Undergraduate course descriptions

Third-Year Grammar and Composition
Marie-Helene Koffi-Tessio
Prerequisites: FREN UN3405 must be taken before FREN UN3333/4 unless the student has an AP score of 5 or the director of undergraduate studies permission. The goal of FREN UN3405 is to help students improve their grammar and perfect their writing and reading skills, especially as a preparation for taking literature or civilization courses, or spending a semester in a francophone country. Through the study of two full-length works of literature and a number of short texts representative of different genres, periods, and styles, they will become more aware of stylistic nuances, and will be introduced to the vocabulary and methods of literary analysis. Working on the advanced grammar points covered in this course will further strengthen their mastery of French syntax. They will also be practicing writing through a variety of exercises, including pastiches and creative pieces, as well as typically French forms of academic writing such as “résumé,” “explication de texte,” and “dissertation.

Advanced Translation Workshop
Sophie Queuniet
In this course we will practice translation from French to English and from English to French, while also exploring theories of translation and historical shifts in translation practice. We will consider the specific challenges posed by genres such as lyric poetry and contemporary news media, and the complex dynamics of inter- or trans-cultural translation. Throughout the course we will consider how the study and practice of translation illuminate the processes of reading and writing and the elements of style. The main objectives of the course are: to improve comprehension and production of written French; to attune students to aspects of literary style in both French and English, and to foster understanding of the historical, aesthetic and cultural questions raised by translation. The course is divided into six short units, each of which undertakes a specific translation project, and/or focuses on a particular genre, text, or author. These units include: rendering Proust’s style; translating poetry and (and into) prose poetry; translation as a medium of inter- or trans-cultural encounter, translating news media, the challenges of oral styles and humor, and translating the academic style. Assignments for the course will involve writing and creative writing, as well as translation exercises. At the end of the semester there will be a unit in which students translate part of a paper they have written in English into French, and draft a one-page translation of two works, one in French and one in English, in any genre, that is of special interest to them.

French through theater
Pascale Crépon
(taught in French)
This course focuses on learning the French language via the study of theatre (through plays, scenes, theories, lecture /workshops by guests, as well as performing a series of activities). The course offers students the opportunity to have a better grasp of the variety of French theatres within the culture and to perform the language through the body and mind. Its goal is to both introduce students to theatre and to explore how it challenges us physically and emotionally, as well as in intellectual, moral, and aesthetic ways. No previous acting experience is necessary but a desire to "get up and move" and possibly even go see plays as a class project is encouraged.

French Language, Society and Culture thru Paris
(taught in French)
Alexandra Borer
Prerequisites: 2 years of college French
Paris may be referred to as the capital of modernity, as the city of romance and pleasure, as the center of social and political powers, or as a privileged stage for crises and revolutions. Analyzing and researching the meanings of these diverse representations expose students to key aspects of French and Francophone political, social, and cultural history. This is a course intended for students who, having completed their language requirement in French, seeks to better their knowledge of French language and society. It offers students the opportunity to study representations of Paris over the centuries as a way to practice writing, reading, and conversation in French and as a way to deepen their understanding of French and Francophone cultures. Materials for the course include major literary texts as well as paintings, movies and popular songs, but also museum websites, local newspapers and local ads, brochures from retail and food malls, restaurant menus, postcards...

French Fiction into Film
Tadas Bugnevicius
(taught in English)
An archivist in the French National Library once opined that the average French filmmaker is above all a bookworm and that this is what makes French cinema unique. How does fiction enable filmmaking? And how has film reinvented literature? We proceed chronologically through novels, novellas, and short stories by major authors such as Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Mauriac, Duras, and Sembène, while watching a range of screen adaptations based on their work. Particular attention will be given to the intertwining of histories and theories of the two media. The course aims to foster close cross-media reading skills and, more broadly, to reboot our relationship to both literature and film. Films in French with English subtitles. Choice to read the literary texts either in English or French.

Intro to French and Francophone History
Zachary Desjardins-Mooney
(taught in French)
This class provides an introduction to the history of France and of the francophone world since the Middle Ages. It initiates students to the major events and themes that have shaped politics, society, and culture in France and its former colonies, paying special attention to questions of identity and diversity in a national and imperial context. Modules include a combination of lecture and seminar-style discussion of documents. (This course is part of a two-course sequence and is a core requirement of the French and Francophone Studies major.)

