Systematic training in all the language skills, with special emphasis on communication, self-expression, and cultural insights. Classes are supplemented by regular assignments in a variety of video, audio, print, and Web-based materials to give students practice using authentic French accurately and expressively. Three meetings weekly.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 18
Prerequisites: Open to students who do not present French for admission, an equivalent departmental placement score, or by permission of the instructor.
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
Systematic training in all the language skills, with special emphasis on communication, self-expression, and cultural insights. Classes are supplemented by regular assignments in a variety of video, audio, print, and Web-based materials to give students practice using authentic French accurately and expressively. Three meetings weekly.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 18
Prerequisites: FREN 101, an equivalent departmental placement score, or by permission of the instructor.
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
Reading, writing, and speaking skills and critical thinking are developed through analysis and discussion of cultural and literary texts. Issues of cultural diversity, globalization, and identity are considered. Thorough grammar review.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: FREN 102, an equivalent departmental placement score, or by permission of the instructor.
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes: A student who takes FREN 202 without having completed FREN 201 must elect one of the following courses in order to complete the language requirement - FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209. Completion of FREN 202 allows first-year students to qualify for international study after two further courses in French - a unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, or FREN 209; and a unit of FREN 210 or above.
Reading, writing, and speaking skills and critical thinking are developed through analysis and discussion of cultural and literary texts. Issues of cultural diversity, globalization and identity are considered. Thorough grammar review. Three meetings weekly.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: FREN 201, an equivalent departmental placement score, or by permission of the instructor.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Fall and Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes: A student takes FREN 202 without having completed FREN 201 must elect one of the following courses in order to complete the language requirement - FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209. Completion of FREN 202 allows first-year students to qualify for international study after two further courses in French - a unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, or FREN 209; and a unit of FREN 210 or above.
Discussion of modern literature and film in their cultural contexts. Training in techniques of literary and cultural analysis. Materials include novels, short stories, poetry, films, screenplays, and videos from France and the Francophone world. Vocabulary building and review of key points of grammar. Frequent written practice. Attention to oral skills and listening comprehension, as needed.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: FREN 202, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
This course develops the skills of listening and speaking in French, with special emphasis on pronunciation and attention to the related skills of reading, writing, and grammatical accuracy. Participants will practice conversation through discussion of a wide variety of materials, including websites, magazine articles, short stories and films.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: FREN 202, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
In this introduction to French society and culture, we will examine France's identity crisis in the twenty-first century. From its historical position of political, economic, and intellectual leadership in Europe and the world, France is searching to maintain its difference as a defender of quality over mass appeal and the proud values of its national tradition in the face of increasing globalization. Topics covered include Franco-American relations, the European Union, immigration, the family, and the role of women in French society. Readings are drawn from a variety of sources: historical, sociological, and ethnographic. Magazine and newspaper articles along with television programs and films will provide supplementary information.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: FREN 202, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
Through the centuries, women's writing has been ignored, criticized and maligned. It was only in the 1970s and 80s that the place of women in literature was recognized and their originality and creativity fully studied. In this course, we will examine how women authors break with social language and literary codes, how they express themselves through familiar genres such as the novel and poetry but also less "mainstream" ones: fairy tales and letters. We will view these women not as the object of desire or discourse, but as subjects thinking and creating independently, expressing their desires, their wishes for themselves and humanity, their vision of society and the world, and their own experience of love, power and powerlessness.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: FREN 202, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
No topics offered in 2024-2025
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: FREN 202, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes: This is a topics course and can be taken more than once for credit as long as the topic is different each time.
Major authors from the Medieval period through the Enlightenment studied in their historical and cultural contexts, with emphasis on close reading, critical analysis, and writing in French. Attention to literary genres, including the constraints and innovations they engender, and study of key notions that will inform students' understanding of French literature and history-galanterie, courtoisie, mimesis, poetics, epistolarity, Salic law, French Wars of Religion, the Edict of Nantes, and Absolutism. We will end with consideration of pre-revolutionary works, anticipating the rise of the French Republic.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes: Any course FREN 210 or above satisfies the requirement for study abroad. Majors should consult with a member of the French Department to determine which course best suits their needs.
Students in this course will explore works of prose, poetry, fiction and autobiography and acquire the skills and techniques needed to decipher and analyze them in writing. A writing-intensive course, in which participants learn to produce a reaction paper, an essay, a creative narration, textual analysis of a poem, and a sustained argument. Special emphasis on critical thinking and interpretive judgment. Students will learn to construct logical, well thought-out essays, including the dialectical essay (la dissertation) practiced in French universities. An ongoing, intensive review of grammar underlies and anchors the course. Open to first-year students who have taken one of the prerequisite courses.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes: Any course FREN 210 or above satisfies the requirement for study abroad. Majors should consult with a member of the French Department to determine which course best suits their needs.
