Undergraduate course descriptions

French Language, Society, and Culture Through Film
Heidi Holst-Knudsen
FREN UN3240
Prerequisites: FREN UN2102 French socio-political issues and language through the prism of film. Especially designed for non-majors wishing to further develop their French language skills and learn about French culture. Each module includes assignments targeting the four language competencies: reading, writing, speaking and oral comprehension, as well as cultural understanding.

French Language Through Theater
Pascale Crepon
FREN UN3241
The course is taught in French and 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.

Read, Think, Write in French
Alexandra Borer
FREN UN3405
UN3405 enables students to hone and perfect their reading and writing skills while improving their ability to express and organize thoughts in French. In this engaging advanced language class, students are exposed to major texts in fields as diverse as journalism, sociology, anthropology, politics, literature, philosophy and history. Stimulating class discussions, targeted reviews of key grammatical points in context, and an array of diverse writing exercises all contribute to strengthen students’ mastery of the French language. This course also works as a bridge class between Intermediate French II and courses that focus on French and Francophone cultures, history and literature (such as 3409 and 3410). Students who take this class will be fully prepared to take advanced content classes or spend a semester in a Francophone country. This class is required for the French major and minor.

Intro to French and Francophone History
Zachary Desjardins-Mooney
FREN UN3409
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 (in French).

This course is part of a two-course sequence and is a core requirement the French and Francophone Studies major. 

Intro French & Francophone Literature
Eponine Senay
FREN UN3410
This class offers a survey of major works of French and francophone literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Emphasis will be placed on formal and stylistic elements of the works read and on developing the critical skills necessary for literary analysis. Works will be placed in their historical context.

Contemporary French and Francophone Lite
Laurence Marie
FREN UN3412
This contemporary French and Francophone literature course designed for undergraduate students is part of the “Choix Goncourt USA” (US Goncourt Prize Selection), an initiative led by the Goncourt Academy in France and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy (Villa Albertine) in the United States.

The course provides students with the unique opportunity to read the latest French contemporary fiction through the lens of critical literary tools, to experience being part of a selecting literary committee, to interview outstanding contemporary writers, and to practice writing book reviews, in addition to the more traditional essays and close readings. This course is entirely conducted in French (readings, discussions, and writing).

Female Friendship in Francophone Novels
Nadrah Mohammed
FREN UN3721
This course will be taught in French with films and novels in French.

This course will examine depictions of female friendship in French and Francophone novels and films. We will consider the different configurations that female friendship took over the course of the 20th century, in diverse political contexts in the Francophone world, from Algeria, France, Haiti, Mauritius and Cameroon. We will elaborate how female friendship works through the lens of three themes: virtue, desire and utopias. First, we will consider how representations of female bonds engage with or disrupt classical (and male) ideas of virtuous friendships based on equality and reciprocity, and how colonial contexts trouble these ideals. Secondly, we will trace the role of queer and heterosexual desire in making and breaking friendships. Finally, we will explore utopian visions of female friendship which imagine the future of women’s communities. This class will be strongly based on a feminist praxis of close reading, and reading “against the grain” by reading more canonical texts alongside non-canonical ones.

Senior Seminar
Joanna Stalnaker
FREN UN3995
Prerequisites: completion of either FREN UN3333-FREN UN3334 or FREN UN3420-FREN UN3421, and FREN UN3405, or the director of undergraduate studies' or the instructor's permission. Required of all French and French & Francophone Studies majors. Usually taken by majors during the fall term of their senior year. Critical discussion of a few major literary works along with some classic commentaries on those works. Students critically assess and practice diverse methods of literary analysis.

Senior Tutorial in Literature
Aubrey Gabel
FREN UN3996

Rebel Literature: Politics and the Novel
Emmanuel Kattan
FREN GU4082
“Quand on refuse, on dit non”, said Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma towards the end of his life. Taking this stance as a starting point, this seminar will explore, through the lens of the novel, major political upheavals in the Francophone world during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. We will shed light on the history of decolonization, May 68, the feminist movement, and struggles against racism and injustice by delving into the imaginary worlds of six leading francophone novelists: Marguerite Duras, Ahmadou Kourouma, Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous, George Perec and Édouard Glissant.

French America 1534-1804
Pierre Force
A study of the French Atlantic World from the exploration of Canada to the Louisiana Purchase and Haitian Independence, with a focus on the relationship between war and trade, forms of intercultural negotiation, the economics of slavery, and the changing meaning of race.

The demise of the First French Colonial Empire occurred in two stages: the British victory at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, and the proclamation of Haitian Independence by insurgent slaves in 1804. The first French presence in the New World was the exploration of the Gulf of St. Lawrence by Jacques Cartier in 1534. At its peak the French Atlantic Empire included one-third of the North American continent, as well as the richest and most productive sugar and coffee plantations in the world.

By following the history of French colonization in North America and the Caribbean, this class aims to provide students with a different perspective on the history of the Western hemisphere, and on US history itself. At the heart of the subject is the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans and between Europeans and Africans. We will focus the discussion on a few issues: the strengths and weaknesses of French imperial control as compared with the Spanish and the British; the social, political, military, and religious dimensions of relations with Native Americans; the extraordinary prosperity and fragility of the plantation system; evolving notions of race and citizenship; and how the French Atlantic Empire shaped the history of the emerging United States.

