The Atelier "Performing Marivaux" will offer students the rare chance to work with celebrated French director and playwright Guillaume Vincent, known in France for revisiting the classics. The course will be co-taught by Guillaume Vincent and Florent Masse, the Director of L'Avant-Scène, the French Theater Workshop. The course will culminate in a presentation of works on April 25, 2024.

Designed for both undergraduates and graduate students, this course will focus on reading major "modern" poets and writings on poetics, in French, German, English and Spanish, with additional readings in theory of modernity, poetry, and the arts written by several of the poets we read. These include: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Celan, Garcia Lorca, Borges, Bishop and Ashbery. Secondary readings will include essays by major theorists and critics who consider the larger questions of representation, temporality, visuality, and language underlying poetic practice.

This class develops the basic structures and vocabulary for understanding, speaking, writing, and reading in French. Classroom activities foster communication and cultural competence through comprehension and grammar exercises, skits, conversation and the use of a variety of audio-visual materials.

The main objective of this course is to enable you to achieve intermediate communication proficiency in French. All four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing will be actively practiced in realistic communicative situations, through a variety of activities designed to help you strengthen newly acquired vocabulary and grammatical structures. You will learn to talk about events and people, construct narratives in French and develop reading and writing skills that will be a foundation for literacy in the target language. There is a wide use of authentic material from France and the Francophone world throughout the course.

FRE 102-7 is an intensive double course designed to help students develop an active command of the language. Focus will be on reading and listening comprehension, oral proficiency, grammatical accuracy, and the development of reading and writing skills. A solid grammatical basis and awareness of the idiomatic usage of the language will be emphasized. Students will be introduced to various Francophone cultures through readings, videos and films.

FRE 103 is an intensive beginning and intermediate language course designed for students who have already studied French (typically no more than 2-3 years). Covering in one semester the material presented in FRE 101 and FRE 102, this course prepares students to take FRE 107 the following semester. FRE 103 is designed to develop the skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in French in a cultural context using authentic materials. Classroom activities include comprehension and grammar exercises, conversation, skits, and working with a variety of audio-visual and online materials.

The main objective of this course is to examine what it means to communicate in a foreign language while helping students strengthen their linguistic skills and gain transcultural and translingual competence. Students will reflect on differences in meaning through the study of diverse cultural modules, including stereotypes; slang; advertisements; Impressionist art; Occupied France; current events; and French and Francophone literary texts and films.

FRE 108 is an intermediate advanced course. It will take you on a journey through various periods of French history and culture and offer an opportunity to reflect on important questions at the center of contemporary debates. Examples include: the role of the State in the shaping of the nation, the organic revolution, the role of education in our society, etc... We have selected a wide variety of materials (films, videos, music, newspaper articles and literary texts) and carefully incorporated them into the curriculum so you will develop the ability to communicate and gain understanding of French and francophone cultures and societies.

An interdisciplinary course proposing the study of language, culture, and French and Francophone literatures organized around the theme "Visions fantastiques". Includes the study of different genres and mediums on topics including fairy tales and folk tales; utopias and dystopias; science fiction; and folly, dreams and the surreal. The course offers a review and reinforcement of advanced grammatical structures and aims to improve written and oral expression through the study of texts and films.

This course is a discussion-based seminar, taught entirely in French, integrating cultural and linguistic learning. We will explore the Francophone world, examining a wide range of topics and issues and interacting with guest speakers from the regions studied. The course will provide intensive language practice, with an emphasis on the acquisition of a rich lexical base for social, economic, political and cultural topics and consolidation of grammatical foundations. Topics will vary from semester to semester and may include environmental, educational, health, social, cultural and political issues as well as aesthetic considerations.

This course examines the major historical and cultural developments that have shaped France since the Revolution. By studying a series of classic texts, important films, paintings, and essays, we will undertake an interdisciplinary tour through two centuries of French cultural history, addressing issues such as nationhood, colonialism, democracy, and consumer society. The focus will be on the relations between artistic renovation, social change, and historical events.

This course offers an introduction to film studies as well as a space for discussing the issues of race, multiculturalism and otherness in the French context. Students will learn to watch films critically, honing their linguistic and rhetorical skills through workshops and brief assignments. While we will survey prominent works, directors, actors, genres, and aesthetic movements in French cinema, the course will also strive to decenter the "canon" by showcasing thought-provoking and esthetically groundbreaking movies made in the last two decades by filmmakers themselves of very diverse backgrounds.

How have French writers sought to portray the experience of illness, medicine, and the modern hospital in recent years? What role, if any, does literature adopt, as its own form of knowledge and healing, in trying to care for sick bodies and diagnose the failings of the medical system itself? How might literature and medicine enrich each other? Short works by key modern writers on topics ranging from mental health, autism, and eating disorders to organ transplants, AIDS, abortion, and disability. Brief background readings in the medical humanities. Class is writing-intensive and discussion-centered to improve French language skills.

