Global Arc

This course is designed to improve spoken and written French while exposing students to a number of urgent topics in French environmental politics: climate change, energy politics, food safety, pollution, animal rights, public health, risk management, landscape conservation, and degrowth. What makes the French case unique? How has French history, including Enlightenment and colonialism, shaped current activism, green politics, and the backlash against "ecofascism"? Discussion, debates, and creative projects will center on films, bandes dessinées, literature, art, philosophy, and essays; the course is writing and speaking intensive.

This interdisciplinary course looks at representations of North and sub-Saharan Africa in modern popular culture aimed (supposedly) at a younger audience. Through literature, graphic novels, films, advertising and web-based media, we will see how artistic and more practical goals coexist with didactic intentions. This will lead us to address critical contemporary issues in Africa, such as education, multiculturalism, gender equality, politics, ecology, etc. We'll see how these productions by Europeans, Europeans of African descent, and Africans, do not only perpetuate and transmit stereotypes, but also convey progressive visions.

This course will explore classic French and Francophone cinema from Meliès and Lumière to the Nouvelle Vague. Directors to include Vigo, Renoir, Godard, Truffaut, Rouch, Varda, and Djibril Diop Mambety. The course will investigate both the specific cinematic languages developed by these various directors, as well as the historical and political context in which these films developed.

To improve spoken and written French through attentive study of French grammatical and syntactic structures and rhetorical styles, with a variety of creative, analytical and practical writing exercises, and reading of literary and non-literary texts. Course conducted in French. Prerequisites: FRE 207, 208, or permission of instructor.

In Advanced French Theater Workshop, students will focus their work on three main French playwrights: one classical, one modern, and one contemporary. The course will place emphasis on refining and improving students' acting and speaking skills. It will culminate in the public presentation of the students 'Travaux' at the end of the semester. Prerequisite: One 200-level FRE course.

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.

This course is an intensive discussion-based seminar which offers an introduction to sociolinguistics, or the study of language as a social phenomenon. Through readings, films, and documentaries, we will explore contemporary debates related to language, culture, politics, identity, and ideology in the Francophone world. The course includes a series of guest speakers for the discussion of Francophone case studies. Past speakers were from Morocco, Québec, Louisiana, Republic of Benin, La Réunion, and the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.

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.