Major authors from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, studied in their historical and cultural contexts, with emphasis on close reading, critical analysis, and writing in French. Literary generations and movements, from the philosopher-writers of the Enlightenment through the nineteenth-century innovations of the romantic and realist writers, to groundbreaking twentieth-century experiments in prose, poetry and theater, and the painful disillusionment of the Second World War. A key course for appreciating and understanding the materials in all our courses and one that prepares students to study abroad.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Fall and Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes: Any course FREN 210 or above satisfies the requirement for study abroad. Majors should consult with a member of the French Department to determine which course best suits their needs.
This interdisciplinary course investigates the intersections of the nineteenth-century French novel with the artistic innovations of its time, with political and psychological selfhood, and with questions of culture and identity that we are still debating today. It situates the genre in its historical and social contexts, and analyzes the impact of three major nineteenth-century literary movements—Romanticism, Realism, and Naturalism—on the esthetic achievement of the writers we read. Recurring themes: the development of narrative form and structure and the novel's role in constructing a French national identity in an era of imperial expansion.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Exploring large swathes of the globe that France colonized over the centuries, this course presents writing in French from these areas. It serves as an introduction to postcolonial studies in general and the Francophone world in particular. We will discover Francophone intellectuals from France, Haiti, Martinique, Mauritius, the Congo, Quebec, and Madagascar, crisscrossing the US., Vietnam, Canada, and Gabon. Transposing France’s imperial aspiration to a universal, global Frenchness, Francophone aesthetics envisions a non-hierarchical, equitable world.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course focuses on texts that seek to reveal the reality of the self in the space of a book, including readings of confessional and autobiographical works by the twentieth-century writers Camus, Annie Ernaux, Roland Barthes, and Maryse Condé, and by their literary ancestors Augustine, Abélard, Montaigne, and Rousseau. Themes examined include: the compulsion to confess; secret sharing versus public self-disclosure; love, desire, and language; the search for authenticity; dominant discourse and minority voices; the role of the reader as accomplice, witness, judge, confessor.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: REP - Religion, Ethics, and Moral Philosophy; LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course offers students analytical tools for interpreting French history, society, and culture. The first part of the course focuses on the approaches that social science disciplines (history, anthropology, sociology) and theoretical frameworks (semiotics, Marxism, structuralism, cultural history, queer theory) have used to analyze French social phenomena. Short excerpts of texts by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Natalie Zemon-Davis, Michel Foucault, Lynn Hunt, Pierre Nora, Robert Darnton, Joan Scott and others will orient our discussions. In the second part of the course, students use these different approaches to examine the ways in which terms such as “nation,” “class,” “secularism,” and “gender” take on distinct meanings in the French context.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: SBA - Social and Behavioral Analysis; LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes: Ann E. Maurer '51 Speaking Intensive Course.
What makes literature “new”? This course examines the ways in which French writers of the 20th and 21st centuries have radically transformed the field of fiction through playful and experimental techniques. We will study the literary games they played in their efforts to break with tradition and expand the boundaries of language, genre, and form. Through a range of texts and audiovisual materials, we will trace this idea of play across the 20th and 21st centuries, with examples taken from the nouveau roman, the OuLiPo, écriture féminine, autofiction, documentary fiction, photo-texts, and digital literature. In the spirit of the materials studied, course assignments will include traditional essays as well as more experimental writing projects.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
Louis XIV sought to present his royal court at Versailles as the ultimate in monarchical splendor and power. Yet writers who frequented the court focus on its dangerous intrigues, moral corruption, and petty rivalries. The course will explore this discrepancy through close study of official and unofficial productions of the court. Royal paintings, medallions, architecture, ceremonies, and official historiography all foreground the Sun King's glory; novels, memoirs, letters, and moral treatises seem to undo the very notions of courtly magnificence put forward by the monarchy. Both elements are crucial to understanding the social, political, religious, and artistic practices that defined the court. Recent films and historical works on Versailles will help us evaluate its legacy for contemporary French culture.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
An examination of the rapid modernization and urbanization (haussmannization) of Paris in the Nineteenth Century and the changes it brought to the life of Parisians. Two authors fond of Paris: Balzac, the eternal Parisian wanderer, and Zola, the social scientist, will be the focus of this course. Balzac witnesses the birth of the bourgeoisie and of the power of money; Zola evokes the monsters they engender.