Racial Histories of Europe (15th- 21st Centuries)
Emmanuelle Saada
FRHS GU4354
After being somewhat eclipsed after World War II, race has reemerged as a central preoccupation in Western European politics, making it more important than ever to understand how the concept and practices have developed and how they have shaped the history of Europe.

In this class, we will focus on historiographical debates about race, including how and when it emerged as an ideology and how it has permeated the history of modern Europe.  We will emphasize the histories of Spain, France, Britain and Germany. We will focus on a set of connected debates, starting with the relationship between race and modernity. Was race a product of internal European dynamics in the late middle-ages related to the status of Christians of Jewish and Muslim origin or of social relations in the Americas following the conquest and the Atlantic slave trade? How much does the history of race share with the history of capitalism and imperialism? What was the role of scientific and artistic representations in the production of race? How was race connected to class, gender and sex? How and when did it become a central dimension of historical narratives and especially of how Europeans told their history? How shall we understand the relationship between antisemitism and other forms of racism in the longue durée history of Europe? How have historians analyzed the role of racism in the final solution and, conversely, how has race been transformed after the holocaust and into the present?

BD Reportage: The Origin and Aesthetics
Aubrey Gabel
CLFR GU4612
This course will trace the rise of “comics journalism,” a term first coined and popularized by the Maltese-American artist Joe Sacco in the 1990s. Surpassing the political or editorial cartoon in both space and scope, BD reportage is often aligned with subjective or opinion journalism, or “op-art.” It is rooted in long-form reporting, oral interviews, and embedded research—all communicated via the full arsenal of tools available in the comics medium. Like investigative journalism more broadly, graphic reporting covers the breadth of topics that affect modern life: from on-going wars and conflicts, to mass migration and the immigrant experience, to environmental disasters, trial reporting, the prison industrial-complex, and so on. Often approached as a predominately American phenomenon, practiced by first and foremost by Sacco himself, it is an increasingly dominant subgenre of French-language comics, as can be seen in the runaway success of Le photographe (2003-2006)—artist Emmanuel Guibert’s stunning, multi-album collaboration with the late photojournalist Didier Lefèvre, about the latter’s 1986 humanitarian mission through Pakistan and Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during the Afghan War (1979-1989)—and in a proliferation of French-language terms and formal prizes. While glancing at a prehistory of proto-forms (like illustrated news in the UK and the US or “printed literature” in Europe), this class will reconstitute a narrower French-language lineage of graphic reporting, through early children’s supplements, wartime comics propaganda, and postwar and present-day illustrated magazines. This course also juxtaposes the work of active artist-reporters, with non-journalist illustrators whose work is adjacent to reporting. Class held in English, with primary and secondary materials in French and English. French majors and minors must submit papers in French, as must graduate students in the Department of French. This class will also involve a few class trips (TBD, likely to the Museum of the Society of Illustrators and the Rare Books and Manuscript Library), as well as at least one in-person event at the Maison Française.

Annie Ernaux: Writing as a Knife
Thomas Dodman
CLFR GU4722
This course offers a deep dive into French contemporary novelist Annie Ernaux’s auto-socio-biographical fiction. It does so through close readings of some of her major works, organized thematically and across Ernaux’s oeuvre. Close readings of texts will be paired with research notes and recent film adaptations, sociological and theoretical work that has inspired Ernaux, her growing critical reception (amplified by her recent Nobel prize), as well as other writers whom she has inspired. Themes covered include: writing impersonally in the first person; what is auto-socio-biography; exploring women’s desire and sexuality; Ernaux’s feminism and political militancy; ethnographies of contemporary France and the baby-boomer generation; history, time, and memory. Throughout, we will consider what kind of genre Ernaux’s writing is, and what writing as a knife can do. Class taught in French (if you are unsure about whether you have the required level please consult with instructor).

Radical Enlightenment Women
Joanna Stalnaker
FREN GU4842
In this seminar, we will explore three different but interrelated questions. First, how did women (both real and fictional) shape the Enlightenment through the radical questions they posed? Second, how has Enlightenment historiography sought to affirm or deny the importance of women to an intellectual movement many believe ushered in the modern world? Third, what critical questions do we want to put to Enlightenment women in confronting the persistent challenges of our own time? In addressing these questions, we will read novels, letters, literary portraits and philosophical dialogues, and explore critical debates surrounding sociability, letter-writing and the institution of the salons. Authors will include Gouges, Montesquieu, Graffigny, Châtelet, Deffand, Voltaire, Lespinasse, Diderot, Rousseau, Henriette and le Chevalier / Mademoiselle d’Éon.

This seminar will be offered in French, with all readings and discussions in French. Advanced undergraduates may enroll with instructor permission.

French For Diplomats
Mohamed Yacine Chitour
FREN GU4995
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).

Writing the Expatriation: American Write
Antoine Guibal
FREN UN3605
T 6:10pm-8:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall

This seminar offers a dive into the richness of the Parisian cultural landscape in the 1920s, particularly through the lens of the American expatriate writers who lived there and produced some of their most important works at that time.

