Courses

Courses by semester

Courses for

Complete Cornell University course descriptions are in the Courses of Study .

Course ID Title Offered
FREN1108 FWS:Monstrous Forms: Wild Men and Wicked Women
FREN1220 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

Spring.
FREN1230 Continuing 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

Fall, Spring.
FREN2080 French for Business
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

Fall, Spring.
FREN2090 French Intermediate Composition and Conversation I
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

Fall, Spring.
FREN2095 French Intermediate Composition and Conversation II
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

Fall, Spring.
FREN2180 Advanced French
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 least 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

Fall.
FREN2310 Introduction to French and Francophone Literature and Culture
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

Fall, Spring.
FREN2320 Introduction to French and Francophone Film
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.

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

Spring.
FREN3020 French Language Across the Curriculum (LAC)
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 Language Across the Curriculum (LAC)

Fall, Spring.
FREN3210 Readings in Modern French Literature and Culture
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.

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

Spring.
FREN3400 French Identities: 21st Century Culture and Society in France
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".

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

Spring.
FREN3630 In Prison 15th-20th Century
The class focuses on the experience of incarceration, as described by literary and philosophical texts written in French, ranging from the 15th to the 20th century.  Select movies will also be commented upon.  After considering literary testimonies from writers-prisoners such as Chenier, Nerval, or Genet, we'll examine the topos of the "last days of a condemned man," with texts from authors such as Stendhal, Hugo, Balzac, Malraux, or Sony Labou Tansi, as well as movies like Bresson's Un condamne a mort s'est echappe.  We'll also reflect on the way thinkers have approached the modern institution of prison and how a generalized view of the world as a prison emerges in the oeuvres of Pascal, Beckett, or Djebar.

Full details for FREN 3630 - In Prison 15th-20th Century

Spring.
FREN3780 What is a People? The Social Contract and its Discontents
When Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced the concept of the "general will" in his classic text The Social Contract, he made what was then an unprecedented and scandalous claim: that the people as a whole, and not an individual agent, could be the subject of political will and self-determination. This claim was all the more revolutionary in that historically "the people" [ie peuple] named those poor masses who had no political representation, and who were subjects of the state only to the extent that they were subject to the will of a sovereign monarch. What then is "the people," and how is it constituted as a collective subject?  How does a people speak, or make its will known? Can that will be represented or institutionalized? Do all people belong to the people? How inclusive is the social contract? This course will examine crucial moments in the constitution of the people from the French Revolution to the present day, considering the crisis of political representation they have alternately exposed or engendered and the forms of the social contract to which they have given rise. Our discussions will range from major political events (the French and Haitian Revolutions, the Paris Commune, colonialism and decolonization, May '68) to contemporary debates around universalism, secularism, immigration, and "marriage for all". Readings by Rousseau, Robespierre, L'Ouverture, Michelet, Marx, Freud, Arendt, Balibar, and Rancière.

Full details for FREN 3780 - What is a People? The Social Contract and its Discontents

Fall.
FREN3921 Literary Theory on the Edge
This course examines a range of exciting and provocative 20th- and 21st- century theoretical paradigms for thinking about literature, language and culture. These approaches provide differing, though often overlapping, entryways into theoretical analysis, including structuralism and post-structuralism, translation studies, Black studies, Afro-Diasporic Studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, performance studies, media theory and cinema/media studies, the digital humanities, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, gender studies and queer studies, studies of the Anthropocene/environmental studies, and animal studies. 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.

Full details for FREN 3921 - Literary Theory on the Edge

Spring.
FREN4065 Friendships: A Global History
This course explores the global, intellectual history of friendship, in order to illuminate a host of underlying questions: what is the nature of human affection? How have different cultures contended with the power of love to defy gendered conventions? How is friendship mobilized as a political concept? We will consider evolving philosophical definitions of friendship (Aristotle, Ibn Muqqafa, Derrida, Mbembe), legenday literary friendships (Rumi and Shams of Tabriz: Montaigne and La Boetie:Tennyson and Arthur Hallam), and aesthetic portrauals of friendship, from its betrayals in a Soviet gulag (Solzhenitsyn), to its fraught dynamic in a Nazi camp in Mauritius island (Appanah), and its redemptive potential in a Tunisian culture divided by jewish and muslim conflicts (Albou).

Full details for FREN 4065 - Friendships: A Global History

Spring.
FREN4200 Special Topics in French Literature
Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4200 - Special Topics in French Literature

Spring.
FREN4265 One French Novel
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

Spring.
FREN4300 Honors Work in French
Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4300 - Honors Work in French

Spring.
FREN4820 Madness, Literature and Medicine
In the XIXe century, both literature and medicine shaped the birth of the idea of the psyche.  A new medical discipline like psychiatry (at that ime called "alienism") considered the pathologies of the soul at the same time as romantic authors investigated the misfortunes and sufferings of the individual in modern society.  Clinical cases (Charcot, Freud) could be read like novels and scientific theories similarly fed fictions (Maupassant, Zola, etc.).  This course will explore these reciprocal influences between literature and medicine in France through medical case studies and fiction, taking into account both classical texts and the most recent researh.  At the intersection between madness, psychiatry, literature, cultural history and narrative theory, it raises questions about personal identities and the birth of modern subjectivities.

Full details for FREN 4820 - Madness, Literature and Medicine

Spring.
FREN6040 The Race of the Poet (1780-1949)
A critical exploration of the phrase "la race des poetes," with and without consideration of racial-colonial power. 1780 marks the release of "La mort d'Abel," by Nicolas Gilbert, whose influence is to be felt from Vigny to Baudelaire and Mallarme on ideas of racial purity, innate poetic genius and determinism- to the third iteration of Cesaire's Cahier, whose successive rewritings re-articulate the transcendental gift of poetry with a critique of colonial racism, in the wake of both Rimbaud and Verhaeren or some 19th century Haitian poets (e.g. Lochard, Ardouin). A meta-concern in the seminar is to contrast the intellective profusion of poetic texts situating the racial with the intellectual reductionism of identity-based readings of the literary.

Full details for FREN 6040 - The Race of the Poet (1780-1949)

Spring.
FREN6300 French Reading for Graduates
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

Spring.
FREN6400 Special Topics in French Literature
Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature

Spring.
FREN6425 Mysticism in Medieval Europe
This course begins with a word - mysticism - that doesn't work, and for good reason: for the authors variously associated with the mythical traditions of medieval Christianity, words are necessary failures.  They snap at the point where they endure the greatest tension.  We'll witness together the limits of language in some of the most provocative so-called mystics of the medieval West, including Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Catherine of Siena, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, and Thomas Aquinas, and the roots of their extraordinary speech in earlier thinkers such as Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Bernard of Clairvaux.  Along the way, we'll ask what language has to do with love, and what each of these might have to do with God, whose name (for these writers) is never one.

Full details for FREN 6425 - Mysticism in Medieval Europe

Spring.
FREN6525 Historicizing Communism
Communism merged multiple theories, events and experiences. It's complexity does not lie exclusively in the discrepancies that separate the communist idea from its historical embodiments; it lies in the diversity of its expressions. Sketching its "anatomy", this seminar will distinguish at least four broad forms of communism, interrelated and not necessarily opposed to one another, but different enough to be recognized on their own: communism as revolution, communism as regime, communism as anti-colonialism and communism as a varient of social democracy. The October Revolution was their common matrix, but their trajectories have been different. Exploring communism as a global experience, we will shape the profile of one of the central actors of the twentieth century.

Full details for FREN 6525 - Historicizing Communism

Spring.
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