Fall 2013 Courses

FREN 0100
Annie Wiart

BASIC FRENCH:
A two-semester course. Four meetings a week for oral practice, plus one conversation hour. One hour of work outside of class is expected every day (grammar/writing, oral practice, reading). An accelerated track enables qualified students to go directly to FREN 0500 after FREN 0200. NOTE: This is a year course. Enrollment limited to 18 per section.
Prerequisites: See the instructor for placement. Written permission required

FREN 0300
Shoggy Waryn

INTERMEDIATE FRENCH I:
A semi-intensive elementary review with emphasis on all four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing). Class activities include drills, small group activities, and skits. Class materials include an audio CD, videos, a French film, short stories, and various other authentic documents. Four meetings per week plus one conversation hour. Enrollment limtied to 18 per section.
Prerequisites: FREN 0200 or placement. (Previous experience with French is required to take this class)

FREN 0400
Thangam Ravindrnathan

INTERMEDIATE FRENCH II:
Continuation of FREN 0300 but may be taken separately. A four-skill language course that stresses oral interaction in class (three meetings per week plus one conversation hour). Materials include audio activities, film, and a contemporary novel. Short compositions with systematic grammar practice. Enrollment limited to 18 per section.
Prerequisites: FREN 0300, FREN 0200 with written permission, or placement

FREN 0500
Shoggy Waryn

WRITING AND SPEAKING FRENCH I:
A four-skill language course that stresses oral interaction in class (three meetings per week plus one conversation section). Materials include audio CD, film, press articles, and literary excerpts. Writing is organized around specific tasks and systematic grammar practice. Enrollment limited to 18 per section.
Prerequisites: FREN0400, FREN 0200 accelerated track (with permission), or placement.

FREN 0600
Stéphanie Ravillon

WRITING AND SPEAKING FRENCH II:
Prerequisite for study in French-speaking countries. Class time is devoted mainly to conversation and discussion practice. Writing instruction and assignments focus on essays, commentaries, and to a lesser degree, on story writing. Apart from reading assignments for discussion (press articles and literary excerpts), students select two novels to read. Three meetingsper week plus one conversation hour. Enrollment limited to 18 per section.
NOTE: Students interested in Literature may register for section 04 (see below)
Prerequisites: FREN 0500 or placement.

For Undergraduates and Graduates

FREN 1050I
Pierre Saint-Amand

STUDIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: Étrangers et voyageurs dans la France des Lumières
The course will attempt to study a number of foreign subjects that emerge out of the context of travel in the literature of the eighteenth century. We will examine these others produced by the discourse of Enlightenment through some classic and some marginal works and will discuss various questions of colonization, slavery, race, and difference. Readings in Montesquieu, Voltaire, Lahontan, Diderot, Graffigny, Mme de Duras, Condorcet, Raynal, Saint-Pierre.

FREN 1060E
Gretchen Schultz

STUDIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: Gender, Sexuality and the Novel
Examines novelistic constructions of gender and sexuality in relation to 19th-century French culture and literary movements, including romanticism, realism and naturalism, decadence, and the popular novel. Topics include constructions of homosexuality in literature and non-fiction, fatal femininity, besieged masculinity, sexuality and race, prostitution, bored housewives. Works by Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Rachilde, accompanied by non-fictional sources in early sexology and criminology.

FREN 1110G
John Moreau

STUDIES IN THE FRENCH NOVEL: En Marge: Exilés et Hors-la-Loi au Moyen Age
Through a close reading of medieval texts from a diverse selection of genres and voices, this course will seek to understand not only those excluded from medieval society, but also their relationship to that society. The thematic focus will be on the condition of marginality itself—the way in which the margins belong fully neither to the outside nor to the inside, but describe a meeting point between them. In this course, students will be asked to consider the marginal space as it provides a dual perspective on excluded individuals and on the world that excludes them.

FREN 1150E
David Wills

STUDIES IN FRENCH CINEMA: Les Silences du son
The history of cinema presumes an increasing realism thanks to technological advents such as sound and color. But different elements of sound (noise, dialogue, music) always functioned, from the silent era forward, in complicated relations with the visual. The course will examine some of those elements and relations via a series of films by Godard, Duras, Beineix, Corneau, Audiard and others. Readings will be in electronic form; viewing sessions in addition to regular classes may be required.

FREN 1310A
Pierre Saint-Amand

SPECIAL TOPICS IN FRENCH STUDIES I: "French Lovers"; Séduction et libertinage sous l'Ancien Régime
A study of love and relationships in the Old Regime. The course will concentrate on the major actors (the libertine, the fop) , on the spaces (the boudoir, the salon, the garden), on social practices (conversation). Authors will include Molière, Mme de Lafayette, Crébillon fils, Laclos and film adaptations by Honoré, Frears, and Forman.

