Fall 2024 Class Schedule
fall 2024 class Schedule
fall 2024 course descriptions
Introductory and Intermediate French Language Courses
FRENCH 111-1: Elementary French
French 111-1 is the first quarter of a three-quarter course that covers the same material as the two-quarter sequence of French 115, (which assumes some prior knowledge of the language). The aim of the course is to review and develop skills in speaking, understanding, reading, writing and cultural competence. Please note, students cannot audit 100-level courses, or take these courses for P/PN, and must earn a C- or better to advance to the next course in the sequence.
FRENCH 115-1: Intensive Elementary French
French 115-1 is the first course of a two-quarter sequence (Fall and Winter) that covers the same material as the three-quarter sequence of French 111, but which assumes some prior knowledge of the language. The aim of the course is to review and develop skills in speaking, understanding, reading, writing and cultural competence. Please note, students cannot audit 100-level courses, or take these courses for P/PN, and must earn a C- or better to advance to the next course in the sequence.
FRENCH 121-1: Intermediate French
French 121-1 is the first quarter of a three-quarter course for students who have completed French 111-3 or have been placed in this course after taking the Placement test of the Department of French and Italian. The teaching methodology for this course uses the flipped model: students learn grammar and vocabulary at home. Class activities are devoted to conversation and other communicative activities that will allow students to practice what they learned while exploring contemporary French and Francophone cultures. Class are conducted in French. Please note, students cannot audit 100-level courses, or take these courses for P/PN, and must earn a C- or better to advance to the next course in the sequence.
FRENCH 125-2: Intensive Intermediate French
French 125-2 is the second quarter of a three-quarter course for students who have completed French 125-1 or been placed in the course upon taking the French Placement Test. The primary goal of this course is to strengthen oral and written communication skills by immersing students in authentic cultural contexts and language. A review of essential grammar and vocabulary will reinforce linguistic foundations. Class meets three times a week and will be conducted in French. Please note, students cannot audit 100-level courses, or take these courses for P/PN, and must earn a C- or better to advance to the next course in the sequence.
FRENCH 201: Culture and Society: Introduction to French Studies
French 201-0 is a one-quarter introductory third-year course, offered only in the fall. This course is designed to develop the students' mastery of French by giving them the opportunity to practice the language in a variety of cultural contexts while deepening and expanding their insights into contemporary French culture. French 201-0 will introduce students to a sampling of social and cultural topics central to an understanding of France and French-speaking peoples. Classes meet three times a week and are conducted in French. Students are expected to attend class regularly and prepare outside of class. A grade of C- or above in French 201-0 fulfills the WCAS foreign language requirement.
FRENCH 202: Writing Workshop: Cultural Encounters in Contemporary France
This course is designed to develop and improve writing skills through a variety of classroom activities: discussion, writing, editing. Students will learn how to write a college-level analytical paper. Selected grammar points will be discussed in class, and course content will be provided by a novel and two films. Homework will include short writing exercises and compositions as well as the preparation of grammar exercises related to the writing objectives. This course serves as prerequisite for most other 200 and 300-level French classes.
FRENCH 203: Oral Workshop: Individual and Society in France Today
This course is designed to build fluency in speaking and understanding French. Classes will concentrate on increasing listening comprehension through viewing of videos and films, building vocabulary and idiom use, and enhancing oral communication skills. One group project based on a play.
Introductory French Literature and Culture Courses
FRENCH 210: Struggle for Paris: Protest & Power
After a series of revolutions and revolts over the course of the century from 1789–1871, the city of Paris came to be seen by French government officials as a dangerous incubator of subversive ideas and movements. The government responded both by beginning to produce a wealth of knowledge about the city through practices of cartography, policing, and other forms of surveillance, and through policies of urban planning intended to enable the free circulation of capital and military forces through the streets. In this course, we will interrogate the relationship of literature and film to these forms of state knowledge production about the city of Paris across the 19th century and in the period from 1945 to the present. To what extent did representations of the city in modern and contemporary literature and film align with the state project of mapping the city and its inhabitants? How did literature function as a space of contestation of the modernization of the city, both through modeling non-normative practices of the use of urban space and in memorializing the spaces and communities impacted by state violence? How have literature and film participated in the struggle over who belongs in Paris, especially around questions of class and race? Authors and directors studied include Gaboriau, Baudelaire, Maspero, and Diop, along with archival documents and shorter excerpts from authors like Balzac, Perec, and Varda.
FRENCH 211:« On connaît la chanson! »: A Cultural History of French Song from the 20th to the 21st Century
The course offers a cultural history of French song from the middle-ages to the contemporary period with a focus on the second part of the 20th century and the 21st century. We will listen to love songs composed and/or performed by Piaf, Barbara, Brassens, Brel, Ferré, Gainsbourg, Rachid Taha, Abdel malik, Christine and the Queens, etc. We will contextualize them and analyze them through the viewpoint of gender, sexuality, race, and class.
