Spring 2022 Class Schedule

• Spring 2022 Class Schedule
• Spring 2022 Course Descriptions
• Spring 2022 Course Flyers

Spring 2022 class Schedule

Spring 2022 course descriptions

Introductory and Intermediate French Language Courses

FRENCH 111-3: Elementary French

French 111-3 is the last course of a three-course Elementary French sequence. The aim of the course is to acquire and develop skills in speaking, understanding, reading, writing and cultural competence. Classes meet four times a week (MTWTh) and will include a variety of activities designed to help students develop their knowledge of basic French vocabulary and structures along with the ability to use what they have learned in communicative activities.

FRENCH 121-3: Intermediate French

French 121-3 is the last quarter of a three-quarter course for students who have completed French 121-2 or have been placed in that course by the French department. The aim of the course is to develop students' communicative skills and cultural knowledge. Class meets four times a week.  

FRENCH 125-1: Intensive Intermediate French

French 125-1 is the first quarter of a three-quarter course for students who have completed FR115-2 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 will reinforce linguistic foundations. Class meets three times a week and will be conducted in French.

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.

FRENCH 204: Acting French

Use of dramatic scenes, dialogues, songs and performance to help students improve their language skills and develop their interpretive, interpersonal and intercultural competence at the Intermediate Mid/High level.

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Introductory Literature and Culture Courses

FRENCH 105-6: First-Year Seminar — The Once and Future King: Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages

This course explores the legend of King Arthur and his significance in medieval literature, focusing on the ways that this iconic figure provided opportunities for social critique.

FRENCH 211: Reading Cultures in French — Cultures of the Mediterranean

This course will explore French culture by engaging with worlds beyond Paris and metropolitan France and focusing on writings, films, and comics set in the cities of Marseille and Algiers. The Mediterranean is traversed by different cultures; it is the world of seafarers, travelers, and migrants. Marseille, France’s second city, is one of the major ports of the Mediterranean. In contrast to the South of France of Nice or Cannes, the “wicked city” has been a melting pot of cultures in the global south, attracting workers from throughout France’s former colonies, notably Algeria. Covering the period from the Second World War to the beginning of the twenty-first century, we will address issues of justice and social upheavals in relation to France’s colonial past and the “banlieue”, migration from the perspective of the francophone black diaspora, and forms of belonging beyond the nation-state.

FRENCH 271: Intoducing the Novel

This introduction to the French novel from the 18th to the 20th century aims to familiarize students with key periods in the history of the French novel as well as help them develop skills in literary reading, analysis and interpretation. While introducing students to various genres and periods (the philosophical and epistolary novel, Romanticism, Realism, the Fantastic, the roman beur and migrant Québécois literature), we will focus on the question of identity and the roles of the “other” (race, gender, class, colonial, im/migrant) in the narrative in order to reflect on the relationships between the novel, culture, politics and history. In this course, we will further develop the techniques of close reading and detailed critical analysis through class discussion and presentations, the creative/reflective assignment, the analytical essay, and the explorationof pedagogical editions.

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Courses with Prerequisites in French

FRENCH 300: Theory and Practice of French Sounds

This course is designed to help you improve the pronunciation, intonation, and fluency of your spoken French, as well as to give you an overall understanding of the phonetic system of the contemporary French language.

FRENCH 303: Advanced Conversation: Debating Contemporary France

The goal of this course is the development of oral proficiency through speech functions, conversational routines and patterns, so as to build confidence in the practice of the French language. In order to achieve this goal, emphasis will be put on extensive examination of French press and French television news, French movies, the reading of a book related to the author studied this quarter, and spontaneous expression through dialogues and discussion, and even debates. Special emphasis will be placed on group work and culturally appropriate usage. The students will participate actively in the choice of the materials.

FRENCH 322: Writing the World: Medieval and Early Modern Travel Narratives

This course examines changing attitudes toward nature, religion, cultural difference and the role of the individual in society through narrative accounts of travel, pilgrimage, quest, and colonization from the Middle Ages to the modern period.

FRENCH 380: How to Change the World: Making Revolution in France and its Colonies

How did France become a secular republic whereas it began as a divine-right monarchy? What did it take to uproot centuries of tradition, social hierarchy, and the established political order France shared with the rest of Europe? In this course, we examine the role of culture and discourse in the revolutionary process by exploring the symbols, cultural practices, and forms of speech that shaped the most radical socio-political transformation in the history of the Francophone world. The French Revolution drew on a powerful new understanding of "man" in order to reinvent or throw out entirely age-old notions of sovereignty, the law, God, religion, the calendar, the nation, and the family. Crucial to the Revolution’s contagious force were the texts, iconography, songs, and spectacles that made it the first mass cultural phenomenon in French history. Beginning with the philosophical challenge to absolute monarchy, we will survey the revolution's most significant cultural achievements, including the emergence of a free press, the birth of human rights, secularism and the reinvention of religion, the reconstitution of time, the rise of new forms of theatricality and ritual, and the creation of new symbols. We conclude with a consideration of antislavery revolution in colonial Haiti, which in many ways exceeded the radicalism of the French Revolution. Works by Rousseau, Sieyès, Marat, De Lisle, Robespierre, Maurin De Pompigny, Dessalines, and others. Taught in French, but readings include essays in English. 