FREN 1310L
Gretchen Schultz

SPECIAL TOPICS IN FRENCH STUDIES I: Les paradis artificiels
This course studies the roles that alcohol and other mind-altering substances have played in the composition, themes, and tropes of French literature from the 19th century to the present. In addition to wine, writers also experimented with hallucinogens such as opium and mescaline. 19th-century medicine contributed to the range of intoxicants available for abuse, even as it fed hygienist and literary discourses condemning alcoholism and drug use as social scourges. Other topics include prohibitionist movements, absinthe and the poètes maudits, narcotics and decadent literature, and the role of drugs and alcohol in the avant-garde, counter-cultures, and radical politics.

FREN 1330A
Lewis Seifert

STUDIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION: Fairytales and Culture
Fairy tales occur in almost every culture across the globe. If the genre has such broad appeal, it is because it encapsulates in (usually) succinct form many of the pressing concerns of human existence: family conflict, the struggle for survival, sexual desire, the quest for happiness, among many others. This course explores why writers and readers have been attracted to the fairy-tale form through a study of its key elements and its uses in adult and children's literature, book illustration, and film. Special attention will be given to French contes de fées, along with North American, English, German, Italian and selected non-Western fairy tales, organized according to folkloric tale-types. The course will be conducted in English. All readings will be in English, with French, German, and Italian originals on reserve at the Rock.

FREN 1510A
Stéphanie Ravillon

ADVANCED WRITTEN AND ORAL FRENCH: Traduction
An introduction to the theory and practice of translation, this course will be designed to expand students' range and appreciation of written styles and registers and will be based on translation exercises and texts reflecting different types of written and oral communication.Texts will range from literary texts (excerpts from novels, plays, comic books...) to journalistic texts (articles from newspapers...). Class activities will also include comparative studies of translated texts, as well as grammar review and vocabulary work. Course taught in French. Written translations to and from French. Prerequisite: FREN 0600 or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 18. Instructor permission required.

FREN 1510C
Annie Wiart

ADVANCED WRITTEN AND ORAL FRENCH: A table!
Thematic units with different approaches to French cuisine and the French meal, such as regional cuisine, meals in literature and at the movies, radio-TV culinary shows, political and economical considerations, and, of course, a practical unit on how to compose, prepare and eat a French meal. Follows FREN 0600 in the sequence of language courses. Development of oral skills via presentations, debates, conversation, and discussion based on the various topics. Writing activities: essays, translations, commentaries, journals, creative descriptions and stories, etc. May be repeated for credit. Enrollment limited to 18.

FREN 1710D
Justin Izzo

Enfances africaines et antillaises: colonialisme, racialisation, modernité
For many writers and filmmakers from Francophone Africa and the French Caribbean, stories of childhood have been (and remain) especially privileged sites through which to examine questions of race, (post)colonialism, and modernity. This class will explore some classic examples of this trend as well as more contemporary variations of (post)colonial coming-of-age narratives. How do stories of childhood speak to and about colonialism and postcolonialism, politics, violence, and race? We will approach this broad question in a number of texts and films from Africa and the Caribbean, in a variety of national and cultural contexts.

Primarily for Graduates

FREN 2110F
Virginia Krause

STUDIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE RENAISSANCE: La matière du livre: Humanisme et Renaissance
Close study of literary works in light of the period's defining events: the birth of humanism, the invention of printing, the rediscovery of scepticism, the promotion of French as a national language, and the Wars of Religion. Readings in Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and Montaigne, among others.

FREN 2190H
Thangam Ravindranathan

STUDIES IN FRENCH LITERATURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY :Les Autres du Réel
If the real is that which always returns to the same place (as has been said about the Lacanian real), this course will examine certain displacing figures and modes of figuration – poetry, folly, metaphor, allegory, prehistory, the parasite, the ghost, the animal – through which literature has sometimes thought its own work. Privileging a selection of 20th century works of literature (in particular post-war and contemporary writers, including Ponge, Michaux, Chevillard, Darrieussecq) and critical theory (Kristeva, Lacan, Ricoeur, de Man, Serres, Derrida, Deleuze amongst others), we will consider what it means to take seriously literature's claim to alternative ontologies.

FREN 2600G
David Wills

STUDIES IN FRENCH CRITICAL THEORY: Stop Love Listen
The course will be organized as a series of three modules that have as their background the beating heart, and as their common motif the sense of interruption or punctuation (of that same heartbeat). Starting from Beckett's fragmentation of writing we will follow other versions of the interrupted text in Blanchot and Cixous; second, we will investigate how the passion of love "parenthesizes" (or not) the concerns of everyday life, political engagement, and corporeal necessity; and third, how attention to (musical) sound complicates hearing and understanding. Texts: Beckett, Blanchot, Cixous, Nancy, Barthes, Bataille, Szendy, films by Jacques Audiard. Taught in English.