This course investigates self-centered forms like autobiography, autofiction, the confession, the memoir, the diary, and forms that many writers have used to explore the self, including lyric poetry, correspondence, bande-dessinée, essay, travel narrative, fragment, interview, etc. Through canonical and lesser-known works written in French from the 18th century to today, we will seek to answer the questions: How does one preserve one's own personhood, memories, identity, and experiences in writing? Which techniques have writers used to do so? How has self-writing changed over time?

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.

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.

As fascism was rising in Europe in the 1930s, French writers, artists, and intellectuals expressed their opposition to this threat both in action, coalescing around militant groups with overt political positions, and in their work. This antifascist cultural mobilization was sustained throughout the decade and siphoned into different kinds of resistance action and creation during WWII. This highly interdisciplinary course explores works of literature, art, cinema, and photography that fought fascism with words and images before and during the war in France. Works will be situated within their historical context and framed by theory.

This course explores the basic ideas, works, and principles of Surrealism as it developed in France and around the world from the early 1920s into the present. A very wide array of material will cover diverse literary genres and media to show how the Surrealists wanted to revolutionize both art and life in its political and ethical dimensions, as well as the movement's ongoing impact. The course is highly interactive, built around two digital creative and critical projects, which will constitute the students' assignments throughout the semester.

The readings and discussions will consider how the literature and arts of Haiti affirm, contest, and bear witness to historical narratives concerning the world's first black republic. The course will sample an array of historical accounts, novels, Afro-Caribbean religion (Vodun), plays, music, film, and visual arts of this unique postcolonial nation.

This interdisciplinary course explores the rich history of photography in France, beginning with the work of early inventors (Niépce's heliographie, Daguerre's daguerréotype, Lumière's vues photographiques animées) and practitioners (Atget, Nadar). We will read important theories and literary texts in which photography plays a central role and will study portraits, landscapes, ethnographic, journalistic, medical, experimental, and documentary photographs, and other genres by French and Francophone photographers from the 19th century to today.

Democratizing Culture will look at the initiatives by French cultural institutions to democratize culture and make their offerings more accessible to everyone. In recent years, major French cultural institutions have tried to engineer ways to attract a more socio-economically diverse audience to their halls, galleries, and venues. Encouraged by the Ministry of Culture, new projects have emerged in the world of theater, music, the opera, and museums. During spring break, we will travel to France to have a first-hand experience and assessment of these cultural policies and meet with government officials and arts institutions' directors.

This course examines a series of classic French works from a variety of genres (theater, poetry, novels and tales) in which human protagonists encounter the supernatural: gods and monsters, magic objects and speaking animals, mysterious travels and transformations. The authors often adapted ancient stories but also created new and enduring myths, employing outlandish fictions not only to entertain but also to raise moral, social, and philosophical questions. Classes will focus on attentive reading and discussion of the texts while taking into account their historical context, as well as visual interpretations such as illustrations and movies.

Designed to provide future teaching assistants with the knowledge and conceptual tools needed to reflect critically on pedagogical practices in the second language classroom. Examines issues related to teaching language and culture in a university setting, highlighting the relationship between theory in Second Language Acquisition and language pedagogy and helping students understand the practical implications of theoretical frameworks in the field.

A survey of historical, social and regional variation in written and spoken French, with particular attention to vocabulary, syntax, phonology and prosody.

The seminar explores a variety of texts and genres written about and in the midst of revolutions, including the French Revolutions (1789, 1848, 1871, May `68), the Haitian and Guadeloupean revolutions (1804, 1802), and the Algerian Revolution. We read widely in letters, speeches, novels, journalism, poetry, films, and other genres, from authors including Toussaint Louverture, Robespierre, Olympe de Gouges, Baron de Vastey, Flaubert, Rimbaud, CLR James, Frantz Fanon, Marx, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Guy Debord, and JL Godard. We also read political theory from authors such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière.

This seminar explores le secret as a defining feature of Renaissance French literature. Studying major works of poetry and prose, we ask how literature emerges during the 16th century as a privileged space of secrecy. Examining the secret as a phenomenon at once aesthetic and political, sacred and erotic, we situate it in relation to a wide range of shifting notions and categories in Renaissance France including: privacy, visibility, the body, gender, power, sincerity, belief, desire, censorship, and freedom. Renaissance texts are put in dialogue with modern theoretical works (Freud, Foucault, Irigaray, Derrida, Butler).

A seminar on the nature, varieties and powers of signs as defined and evoked in the philosophy, theology, and poetry of the Middle Ages. Subjects to be discussed include typologies of natural and artificial signs, theories of imposition, analogy and equivocation, self-signification, and "efficacious" meaning. Case studies are furnished by the sacraments, romance obscenities and euphemisms, proper names, Tristan and Yseut's "potion," Lancelot's cart, and the dates of Villon's Testament.