FRENCH 272:Poetics of the Tragic in Modern French Drama (17th-20th Centuries)
It has been argued that the sense of the tragic disappeared in the modern era, and yet many plays continued to stage characters facing their destiny and questioning its meaning. Reading Racine, Musset, Camus, Beckett, and Koltès will be an opportunity for students to reflect on the persistence and the transformations of tragedy in modern French theater. Identifying the theatrical forms (comedy, tragedy, lyrical tragedy, drame…) and cultural genres (Classicism, Romanticism, Absurdism…) that have shaped the history of French theater will enable us to highlight the constant dialogue between literature and society and to assess the social, political, cultural, and historical factors that have framed the (re)writing of tragedy from early to late modernity.
Courses with Prerequisites in French
FRENCH 302: Advanced Writing: Finding Your Voice in French
Perfect your written expression in French and learn to write in a variety of genres such as portrait, summary, review of film or performance, explication de texte, correspondence, interview, editorial, documentary research and creative writing. Practice is organized according to language functions (describing, summarizing, persuading, hypothesizing, etc.) and communicative needs. You will review vocabulary and grammar as needed and develop awareness of appropriate styles of writing, learning their characteristics by reading authentic material.
FRENCH 334: Montaigne and Modernity
Michel de Montaigne was one of the most important writers and philosophers of the early modern period; his Essais continues to be a book to live by. This seminar explores Montaigne's writings in depth, along with those of his most important interlocutors, in the context of the emergence of modern subjectivity in the period we call "Renaissance". Placing the distant past into conversation with the present, we will consider a set of problems relative to the constitution of the self, of the body, of cultural and gender identity, educational ideals, and political freedom. We will explore the rise of cultural norms surrounding death, love, friendship, faith, and violence. Montaigne's writings are a gateway into a turbulent and transformative period of history, one which has much to say to our own.
FRENCH 355: Sailor: Queer Agent of Empire?
Sailors played a paradoxical role in France’s empire. On the one hand, they were the agents of empire, spreading French civilization throughout the world. On the other, they were often drawn from the lower classes of society, and from Brittany, a region of France that was itself a kind of colonized space, where residents mostly spoke Breton rather than French. The sailor was also closely associated with supposedly asocial behaviors: criminality, same-sex sexuality, rampant non-monogamous heterosexuality, and interracial relationships. In this class, we will explore these paradoxes of the figure of the sailor in French literature and film of the 19th and 20th centuries, through the works of Jules Verne, Pierre Loti, Jean Epstein, Ousmane Sembène, and R. F. Fassbinder.
French Graduate Courses
FRENCH 393/403: French and Italian Language Teaching: Theory and Practice
The course provides a foundation in approaches, methods, and materials for the teaching of French from the perspectives of Second Language Acquisition research. The theoretical background will be applied to the teaching of the four skills such as speaking, listening, reading and writing and the teaching of culture to help students develop their own philosophy of foreign language teaching. Students will acquire the pedagogical tools and metalinguistic awareness that they need to become successful language instructors.
FRENCH 465/CLS 488/MENA 490: Errancy, Writing, and Francophone
African Fiction
The Moroccan scholar, Abdellah Kaaouas has dedicated a book to "errance," one of the "corner stones" of Abdelkebir Khatibi's work. Indeed, through the motif of "errancy," Khatibi converses with multiple traditions of literary and philosophical writings, as well as across time. Figures such as the translator, the voyager, the mystic, the knight, the artist lie at the core of his literary work as well as his writings on ethics and politics. In this course, we will both read Khatibi through this lens and expand our scope by turning to the corpus of Francophone African literature broadly to trace and reflect on the modalities of this dynamic's inscriptions and its association with "error" and "going stray," given its derivation from the Latin "errare." As a point of departure, we will explore one of the most errant works of world literature, A Thousand and One Nights to understand its history, modality of narration, and influences on contemporary works.
FRENCH 494/CLS 410: Worlds of Literature
"World literature" has been one of the most influential and controversial ideas in literary studies in recent decades. Some champion it as a liberation from the provincialism of national and/or Euro-centric canons and methods. Others critique it as the cultural analog of imperialism and capitalist globalization, leveling diverse and incompatible oral and textual traditions into something recognizable as "literature" in a few "major" languages. In this seminar we will read about a variety of ways of conceiving the "world" of world literature. After considering some of the most influential and canonical models in recent literary studies (Damrosch, Casanova), we will study a variety of alternative forms of literary world-building, such as Soviet internationalism, transnational Black solidarity movements of the early twentieth century, and script-worlds (such as the Sinosphere). Our readings will range from classic theoretical texts by Herder, Kant, and Marx to publications from the past two or three years (Nergis Ertürk, Madhumita Lahiri, Musab Younis), by way of such major contemporary critics and theorists as Emily Apter, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pheng Cheah, Fredric Jameson, Lydia Liu Amir Mufti, and Roberto Schwarz.