Intro French and Francophone Literature
Celia L Abele
(taught in French)
This class offers a survey of major works of French and francophone literature from the Middle Ages to the present. We will emphasize the formal and stylistic aspects of the works we read, and develop the critical and practical skills necessary for literary analysis. Additionally, we will place the historical context of the texts we study at the center of our approach. (This course is part of a two-course sequence and is a core requirement of the French and Francophone Studies major.)

Transgressive Modern French Lit. & Film
André Pettman
(taught in French)
In its widest sense, transgression is the violation of cultural, social, religious, and legal norms or laws. Traditionally, transgression is regarded as being unacceptable, objectionable, and even harmful. Certain behaviors, such as cannibalism or incest (Freud 1913; Lévi-Strauss 1949), are transculturally deemed as taboo. From another perspective, however, transgression holds the potential to rupture and radically reshape the status quo, a conviction perhaps most evident in the realm of art. Transgressive art shocks us, it elicits outrage, paralyzes us in horror, it makes our stomachs turn, our knees weak. It shakes the tenets of our morals, challenges our sensibilities, and interrogates our notions of what is offensive, appropriate, and societally acceptable. What is it about a work of art that makes it transgressive? Do we know it when we see it? Is it derived from a work’s content or is it also a question of its form? How does it interface with questions of authorship, sociopolitical context, and reception? What limit must a work go beyond in order to be deemed transgressive? What is the relationship between subversion and transgression? Can we speak of an aesthetics of transgression? 2 These questions will drive our exploration and critical engagement with French and Francophone literature and film. In addition to offering a broad overview of 20th - and 21st -century French and Francophone literary and cinematic production, this course will focus on the shifting cultural, social, and political contexts of these works. We will consider how these contexts – in conjunction with a work’s content and form – shape what constitutes transgression and how or why a work is shocking. To contemplate a more comprehensive understanding of transgression and its specificities and contingencies, we will cover an array of literary and cinematographic genres (prose narrative, autofiction, nouveau roman, noir thriller, new wave, experimental film, horror), and themes (romantic love, desire, sexuality, colonialism, familial relations, cultural norms, religion, censorship). Along with primary source texts and films, we will read selected secondary sources to gain knowledge of influential theories of transgression and raise additional questions related to race, gender, genre, sexuality, violence, and the construction of the self.

Violence, Politics, and the Graphic Novel
Aubrey Gabel
In the 21st-century, we are adjusted to seeing historical violence represented in popular culture of all forms, from animated film to TikTok videos. But when Art Spiegelman published Maus at the beginning of the ‘80s, he worried about the dissonance between form and content: “I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dream. And trying to do it as a comic strip!” That said, Spiegelman is not the only, nor the first artist to turn to this medium to represent politics, history, and violence. If Callot denounced the Thirty Years’ War in a series of etchings, Goya treated the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars with irony in his engravings. 19th-century French illustrators took hold of caricature as a political speech act—epitomized by Charles Philipon’s infamous drawing, which transformed the head of Louis-Philippe into a pear. Today, we understand the medium of comics (bandes dessinées or BD in French) to have distinctive properties—hand-drawn art, seriality, frames, word bubbles, and gutters—but throughout history, artists have experimented with the relationship between image and text; recall Hokusai’s manga, Töpffer, Cham, and Doré’s la littérature en estampes, or Frans Masereel’s bande dessinées muettes. In the first half of this course, we will explore together a retrospective history of the medium, reflecting on proto-comics, and the development of the illustrated magazines, comics, and comic books proper, aimed at children since the beginning of the 20th century. We will insist upon the polemic nature of BD since their inception, in series like Tintin ou Zig et Puce, which were so often vehicules for Vichy and colonial propaganda. This retrospective history will open out onto the adult forms of the 1960s and ‘70s, counter-culture comics or “comix” magazines (Charlie Hebdo, Métal Hurlant), then the development of the modern graphic novel (or album narratif). In the second half of the semester, we will focus in on French and Francophone graphic novels that treat historical traumas as diverse as WWI, the Iranian Revolution, the totalitarian North Korean state, or the Vietnamese diaspora. Drawing on examples from some iconic artists (Tardi, Satrapi, Sfar, ou Sattouf) and some lesser-known artists (Baru, Baloup, Abirached), we will examine how and why the medium has become such an important site for the work of memory and autobiography. Final, we will touch on new genres, like BD reportage, or comics journalism, which represents ecological, sociological, and historical crises.

