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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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.

Catalog Distribution: (FL-AG)

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: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, FL-AG, LA-AG)

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 texts, and will be conducted in French.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (FL-AG)

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

Throughout Western history, the nature of melancholy (aka "depression," its modern counterpart) has both inspired and baffled philosophers, doctors, artists, and writers. Compared to other ailments, affects, or conditions, this mysterious sadness has provoked a proliferation of concepts, theories, therapies, and artworks. This seminar offers a comparative survey of discourses on melancholy/depression and their related ideological, social, aesthetic, and scientific issues, from the Ancient Greeks onwards. We will focus on the ways in which melancholy/depression has been theorized in medicine, theology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, ethnography, philosophy, and ecology; on how its shifting forms are related to issues of politics, society, culture, race, and gender; and on the many modes through which it has been file and expressed in literature, visual art, music, and today's social media.

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

Full details for FREN 2550 - From Black Bile to Digital Depression:The History of Melancholy in Medicine, Philosophy, Art, Media

In this course, both seminar and workshop, students discuss writing about translation, mostly in French, and practice translating from French to English.  The theoretical texts studied represent a variety of perspectives and the French texts translated, a variety of literary and non-literary genres.  Students will investigate ways of addressing various types of difficulties they encounter in the process of translating across languages and cultures with the aim of developing their own principled approach to translating.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 3160 - Translating French: Theory and Practice

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: (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 3210 - 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: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, FL-AG)

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

In the age of smartphones and social media, it's a cliché to say that the competing claims made on our attention only seem to be multiplying. But a cliché can be true. This course is an opportunity to enact certain practices of attentiveness and concentration, drawing largely from religious, literary, artistic, philosophical sources. We'll be trying to slow down our normal critical processes, to suspend the appropriative, pragmatic, and goal-oriented nature of much of the modern university. Through various exercises, from memorizing poems to immersing ourselves in our surroundings to reading about the ways in which our senses reach out to the world, we'll try to make ourselves more attentively available to that world.

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

Full details for FREN 3540 - On Paying Attention

What makes religious violence so intractable, and what has fostered the continuity of this form of conflict over such a long span of time? What is the role of aesthetics in literary descriptions of such horrific violence? Violence as a spectacle raises the question of personal responsibility, making those who observe it complicit even if they do not participate in it. Texts to be considered will include Maalouf's Les Croisades vues par les arabes. Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques, René Girard's La Violence et le sacré, Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et après, Shoshana Felman's and Dori Laub's work Testimony, Gillo Pontecorvo's La Bataille d'Algers, Franz Fanon's Les Damnés de la Terre, Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, ETM-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 3730 - Religious Violence in French and Francophone Literature

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for FREN 3921 - Literary Theory on the Edge

This course examines how writers, filmmakers, and content creators from Africa engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, queerness, sex strikes, etc. Our inquiry also surveys theorists' commitment to highlighting forms of self-fashioning and agency/responsibility in addition to troubling problematic tropes of pathologization and excess. 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. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentations) and deep attention to analysis and writing (reaction papers, an abstract, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you refine your understanding of body politics.This course examines how writers, filmmakers, and content creators from Africa engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, queerness, sex strikes, etc. Our inquiry also surveys theorists' commitment to highlighting forms of self-fashioning and agency/responsibility in addition to troubling problematic tropes of pathologization and excess. 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. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentations) and deep attention to analysis and writing (reaction papers, an abstract, an annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you refine your understanding of body politics.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

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

Guided independent study of special topics.

Full details for FREN 4200 - Special Topics in French Literature

This seminar will explore some of the most important psychoanalytic approaches to politics and collective life. from Sigmund Freud's Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego to works by Le Bon, Reich, Althusser, Fanon, Lacan, Safouan, Zizek and Dolar. Questions explored will include the relationship between mass and individual psychology; the role of unconscious identification (ideal ego, superego) in group formation, nationalism, xenophobia and racism; fantasy and politics; and the people considered as a subject and political actor. Events and contexts discussed will range from the French Revolution to the Nazi Reich to colonialization and contemporary authoritarianisms. Works of political theory by Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Arendt, Balibar and Ranciere will be put in dialogue with psychoanalytic readings.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG)

Full details for FREN 4240 - Psychoanalysis and Politics

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.

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

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

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (FL-AG)

Full details for FREN 4265 - One French Novel

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4300 - Honors Work in French

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

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

Full details for FREN 4334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

Taking the form of ghosts, revenants, and zombies, dead are regularly summoned up in literature, film, and TV series. Their eternal return and narrative power reflect the upheavals of our troubled times as either disquieting or mischievous, tragic, or comic characters. How can we explain this return of the repressed? How do they manifest themselves in contemporary French-language fiction? What do they tell us about ourselves, our hidden memories, our conceptions of the invisible, an our projections into the future? This seminar will scrutinize many novels, films and TV series that raise these questions by combining literary, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This will provide the opportunity of rethinking some key methodological notions such as "uncanny", "hauntology", and "spectral turn".

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS)

Full details for FREN 4630 - Ghost Stories: Literature, Cinema, and TV Series

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by "literature" and the "sciences." Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

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

Full details for FREN 4825 - Literature and Science: Transfers in Poetics and Epistemology

This course calls into question the public use of history. The past is permanently mobilized according to the culture and the problems of the present. Over the last decades, "memory" - a general concept used as a synonym for remembering, history, imagination, or representations of the past - arose at the heart of the public sphere, becoming an object of struggles.  In some historical circumstances, the past is suddenly "reactivated" and irrupts in the present by claiming its "rights," the end of oblivion, and rescue of the vanquished.  Considering some well-known controversies about slavery, colonialism, fascism, communism, civil wars, the Holocaust, etc., the course aims at exploring how collective memories are interwoven with cultural industry, public policies (museums, commemorations, laws, etc.), and history writing.

Full details for FREN 6225 - The Politics of Memory: Uses of the Past

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

The seminar will explore relations between the tangible effects of climate on urban, infrastructural, and ecological landscapes in the Caribbean and lived experiences of climate as mediated through literature, film, and other expressive forms. Topics will range from historical accounts of climate as 'catastrophe' – the effects of hurricanes, volcanoes, and earthquakes– to colonial histories of coerced labor, to climate as a more general  horizon in the constitution of Caribbean worlds. The seminar draws on the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, interpreting the industrialized-urbanized ecological territory in terms of "capitalist ruination" which, nonetheless, holds possibilities for other modes of environmentality, as the hazards effected by climate change fundamentally disrupt and transform the very urbanity constituted through colonial and later resource extractive appropriations.

Full details for FREN 6334 - Caribbean Worlds: Landscape, Labor and Climate Imaginaries

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature

Part epistemology and part experimental humanities, this seminar looks at improbable encounters between the divergent regimes of thought and knowledge expressed by "literature" and the "sciences." Our main concern is not the literary thematization of the scientific, nor is it an exploration of science fiction as a genre. Our reflexive focus is rather on the noetic and poetic transfers different modes of textuality could unfold, beyond their hiatus in terms of writing, apparatus, signification, and mental experience. Readings include scholars such as Foucault, Kuhn, Strabo, Haraway, or Hayles, and writers such as Homer, Rousseau, Shelley, or Borges. Several discrete disciplines, such as geometry, cognitive science, botany, primatology, or AI, could be analyzed. The seminar is also linked to the research activities of the Humanities Lab.

Full details for FREN 6825 - Literature and Science: Transfers in Poetics and Epistemology