Courses Taught in Italian
ITALIAN 101-1: Elementary Italian
A beginning course in Italian language and culture, Elementary Italian is devoted to developing all four language skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing) within the three modes of communication (interpersonal, interpretive, presentational). While studying the language, students will be introduced to Italy and its people and they will gain both language and cultural competence. At the end of full-year Italian 101 sequence, students will be able to handle successfully a few uncomplicated communicative tasks, participate in simple conversations on topics related to personal information, personal preferences, daily activities, and immediate needs. This course is the first in a three-part sequence for beginning students of Italian. Classes are conducted entirely in Italian and are very lively, with lots of give-and-take among participants. Students with some experience in Italian may take the online placement test to place out of any or all of the first-year sequence. Please note that Tuesday classes will meet asynchronously.
ITALIAN 102-1: Intermediate Italian
Intermediate Italian continues and completes the two-year sequence in Italian language and culture. At the end of the full 102 sequence (102-1,2,3), students are expected to create with the language when talking and writing about familiar topics, to understand the main ideas and some supporting details from a variety of texts (newspaper articles, short stories, …), to describe and narrate, with some consistency, in all major time frames while organizing their discourse into paragraphs. Students will significantly increase their knowledge of Italy's history and culture. After the completion of the entire sequence of Italian 102, students will be eligible to study in Italy and will be ready to embark on the minor or major in Italian. The second-year Italian course sequence completes the two-year WCAS language requirement. The classroom is very lively, with lots of conversation, partnering, and small group exercises. Students will be guided toward independence, posing and solving language problems on their own and in collaboration with classmates. Please note that Tuesday classes will meet asynchronously.
ITALIAN 133-1/ITALIAN 134-1: Intensive Italian
Intensive Italian is a double course that fulfills the WCAS two-year language requirement in one academic year. At the end of the entire 133/134 sequence, students will be able to create with the language when talking and writing about familiar topics; to understand the main ideas and some supporting details from a variety of texts (newspaper articles, short stories, …); to describe and narrate, with some consistency, in all major time frames while organizing their discourse into paragraphs. While studying the language, students will be constantly exposed to the Italian culture. By the end of the intensive sequence, students are expected to achieve language, cultural, and intercultural competence enabling them to study in Italy and to embark on the minor or major in Italian. Intensive Italian classes are small and highly interactive. Please note that Tuesday classes will meet asynchronously.
Students MUST be registered for both Italian 133-1 and 134-1. However, students should wait until the add/drop period to register for 134-1, to avoid potential issues with adding a 5th course.
ITALIAN 201: Exploring Urban Italy
Italy boasts not one, but numerous capital cities, each epitomizing distinct aspects of its multifaceted identity. Geographical and historical differences provide each Italian city with a unique cultural landscape, reflected in local practices, discourses, and representations. This third-year course immerses students in the tapestry of Italian urban life through an array of media representations. From poetry and music to visual arts and fiction, from photography and journalism to movies and graphic novels, students will engage with various forms of media to enhance their linguistic skills (speaking, writing, listening, reading) while delving into Italian culture. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach, students have the freedom to pursue their specific interests and deepen their understanding of Italy's rich urban heritage. Taught in Italian.
Italian Courses with Readings and Discussion in English
ITALIAN 250: Projecting the Past: 'Medieval Cinema', Italian Style
Since its inception, cinema has been a great factory of medieval imagination. Starting from the silent film L'Inferno (1911), a transposition of Dante's ‘Hell', the Italian film tradition has shown an original way of ‘remaking' the medieval past. Italian directors have drawn from their 'national' medieval literary tradition avoiding the fantasy genre typical of Hollywood. The Italian medieval film plays with realism, spiritualism, pauperism, comedy, sexual irreverence and political commentary. This course explores films by world-famous directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Liliana Cavani inspired by the Italian medieval literature, history and visual arts to consider, among other things, how the projection of the past served as a reflection on the difficult present of the nation.
ITALIAN 275: Dante's Divine Comedy: A Dream of Peace
Refashioning the conventions of poetry, Dante (1265-1321) used the account of his presumed journey through the three realms of the Christian afterlife - Hell, Purgatory and Paradise - to explore the world at the close of the Middle Ages. The poem is both an adventure story and an exhaustive, assessment of the state of politics, society, religion, literature, philosophy, and theology at the beginning of the fourteenth century. This course examines a selection of the Divine Comedy's cantos in their cultural, social and political context. In particular we will explore how the world imagined by the poet relates to late medieval life and culture. A guiding concern of the discussion is to assess the ways in which Dante fashioned the relationship between the human and the divine, justice and love, will and reason, happiness and knowledge, literature and the Bible to craft his dream of universal peace. Political turmoil, philosophical and theological paradigms social and religious conflict all converge in the making of Comedy and will thus form crucial elements of our investigation.