Global Arc

The goals of the Introduction to Haitian Creole course are to develop the basic structures and vocabulary for understanding, speaking, writing, and reading in Haitian Creole. Classroom activities will include communication and cultural competence via comprehension and grammar exercises, conversation, and the use of a variety of authentic materials such as videos, films, songs, etc.

To write is to assemble, over time, a personal toolbox--a set of gestures, forms, voices, and rhythms drawn from reading, practice, and invention. This workshop invites students to discover and refine their own literary tools by engaging with a wide range of authors from around the world, from Kafka to DeLillo. We will experiment with narrative movements, points of view, voices, characters, composition. Each session from this multilingual workshop begins with a close reading and leads to exploratory writing, to help each student find a form that is truly their own.

This course explores the formal inventions of modern and contemporary writers--from Woolf, Borges, Perec to Bolaño--who reinvent storytelling through hybrid structures, fragmented voices, and experimental forms, who carve new paths through language and narrative. Each session will spotlight authors from the French, English, and Spanish literary worlds, examining how each writer responds to the ruptures of the modern world through the invention of forms, how literature might respond to (and reshape) the world to come.

This course studies the history of French writing between 1400 and 1700. With an emphasis on materials and technologies, we explore medieval manuscript culture, the printing revolution, and everyday practices of writing in early modern France. In this workshop-style course, students make frequent visits to Rare Books in Firestone and gain hands-on experience with techniques such as writing with a quill, setting type for printing, composing a letter for the royal post, and using early French dictionaries. We examine how technological changes shaped the development of the French language, as well as French culture and politics.

FRE 302 is designed to help students gain an active command of Haitian Creole and culture by focusing on reading and listening comprehension, oral proficiency, grammatical accuracy, and the development of reading and writing skills while emphasizing awareness of the idiomatic usage of the language. Students will explore various aspects of Haitian culture through authentic materials such as art, literature, music, podcasts, and films. We will consider how the culture has been affected by politics, migration, security, healthcare, etc.

Simone de Beauvoir was a towering figure whose work shaped how we think about gender, race, aging and death, citizenship, and the good life. Her groundbreaking feminist opus The Second Sex challenged taboos and sparked transnational political movements. This course explores Beauvoir's interdisciplinary work and legacy through multiple media. Pairing her writings with responses from contemporary authors and filmmakers (including Sara Ahmed, James Baldwin, Annie Ernaux, Paul B. Preciado, and Agnès Varda), we will investigate why her radical techniques continue to inspire feminist activists and artists today.

Based on novels published in France between the 80's and today, this seminar will discuss the figures of children of immigrants in French fiction and the changes that might have happened to these figures in forty years. Most of the writers are themselves descendants of several immigrations: from Algeria to Vietnam, Cameroon to Senegal. They don't share the same stories and might have very different ways of telling them. We will discuss, as well, the reception of these books in French society, via press articles or emissions, and how they fit (or not) in the main representations of what is a "good immigrant" and of what is a "good book".

What does literature tell us about families? In both form and content, literature is exceptionally well-suited for the representation of the family. Offering privileged access to intimate spaces, literary works depict this essential feature of the human condition. The French literary corpus from the Ancien régime to the present day is notably rich in representations of both intimacy and intimidation in private spaces. We begin our survey with Molière, an iconic figure in the French canon who has centered his attention on the family as the inspiration for his artistic expression, before tracing the evolution of its portrayal across history.

As we read, we typically stop noticing individual letters in order to make sense of words and ideas. In this course, we do the opposite. Focusing on works that experiment with typography and orthography, we analyze how French and Francophone writers and artists throughout history have brought attention to the letters themselves. What does the shape or sound of a letter represent? What about the absence of a letter? How does altering the font of a text alter the reader's experience? Mixing sight and sound, concrete and abstract, the experimental texts in this course offer students a visual history of French literature.

Love potions, otherworldly banquets, demonic incantations, medicinal plants... Explore the meeting point of magic, food, and poetry in the French Middle Ages. Centered on manuscripts, talismans, and amulets written in Old French, this course is taught entirely in French and offers a hands-on introduction to key texts and methods in medieval studies, as well as literary analysis in French. Students will gain the tools needed both to understand the central-and transnational-influence of French culture in the Middle Ages and to succeed in advanced 300-level courses.