Global Arc

Advanced French Theater Workshop is a continuation of FRE/THR 211, French Theater Workshop. Students focus their work on three French playwrights: one classical, one modern, and one contemporary. The course will place emphasis on refining and improving students' acting and oral skills. It will culminate in the presentation of the students 'Travaux' at the end of the semester.

This course will examine the cultural and political events knows as May '68, with a focus on the historical and political context that contributed to its development as one of the watershed events of modern French history. We will study May '68 from a range of perspectives, including film and photographic representations, as well as its historical, sociological, artistic, and philosophical dimensions. Special focus in the second half of the course on 1968 is in a global context, addressing this world changing moment in sites such as Prague, Mexico, Brazil, China, Germany, Italy, US, etc.

The course title "Les Combustibles" comes from an Amélie Nothomb play in which three people trapped in an apartment during a war in winter must decide which books they will burn to stay warm. The choice between physical and intellectual well-being serves as an organizing theme for the course, which focuses on prose produced in an age when the latter is often subordinate to the former. Genres: novel, essay, autofiction, autobiography, blog, and philosophical treatise. Themes: representations of the body, metatextuality, the act of reading and writing, global identity, memory and trauma, and consumerist culture.

The religious demand for self-examination and confession reaches back to the 13th century; later, the secular tradition sees confession as a requirement for authenticity. Many modern texts build on these traditions, whether in the introspection of the first-person narrative, or with the analytic attention of an outside observer, and the policing of society also makes a demand for confession from the suspect. The seminar will study a variety of confessional writings, from Rousseau to Patrick Modiano. This course will be taught inside a correctional facility.

An exploration of the concept of hospitality, individual and collective, in French, Mediterranean, and Maghrebi (i.e., North African: Arab, Berber, and Jewish) cultures. Draws on materials from literature and the arts, politics and law, philosophy and religion. Issues studied include immigration, citizenship, alienation, and, more generally, the meaning of welcoming a stranger. Prerequisite: a 200-level course in French or instructor's permission. One 90-minute lecture, one 90-minute preceptorial.

An interdisciplinary study of places, periods, persons, or questions that helped define French cultural identity, from its origins to the present. Areas of study could include courtly love; gothic art; the Enyclopedia; the Belle Epoque; the Figure of the Intellectual from Zola to Simone de Beauvoir; the sociocultural revolution of May 1968; colonization, its discontents, and its aftermaths; France in the age of globalization; Franco-American relations; etc. Prerequisite: a 200-level course in French or instructor's permission. Two 90-minute classes.

Readings from the works of Rabelais, the Pléiade poets, Marguerite de Navarre, Montaigne, and d'Aubigné in the light of contemporary artistic, political, and cultural preoccupations. Themes will include the rhetoric of love, education, humanism, recurrent mythologies, and utopias. Two 90-minute classes. Prerequisite: a 200-level course in French or instructor's permission.

The continuities of French culture and its preeminence over much of Europe from its 11th-century beginnings through the 16th century. Emphasis on medieval and Renaissance literary works (in modernized versions) in their relationship to topics such as "love'' (fin'amor), saintliness, national identity, humanism, and so on. Prerequisite: a 200-level course in French or permission of the instructor. One three-hour seminar.

A survey of Renaissance literature and art in France from the late 15th to the early 17th centuries. A variety of cultural aspects of the period, including major literary and art works, will be considered, and we will intergrate the colleactions of the Princeton University Art Museum into the material under study. Museum curators will also provide assistance to students. Time will be divided between formal presentations, oral exposés, textual analyses, and discussion.

This interdisciplinary course explores the topic of race in France, from the earliest populations to inhabit the land now called France to the multiracial communities that reside there today. Approached through a variety of fields (law, ethnography, biology, literature, philosophy, and political theory) students will study themes such as colonialism and immigration, scientific and juridical racism, anti-racist activism, and various racial imaginaries that mark the country's cultural production. Lecture in English with both English and French precepts.