Asylum/ Asile: Theory and Practice of Asylum Law Through Francophone African Asylum Claims in New York
Emmanuelle Saada and Andrew C Heinrich
FREN UN3725
MW 4:10pm-5:25pm Location:407 Hamilton Hall

Asylum/Asile is an experiential learning class conducted in collaboration with Project Rousseau, a holistic non-profit organization that helps young people in communities with the greatest need.  

Theory of Literature I
Aubrey Gabel
GU4000 
(taught in English and French)
R 2:10pm-4:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall
 
This course explores theoretical approaches to literature with emphasis on French and Francophone contributions. During the first few weeks of the semester, we examine foundational ideas about literature, authorship and criticism. We also review key critical concepts and theories relating to semiotics, rhetoric, narrative and genre. The course will include a brief overview of the rules of versification in French poetry, and we’ll practice techniques of close reading. As the semester progresses, we examine theories about literature’s relationship to empire and to the environment, to the expression of gender, the act of bearing witness and to multilinguality and translation. The units resonate with and build on each other, illustrating the recurrence of some key questions and debates - What is the relation of literary language to other language? Is the literary work a creation, a structure, a symptom? What does it mean to historicize literature? How do canons form and how do they change over time?
 

How to Love: Medieval French and Arabic
Yasmine Seale and Eliza Zingesser
GU4022
(taught in English)
W 10:10am-12:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall

How did people conceive of and talk about love on either side of the Pyrenees? This course will explore the many faces of desire in medieval French, Occitan, Arabic, Hebrew and Romance (proto-Spanish) literature to ask a broader question: what would be our understanding of lyric poetry, often taken to originate with the troubadours, if we incorporated the poems and songs of Al-Andalus? After anchoring ourselves in history, we will survey the major events and trends that attended the emergence of new poetic and musical forms both in Andalusia and in France between the 8th and the 14th centuries. We will study how these works were composed, read, performed, and transmitted. Weekly readings will combine scholarship with primary texts exploring the many facets of erotic experience: from sexual contact to love from afar, love as madness, love mediated by birds, rejection of marriage, gender fluidity and queerness. We will also think about the literary forms in which these themes are expressed, including dawn songs, bilingual love poems, treatises on achieving female orgasm, conduct manuals, and hybrid texts combining prose and verse.  (Translations will be provided for most material, but reading knowledge of modern French is required.)

French Film Aesthetics
Tadas Bugvenecius
GU4028
(taught in English)
W 6:00pm-9:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall
R 12:10pm-2:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall

The seminar examines a particular branch of French-language film theory and criticism that deals with medium specificity, at the expense of reception and apparatus theories. We follow its history from the silent-era writings of Dulac and Epstein to the most recent inquiries into the notions of montage, découpage, and mise en scène. Along the way, we discuss the privileging of aesthetics in the Cahiers du cinéma criticism as well as its intersection with French theory in the work of Barthes, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Rancière. Obligatory weekly films by filmmakers such as Akerman, Delsol, Dulac, Duras, Hou, Ruiz, Sissako, Tati, and Triet will accompany and put pressure on theory.

Alice Diop: French Cinema and Postcolonial Universalism
Mame-Fatou Niang
GU4325
(taught in English)
T 2:10pm-4:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall
 
This seminar is the first comprehensive course on Alice Diop's cinema, from her confidential beginnings in 2005 (Clichy pour l’exemple) to her international success in 2022 (Saint Omer). Alice Diop is a young Black woman of Muslim culture, born in the banlieues to an immigrant family of modest means. Each of these six identities alone make her an outsider in a traditionally Parisian, white, bourgeois, and heavily male French cinema environment. Taken together, these characteristics form the main thread of this seminar: the aesthetics, intersectional identities, and universalist aspirations in Alice Diop’s that interrogate contemporary France. This class will present foundational themes of Diop's work, themes that are intimately weaved throughout the life of the filmmaker. Through these themes, we will analyze the theories of consciousness that are transforming French society at the beginning of the 21st century.
 

Classical French Moralists
Pierre Force
FR GU4441
(taught in French)
W 2:10pm-4:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall

A study of three seventeenth-century “examiners of the human soul” known for their virtuoso use of the short form and their attention to the puzzling nature of human behavior, with a focus on Pascal’s Pensées, La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes, and La Bruyère’s Caractères.

Images of the French Revolution
Caroline Weber
ENFR4819
(taught in English)
M 6:10pm-8:00pm Location:507 Philosophy Hall

Since 1789, the French Revolution has been mythologized and analyzed in a host of polemical, historiographical, and literary writings as well as in the visual arts and cinema. This course focuses on Western European responses to the Revolution from the late 18th century to the present day. Authors studied include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Olympe de Gouges, Edmund Burke, Mary Wollestonecraft, the Marquis de Sade, Georg Büchner, Jules Michelet, Charles Dickens, Hegesippe Legitimus, and Chantal Thomas. A selection of 18th- and 19th-century caricatures and paintings and contemporary films will also be examined. (Reading knowledge of French required.)