This course will take place in French, with texts primarily in French, except for a few crucial articles or texts that are difficult to access in the original French. We will do several field trips, to local museums and the Rare Books Library, and at least one event at the Maison Française de Columbia. There will also be several invited speakers, to enrich our collective discussion.

Versailles
Caroline Weber
This seminar will examine Ancien Régime culture through the history of Versailles from its origins as a hunting lodge through Louis XIV's displacement of the court to the château in 1682, through the Revolution. We will read contemporary literature; look at cultural history, architecture and the arts; and consider film treatments from Sacha Guitry's 1954 "Si Versailles m'était conté" to the recent television series "Versailles."   

Medieval Animals, Human and Other
Eliza Zingesser
How did medieval people separate themselves from other (non-human) animals? Was it the ability of humans to talk, use tools, exercise rationality or something else? We will consider these questions in the first unit of this class, in which we’ll look at cases of what Agamben calls “the anthropological machine”—the ways in which humans distinguished themselves from other species. Why do some bestiaries (catalogues of animals) include human animals but not others? How did medieval people understand Genesis and the notion of ‘dominion’ given to humans over the rest of creation? In the next unit, we will turn to talking animals, both in medieval philosophical texts and in literature. Do they speak differently from human animals? Do humans speak differently when speaking of them (for example, do texts about parrots or other bird mimics start to ‘parrot’ other texts?). We next turn to cases of metamorphosis (human to animal or vice versa) and hybridity (in which a single body is both human and animal). What do these texts reveal about what is proper to the human and how does the body play a role in shoring up species identity? In a final unit, we turn to assemblages—conglomerations in which human and nonhuman animals act together. We will look both at chivalry (knight+horse) and at medieval lovers, who are often surrounded by birds.

Francophone Romance:  Love, Sex, Intimacy in the French Colonial World
Madeleine Dobie
Colonial domination and violence have been interwoven with desire and various forms of intimacy. Personal relationships have been vectors of colonial power as well as sites of resistance. This course explores various ways in which love, desire and intimacy have emerged as questions in French colonial practice. It covers a broad historical and geographic span stretching from the age of plantation slavery to the era of decolonization and from the Caribbean and Louisiana to Vietnam and Africa. The primary lens is literature, a medium in which the personal dimensions of empire have often found expression, though we also draw insights from history, sociology and law.

French Empires: History and Historiography
Emmanuelle Saada
At the beginning of the 21st Century, forty years after its last colonial war, France, which had primarily seen itself as a “nation” in the previous two hundred years, discovered that it had been an “empire” for most of its history. The questions of slavery, colonial violence, racism, exclusion, and exploitation became prevalent in public debates with the conviction that colonial legacies continued to shape France’s present. This new interest in the imperial trajectory of France both informed and was shaped by the publication of many historical works.

This class will explore this 'imperial turn' and examine its specificity vis-à-vis the historiographies of other European empires. We will examine the questions that have been at the center of the historian's agenda: what kind of historical processes are revealed (or masked) by the imperial perspective? How do we think historically about the relationships between nation, Republic, and empire?  How has the 'imperial turn' shaped the categories and writing practices of historians? How have new repertoires of questions about citizenship, gender and sexuality, racism, capitalism, and the environment emerged in the study of imperialism?  What are the contributions of historians to the understanding of postcolonialism?

French for Diplomats
William U Kehl
This course deals with French foreign policy. It is designed for students who have a good French level (the whole course is taught is French, so there are minimal requirements) and are interested by international relations and France. It aims at improving students knowledge of French diplomacy : the vision and values it carries, its history, its logic, its strenghts, its weaknesses, the interrogations and challenges it faces. Though it is not a language course (there will be no grammar), it will also shapren students mastering of French (especially useful for those considering an exchange at Sciences Po, or wanting to work in places such as the United nations where it is useful to master some French diplomatic vocabulary).