-rule) from antiquity to the modern period with emphasis on its relation to culture. We will then focus on the period of the 1960s and 70s, with experimental and mainstream cinema of Antonioni, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Petri and others; with writers such as Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Nanni Balestrini; with arte povera as one "origin" of contemporary conceptual art; architecture and the reformation of public space in the wake of the situationism; and critics or theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and so on. We will conclude with the potential relevance of autonomist-or-some might say post autonomist-thought for the present and future.

Full details for FREN 4715 - Labor and the Arts

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

In the last decades, "Holocaust Studies" witnessed an extraordinary expansion, covering different fields of scholarship, from history to literature, from philosophy to aesthetics.  This seminar will retrace the major steps of Holocaust history writing.  It will analyze the classical debates between "intentionalism" and "functionalism," the discrepancies between the analytical approaches focused on the perpetrators and those focused on the victims, the inscription of the Holocaust into the broader context of war violence, and its comparison with the genocidal violence of colonialism.  Finally, it will investigate some methodological problems concerning the place of testimony in history writing and the permanent connections, both fruitful and problematic, between history and memory.  This means taking into account the entanglement of the most productive areas of Holocaust scholarship (Germany, France and the United States) as well as the relationship between the historiography of the Holocaust and other disciplines (memory studies, postcolonial studies, etc.).

Full details for FREN 6375 - The Holocaust and History Writing

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature

This seminar provides an opportunity to study aspects of the philosophical oeuvre of Gilles Deleuze. Our point of departure will be Deleuze's 1968 book Difference and Repetition.  We'll later consider some of Deleuze's key concepts and problems, as they unfolded in essays co-authored with Félix Guattari (including the two-volumne set on Capitalism and Schizophrenia), and beyond (such as the diptych devoted to Cinema).  Our goal is neither to provide a chronological overview of Deleuze's scholarship, nor to add his ideas to a putative "tool box" that we might opportunistically use without much concern for intellectual provenience.

Full details for FREN 6535 - Deleuze

Full details for FREN 6561 - Freud and the Invention of Psychoanalysis

What does the term "normal" mean?  It is a modern invention, but one based on millennia of theories on what is natural or unnatural, regular or irregular, orderly or monstrous.  All of these terms are loaded with the histories of gender, racial, and ability-oriented differences.  This course, based on the work of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, will explore current theories of the normal in the domain of disability studies and queer studies, and return to the past of these concepts to examine their ancient origins.  Authors will include Shelly Tremain, Lennard Davis, Nirmala Erevelles, Robert McRuer, Elizabeth Beardon, and Jasbir Puar.

Full details for FREN 6730 - The Normal and the Pathological