Spring 2023 Class Schedule

• Spring 2023 Class Schedule
• Spring 2023 French Course Descriptions
• Spring 2023 Italian Course Descriptions
• Spring 2023 Course Flyers

Spring 2023 class Schedule

Spring 2023 course descriptions

Introductory and Intermediate French Language Courses

FRENCH 111-3: Elementary French

French 111-3 is the third and 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.

French 111-3 Prerequisite: Grade of at least C- in FRENCH 111-2 or Department placement.

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 121-3 Prerequisite: Grade of at least C- in FRENCH 121-2 or Department placement.

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 125-1 Prerequisite: Grade of at least C- in FRENCH 115-2 or Department placement.

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.

Prerequisite: FRENCH 125-3, FRENCH 201-0, or Department placement.

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.

Prerequisite: FRENCH 125-3, FRENCH 201-0 or Department placement.

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French Courses with Reading and Discussion in English

FRENCH 375: Writing Cinema Between the World Wars

In this course we will study literary and critical writings about cinema during the 1920s and 30s, learning about the global circulation of films and of ideas about cinema in the historical context of the period. In addition to France, we will also consider (and students will have the opportunity to do research on) texts and films from elsewhere in Western Europe, the Soviet Union, East Asia, and Latin America.

We will read several classics of early film theory that try to define cinema and its potential as an art and/or a mass medium. Beyond film criticism in the narrow sense, these texts ask broader questions about the relationship between art and technology, entertainment and politics, perception and reality. We will also read several works of poetry and fiction that responded in formally innovative ways to the experience of cinema.

Films may include: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Kid (1921), A Page of Madness (1926), Un Chien andalou (1929), São Paulo, Symphony of a Metropolis (1929), A Propos de Nice (1930), and An Amorous History of the Silver Screen (1931). Literary authors may include Blaise Cendrars, Patricia Galvão, and Carlos Oquendo de Amat; critics and scholars: Walter Benjamin, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, Miriam Hansen, Imamura Taihei, and Liu Na'ou.

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Introductory Literature and Culture Courses

FRENCH 211: Francophone Hip Hop and Culture

From its inception in the Bronx in the 70's, hip hop as art form and cultural movement has evolved as "an uncompromising prism for critique, social and political analysis and representation of marginalized and underrepresented communities throughout the world." Today, hip hop and rap are two of the most streamed genres in the world and the second largest group of hip hop and rap consumers are located in France. This course serves as an introduction to French and francophone culture and politics through the lens of hip-hop, music, and cinema. We will examine the intersections between hip hop, local literary practices, and political contexts which allows for the emergence of different varieties of francophone hip hop. We will explore how these different forms of aesthetic production critique and contribute to a number of public debates on topics such as French republicanism, national identity, im/migration, as well as language, economic hardship, and colonialism. By taking hip hop as our point of departure, we will gain a broader understanding of how individuals produce meaning about the everyday though language and artistic creation.

Prerequisite: FRENCH 202-0, AP score of 5, or consent of instructor. Literature Fine Arts Distro Area.

FRENCH 271: Literary Movements in Historical Context

This class provides a survey of major authors and movements in the French novel from the 17th to 21st centuries. Students will learn to recognize stylistic and thematic characteristics typical of each author/period, as well as technical skills for literary analysis.

Prerequisite: FRENCH 210-0, FRENCH 211-0, or consent of instructor. Literature Fine Arts Distro Area.

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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.

Prerequisite: FRENCH 202-0, FRENCH 203-0, or consent of instructor.

FRENCH 309: French for Health Professions

How do healthcare systems and approaches to wellness differ across cultural and linguistic contexts? This course is designed especially for students planning a career in the health professions, global health, and/or public health." In this course, students will gain knowledge of the different models of healthcare systems in Francophone countries as well as familiarity with some specific terminologies and grammatical structures employed in the field. Using communicative and task-based approaches, students will discuss current issues, examine and reflect on ethical beliefs and values, through topics such as healthcare access, terminal illness, the use of technology etc.

Class discussions and activities as well as written assignments will be based on videos, press articles, and on the reading of a short novel related to the medical field. Students will research topics and share their findings through oral presentations. They will also explore their personal area of interest in the field.

Prerequisite: FRENCH 202-0 or consent of instructor.

FRENCH 310: Defining Difference: Encountering the Other in Old French Literature

This class examines narratives of travel, quest, crusade, and exploration to ask how medieval people conceptualized identity and otherness. To what extent do modern categories of race, ethnicity, religion, and national identity apply to the Middle Ages? How did the medieval period contribute to modern ideas of community and alterity? We will focus on Old French literature as a way of asking how encounters with the other contributed to the formation of a "French" cultural identity.

Prerequisite: FRENCH 271-0, FRENCH 272-0, or FRENCH 273-0, or consent of instructor. Literature Fine Arts Distro Area.

FRENCH 367: What's Luck Got to Do With It?: Encounters at the Crossroads of Chance and Destiny

In "Déviation" [Detour] a short story by the Algerian writer, Mohammed Dib, two people are driving back to their hometown when they hit a roadblock marked "road work" and must take a detour. A familiar everyday event that ordinarily might annoy but eventually gets the traveler to their destination. However, here, unbeknownst both to our travelers and to us, this is no ordinary detour but rather a crossroad where chance and destiny converge. We begin our course with this short story to explore not only the daunting and often unanswerable question of "is it chance? Is it desinty?" but also the relationship between storytelling and this double question. Focusing our analyses and discussions on different modalities of encounter, we will investigate the history of key notions in the debate on chance and destiny, beginning with these words themselves, and consider their broader political and historical implications. Our class topic is not limited to human-human encounters but rather expands to consider encounter as a relation in general. Students will contribute to the structure of the class not only theoretically and critically but also by drawing on their own everyday experiences of encounter and stories.