FRENCH 386: Queer Autofictions: Writing Gender in Contemporary French Literature

The genre of autofiction has profoundly renewed the writing of the self in contemporary French literature. Mixing autobiography with fiction, autofiction makes possible the writing of a postmodern self—a self that is both fluid and transformative, and whose meaning is open. This is especially true as regards gender: it remains a significant component of the self along with sexuality, class,and race, but has become more fluid in the postmodern era. The course will explore this revolution of gender through the reading of autofictions written by queer (gay, lesbian, and trans) authors in the last three decades.

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French Graduate Courses

FRENCH 430: Studies in the 17th Century: Absolutism & Society

The course is an introduction to 17th century French literature. We will read mostly primary texts—written by Cyrano, Corneille, Racine, Corneille, Molière, La Fayette, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Fontaine—so as to highlight the richness and the diversity of the literary production of the classical age as well as the profound transformation brought about by the consolidation of the absolute monarchy at the time, which includes the definition of the public and the private, the domestication of nobility, the institution and the intensification of the intellectual life, the renewal of the mechanisms of domination, the transformation of gender identities, the growing interest in psychology.

FRENCH 492/COMP_LIT 482: The Politics of Seduction and Consent

In the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, what is left of seduction? As its etymological derivation from the Latin seducere makes evident, seduction signifies the threat of being led astray, suggesting a problematic reorganization of boundaries, activity and passivity, power, and vulnerability. How have literature, psychoanalysis and philosophy responded to the drama of dissymmetry and otherness? To what extent does seduction affirm an inequitable logic when it comes to age, gender, and race? Does seduction always imply violence? How can we define the notion of consent, and can it offer not only legal redress but ethical care? To what extent can justice regulate sex, fantasies, and desires? To what extent has psychoanalysis problematically altered our notions of guilt and innocence when it comes to seduction? Throughout this seminar, we aim to confront these questions by revisiting primal scenes of seduction and consent in a broad range of literary, psychoanalytical, legal, and philosophical texts from Europe and the USA. Works covered will include texts by Springora, Kouchner, Nabokov, Freud, Ferenczi, Laplanche, Srinivasan, Hartman, Butler, Nussbaum, Alcoff, Kukla, and Dougherty.

FRENCH 494: Theories of Embodiment in the 20th and 21st Centuries: Transformations, Contentions, Aporias

From life sciences to cultural theory, from philosophy to politics, the human body has been the focus, object or target of unprecedented attention in the 20th- and 21st-centuries. Psychoanalysis, phenomenology, cultural anthropology, gender theory, neurosciences, ecocriticism, have all provoked important shifts in the epistemology of the body. They have enriched our understanding and experience of embodiment, while upsetting traditional Western dualisms and partitions, to begin with the nature/culture and the body/mind divides . From the so-called natural body to the trans or cyborgian body, from the speaking body of psychoanalysis to the joyful body of second wave feminism, from biopolitics to body art, from the human organism to the ecology of the living, this course will revisit some chapters in the history of these shifts. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which they have affected gender theory or have been compounded by it, in an attempt to ascertain their stakes for both feminist and postfeminist thought as well as politics.

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Courses Taught in Italian

ITALIAN 101-2: 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 secondin 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.

ITALIAN 101-3: Elementary Italian

ITALIAN 133-2/ITALIAN 134-2: Intensive Italian

Italian 133-3/134-3 is the third segment of the intensive course that started in the fall. 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, etc.); 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.

ITALIAN 349: Italy's Belcanto: Lyric & Opera

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Italian Courses with Readings and Discussion in English

ITALIAN 350: Art and Science in Italian Cookery

Before the advent of anatomy and surgery in 16th century, with chemistry increasingly used for pharmacology soon after, the only way to intervene over human body was nutrition and medicines were essentially a combination of natural elements (“semplici”); thus, human complexion was seen – after a long Classical tradition started by the likes of Hyppocrates and Galenus – as a combination of elements whose balance could be threatened by illness and had to be restored by means of ingestion of counterbalancing principles. Consequently, there was a thin line between the principles of medicine and pharmacology on the one side and those of cookery on the other: the creation of some dishes – including some classics of Italian cuisine! – can indeed be understood as an attempt to create balanced food that respects the natural complexion of human beings. The course will introduce to the principles of Medieval and Renaissance medicine and how they are reflected in contemporary cookbooks, with examples mainly from Italian texts of the 14th and 15th centuries, that will be examined in their specific language, often influenced by regionalism.

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