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

In this course, furthering oral communication skills and writing skills is emphasized. A comprehensive review of fundamental and advanced grammatical structures is integrated through a variety of topics such as social unrest and inequality, immigration crisis, social and geopolitical issues within and outside the Eurozone, post-Brexit, cutting-edge technology, media, environment, and pop-culture via short stories, literary excerpts, videos, poems, and articles fromFrench 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.

Full details for FREN 2180 - French through News, Current Events, and International Relations

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 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, Mallarme, Michaux, Proust, Rimbaud, Sarraute, and Sartre.

Full details for FREN 3210 - Modern French Literature and Culture

The concept of intellectual - the writer or scholar who takes a political commitment - was born in France at the end of the nineteenth century. From the Dreyfus Affaire to the recent polemics on French identity, passing through Vichy, the Algerian War and May 68, intellectuals established a symbiotic relationship between culture and politics, becoming a sort of national brand, object of both admiration and contempt outside of the country. The aim of this course is to revisit some crucial moments of this history, focusing on different attempts to define the nature and function of the intellectual, from Emile Zola to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Simone de Beavoir to Michel Foucault.

Full details for FREN 3460 - Intellectuals: A French History

Is Homo sapiens the only species capable of producing visual art? Nonhuman great apes, especially, seem to be able to draw, paint, and enjoy such works. Our prehistoric ancestors are responsible for the adornment of the Lascaux, Altamira, or Chauvet caves. Our next of kin in the distant past (including Neanderthals) also displayed symbolic activity involving visual (re)presentation. Avant-garde or Aboriginal practices, “outsider art” concurrently challenge how we define the visual realm. Thus, the purpose of this interdisciplinary class is to revisit the contemporary debate on the dawn of art by bringing together research in paleoanthropology and primatology at the interface of aesthetics, cognitive science, and speculative theory. The course could also allow students to participate in related research projects undertaken in the Humanities Lab.

Full details for FREN 3837 - Dawn of Art: Apes, Prehistory, Theory

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

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.

Full details for FREN 4070 - Madness Narratives

This course is a survey of feminist thinkers from North Africa and its diaspora, featuring both French and Arabic texts in English translation. The purpose of the course is to critically explore the competing treatment of major gendered tropes in a Muslim context (the veil, the harem, polygamy, etc.) by North African thinkers, through their examination of qur’anic surats / hadiths, the evolution of tafsirs (tradition of qur’anic exegesis) as well as their conflicting approaches to secular western feminism. Authors include: Fatima Mernissi, Assia Djebar, Qasim Amin, Asmaa Lamrabet, etc.

Full details for FREN 4080 - Feminism and Islam in North Africa

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.

Full details for FREN 4240 - Psychoanalysis and Politics

Consult director of undergraduate studies for more information.

Full details for FREN 4300 - Honors Work in French

What is the “meaning of meaning,” exactly? Are signification, significance, sense, and meaning one and the same? Is “semantics” a sub-branch of linguistics, or what GPT “does,” or a path to poetry? This transdisciplinary research seminar will put to the test vastly different theories—and practices—of meaning, ranging from the display of signification in the verbal arts to the task of philosophical definition, from the technology of the dictionary to that of computerized word embedding, from the interplay between cognition and communication to the scholarly art of reading. Our scope will be broad and comparative, across disciplines, languages, historical periods, and genres. The course could also allow students to participate in related research projects undertaken in the Humanities Lab.

Full details for FREN 4846 - Theories & Practices of Meaning: Literature, Semantics, AI

This course is a survey of feminist thinkers from North Africa and its diaspora, featuring both French and Arabic texts in English translation. The purpose of the course is to critically explore the competing treatment of major gendered tropes in a Muslim context (the veil, the harem, polygamy, etc.) by North African thinkers, through their examination of qur’anic surats / hadiths, the evolution of tafsirs (tradition of qur’anic exegesis) as well as their conflicting approaches to secular western feminism. Authors include: Fatima Mernissi, Assia Djebar, Qasim Amin, Asmaa Lamrabet, etc.

Full details for FREN 6080 - Feminism and Islam in North Africa

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

Guided independent study for graduate students.

Full details for FREN 6400 - Special Topics in French Literature

What is the “meaning of meaning,” exactly? Are signification, significance, sense, and meaning one and the same? Is “semantics” a sub-branch of linguistics, or what GPT “does,” or a path to poetry? This transdisciplinary research seminar will put to the test vastly different theories—and practices—of meaning, ranging from the display of signification in the verbal arts to the task of philosophical definition, from the technology of the dictionary to that of computerized word embedding, from the interplay between cognition and communication to the scholarly art of reading. Our scope will be broad and comparative, across disciplines, languages, historical periods, and genres. The course could also allow students to participate in related research projects undertaken in the Humanities Lab.

Full details for FREN 6846 - Theories & Practices of Meaning: Literature, Semantics, AI