Prerequisite: FRENCH 271-0, FRENCH 272-0, or FRENCH 273-0, or consent of instructor. May be repeated for credit when content changes. Literature Fine Arts Distro Area.

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French Graduate Courses

FRENCH 420: Violence & Form

Both as ‘body' and as ‘genre' this course explores the ways in which ‘form' shapes and responds to violent imagery across French and European literature of the 16th century. We will interrogate the language of violence in love poetry, essays, tales, epic and chilvalric romance and explore what metaphors of torment and abjection allowed early modern writers to do. How did the eroticized body of the Beloved in the love sonnet become the wounded flesh of the Huguenot soldier during the Wars of Religion? How did the anatomized female form in the blason come to represent European nations torn apart by civil strife? We will examine structural and formal conventions as well as historical and political contexts to discern conversations between our texts and the turbulent times in which they were created. Authors will include Marguerite de Navarre, François Rabelais, various lyric poets, Michel de Montaigne, Agrippa d'Aubigné, etc.

**Please note: in addition to exploring early modern literary texts, this course will also focus on students' professional development through discussions of academic research, writing, and publishing.**

FRENCH 460: Modern French Poetry and Poetics in the World

In this course we will study the global contexts and consequences of French poetry and poetics between the World Wars. We will read poems and critical writings by some of the most important French-language poets from the period, with an eye to their international origins, interests, and travels. At the same time, we will read works by their contemporaries, from around the world, who were based in Paris and/or were in dialogue with these writers.

Some of our themes will include the Great War; French colonialism; primitivism, orientalism, and the search for cultural alternatives; the transformation of experience by urbanization, transportation, and technological media; poetry's relationship to the visual arts; and, of course, the formal and aesthetic innovations of these poets.

Authors will include Apollinaire, Cendrars, Breton, and Césaire. Readings will be available in English as well as the original language, and students may choose to focus on a non-French writer for their research paper.

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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 second 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.

Italian 101-2 Prerequisite: Grade of at least C- in ITALIAN 101-1 or Department placement.

ITALIAN 101-3: Elementary Italian

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

IT 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 133-3/Italian 134-3 Prerequisite: Grade of at least C- in ITALIAN 133-2 and ITALIAN 134-2 or Department placement.

ITALIAN 349: Food, Territory, Inclusivity: A Journey Through Italian Culture

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Italian Courses with Readings and Discussion in English

ITALIAN 105-6: Media & Exhibitionism

This course will explore the role that exhibitionism and the logic of the spectacle have played in Italian culture from the years of Fascism (1922-1943) to Silvio Berlusconi's rise to power in the 1990s and the current resurgence of populism and far-right politics. As the flip side of our desire to see, exhibitionism manifests the desire to be seen, to expose oneself to the look of others—to turn oneself into a spectacle—in both the private and public spheres. While drawing from the fields of cinema and media studies, feminist/queer theory, and critical race theory, we will analyze how film, television, and social media both express and construct our desire for visibility. We will pay particular attention to questions of gender, sexuality, and race, and to the ways in which spectacle and politics have joined forces at different junctures in Italian history.

ITALIAN 250: Italian Culture and the History of Fashion

Strictly speaking, until the first half of the 20th century, it is difficult to talk about a fashion which is essentially Italian rather than the execution of French-inspired models. It was only starting from the 1950s, with the fashion shows in Sala Bianca in Florence, that Italian fashion was established at the international level. The Fifties were also the decade of the Italian economic miracle, which constitutes both the presupposition and the consequence of a growth in American interest in Italian fashion. In the eighties Italy established fashion as a language of mass culture with the invention of a new prêt-à-porter - or "ready to wear": a kind of style attractive from an aesthetic point of view and independent from high fashion and from France stylistically and structurally.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Italian fashion collects heritage of craftsmanship, taste for beauty, attention to the manufacture of the product, organizational capacity, and production quality, but above all, it launches new ways of representing, selling and communicating the product.

The course will start with an introduction to the birth of modern fashion in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and will then focus on the birth and the development of Italian fashion from 1920 up to 2000, always comparing it with other western fashion styles in France, in the United Kingdom and in the U.S.A.

Fashion plays a key role in Italian culture and the study of its diachronic and synchronic development help to understand many aspects of Italian society and its way of lifestyle.

ITALIAN 360/ATP 372: Inextinguishable Fire: Harun Farocki

Did Godard understand Brecht? Perhaps Godard, in the end, was merely Godard. But Farocki understood Brecht and Godard and extended their work through films (documentary, essay, activist), installations and writings. He also understood contemporary Italian thinkers (Negri, Lazzarato, Virno) and their radical approach to labor, life, and creativity. In an incredibly large and varied body of work produced from the 1960s to the 2010s Farocki addressed two principal subjects: the practices of labor and the production of images. When we experience this work, multiple lines of flight open up. What is an image? How do images shape our subjectivities, our social and political systems? 

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