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 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

The palace of Versailles has been an object of fascination for over three hundred years. A place of splendor and squalor Versailles has been identified with French culture as the epitome of elegance and grace from Louis XIV to Karl Lagerfeld. It has also been the scene of scandal and tragedy. This course will examine the importance the reality and mythology of Versailles has played across the centuries and across the world. We will examine the construction, the art, architecture, garden construction music and social history of the palace and its place both in Absolutist France and in our contemporary world. Using movies, reproductions or art and architecture as well as revealing the secrets of its sexual politics and murderous plots we will attempt to understand why the fascination of the greatest of all palaces continues to draw millions of visitors each year trying to discover its grandeur and decadence.

Full details for FREN 2270 - Versions of Versailles

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 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.

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

The French Revolution was one of the most dramatic upheavals in history, sweeping away centuries of tradition and ushering in the political and cultural modernity we arguably still live in today. Although often remembered for mass executions by guillotine and the rise of Napoleon, it was much more. Between 1789 and 1815, the French people experimented with virtually every form of government known to the modern world: absolutist monarchy, constitutional monarchy, representative democracy, radical left-wing republicanism, oligarchy, and right-wing autocracy. This course explores the rapidly changing political and social landscape of this extraordinary period, the evolution of political culture (the arts, theater, songs, fashion, the cult of the guillotine), and shifting attitudes towards gender, race, and slavery.

Full details for FREN 2860 - The French Revolution

This course offers an introduction to Canadian literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with a special focus on the multilingual, multicultural character of Canadian cultural production. We'll take a look at texts from both French-speaking (in translation) and English-speaking Canada, including Indigenous and immigrant authors who locate themselves at once inside and outside those linguistic traditions. Special emphasis will be given to queer voices and other engagements with the representation of gender, sexuality, and desire. An additional independent study, conducted in French, may be taken by students who wish to explore Francophone material in greater depth.

Full details for FREN 2900 - Contemporary Canadian Literature

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.

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

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 Conde, 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

Beginning in the early days of silent cinema, a rich tradition of what are called city films, combines technological innovation with the exploration of specific urban spaces. Students in this class will learn how to think about the possibilities of limits of cinema as a way of knowing a city and its cultures, including linguistic cultures. This course will be offered in English and is open to all students. The focus will be on the relationship between the cinema and the development of urban centers, including Madrid, Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Full details for FREN 3485 - Cinematic Cities

This course will offer an overview of theoretical and historical responses to bodily and cognitive difference. What was the status of people with (dis)abilities in the past, when they were called monsters, freaks, abnormal? How are all of these concepts related, and how have they changed over time? How have we moved from isolation and institutionalization towards universal design and accessibility as the dominant concepts relative to (dis)ability? Why is this shift from focusing on individual differences as a negative attribute to reshaping our architectural and more broadly social constructions important to everyone? Authors to be studied include: Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, and Jasbir Puar.

Full details for FREN 3520 - (Dis)ability Studies: A Brief History

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.

Full details for FREN 3560 - Freud and Psychoanalysis

This course will introduce students to the relationship between modern fantasy fiction and the Middle Ages. What kind of world is the world of quests and secret love affairs, swords and sorcery? We'll begin with the two main models for adventure stories in medieval French literature, the Song of Roland and Lancelot, before examing how they appear in modern literature and film. Along the way, we'll consider more familiar exchanges between medieval literture and modern allegory in the work of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and we'll ask what fantasy fiction allows us to fantasize about.

Full details for FREN 3775 - Future Past: Fantasy Fiction

The Second World War and the Occupation of France by German forces had a traumatic impact on the nation's identity. We will examine the way France has tried to deal with this conflicted period through a series of films that each deal, directly or indirectly with the major questions posed by history to French memory of the Occupation. What was the role of collaboration, resistance, anti-Semitism, of writers and intellectuals during this traumtic period? How has film helped to define and re-shape the ways in which France has come to terms with its conflicted past?

Full details for FREN 3840 - Occupied France Through Film

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

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.

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

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Full details for FREN 4836 - Transcultural Theory

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

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature

Cultures are never monolithic, and they are very rarely impervious to foreign influences. Exchanges allow for the inception of individual cultures: the widespread process of dual integration and alteration of external behaviors, ideas, objects, texts, or practices is constitutive of the plasticity of group evolution. This research seminar will offer a critical inquiry on the rise of the concept of “culture” and of its prefixations (multi, inter, cross, trans), contrasting it with categories such as “global(ized),” “planetary,” “universal,” “cosmopolitics.” We’ll articulate literary theory with anthropology, experimental psychology with political theory, or ethics with biology (“animal culture” now forming a legitimate category). We’ll additionally study some cases of transcultural circulations in the human context (science, literature and the arts), especially between Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.

Full details for FREN 6836 - Transcultural Theory

This seminar focused on early modern texts by (e.g.) Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau. and others. Dealing with early modern anti-and post-humanism, and topics such as: subjectivity, embodiment, alterity, vegetal being, monstrosity, representation, affect, violence, politics, ecology, and nature. With forays into ancient and more modern philosophy, the 20th- and 21st-c. afterlife of early modern issues (Freud; Heidegger; Derrida; Agamben; etc.),and related or homologous problems and modes in the visual arts (e.g., the grotesque; the beautiful and the sublime; sketching; the non-finito; fragments; ruins; e.g.,).

Full details for FREN 6945 - Aesthetics, Before and Beyond Kant