In this class we will discuss the modernization of Paris in the XIX Century and its effects on the life of Parisians. We will study a novel by Balzac, Ferragus, in which the author emphasizes the “monstrosity” of the French Capital, which is a theater of a struggle between the new and the old. In Ferragus, Balzac contrasts the old and dirty streets and neighborhoods of Paris, where shady, destitute characters roam, and the new polished “quartiers” where the bourgeoisie and the Bank have just established their bearings. Inequalities abound and extremes between the social classes become prevalent. We will also study excerpts from César Birotteau, a novel about financial speculation and the evolution of commerce in the early 1830’s.
Advertising and marketing, two factors of success evoked by Balzac in Histoire de la grandeur et décadence de César Birotteau dominate the retail market in Zola‘s Au bonheur des dames. In the latter novel, Zola recalls the birth of the large department stores and explores their successes. The availability of goods, mass consumption and cost cutting are part of the new trade strategies and symbolize the modern activity that Zola describes in Au Bonheur des dames. Zola’s goal in his Histoire naturelle et sociale d’ une famille sous le Second Empire was to portray his century as a century of conquest and action which witnessed the transformation of Paris from an unsanitary medieval town into a modern urban city. In La Curée, he recreates the commercial Paris of the “Grands Boulevards” as well as the bourgeois Paris riddled with speculation and corruption. Gold and pleasure are the two driving forces of the century.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video
Typical Periods Offered: Winter
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
The French have long been fascinated by the United States, especially since the end of the Second World War. At times, the United States has been seen as a model to be emulated in France; more often, it has stood out as the antithesis of French culture and values. This course examines French representations of the United States and of Americans through key historical and literary texts-essays, autobiographies, and fiction-as well as films. Topics to be explored include: representations of African Americans in French films (Josephine Baker), French views of Taylorization, the Coca-Cola wars of the 1950s, French-American tensions during the Cold War, especially under de Gaulle, as well as more recent debates about Euro Disney, McDonald's, Hollywood, globalization, and multiculturalism.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies; LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
For more than two hundred years, the experiences of Americans in Paris have exerted an outsized influence on American, French, and global culture. These transnational encounters have included writers and artists as well as diplomats, students, filmmakers, jazz musicians, bohemians and tourists. Drawing on a variety of historical and literary documents, among them novels and essays, along with films and music, we will trace the history of American encounters with Paris from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Through our study, Paris emerges as a long-running site of complex cultural encounters, a creative and dynamic metropolis with special significance to many different groups, among them, African Americans, women, and queer people, who have made this city a hotbed of intellectual innovation and social change.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 20
Crosslisted Courses: AMST 231
Prerequisites: None.
Distribution Requirements: HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Few experiences in recent French history have marked French collective memory as profoundly as World War II. During these years, the French dealt not only with the trauma of defeat and the German Occupation, but also with the divisive legacy of the collaborationist Vichy regime, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, a revered World War I hero. Memories of the war have continued to mark the public imagination to the present day, manifesting themselves in the various arenas of French national life. This course examines the history and memory of the French experience of World War II through historical documents, memoirs, films, literature, and songs.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Prerequisites: At least one unit of FREN 205, FREN 206, FREN 207, FREN 208, FREN 209 or above, or an equivalent departmental placement score.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Fall and Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
A close look at how the purposes, contradictions and anxieties of empire building are revealed in four nineteenth-century French-language novels. First, an analysis of the postcolonial cultural critic Edward Said’s method of contrapuntal reading will make clear the uneasy dialectic between metropolitan and colonial histories in literary texts. Armed with this critical reading strategy, we will evaluate the impact of colonial expansion on narrative form, historical consciousness and stylistic choice in Honoré de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, Claire de Duras’s Ourika, Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal and George Sand’s Indiana. Central to our preoccupations will be the global dimensions of the novel, the gender and racial dimensions of its characters, and the colonial novel’s place in the field of postcolonial studies.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: None.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
This course examines the development of antislavery thought in French literature from the end of the eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century. We will analyze the imagery, narratives and presuppositions on which authors relied and in turn reproduced to express antislavery sentiment. We will pay attention to how the Haitian Revolution; French abolition of the slave trade and other models of abolition shaped a culture of moral repugnance at France’s ongoing economic dependence on the practice of chattel slavery. Referring to this context, we will consider the particular voice of antislavery literature in producing abolitionist arguments. On what grounds did French authors understand and denounce colonial slavery? How did antislavery texts participate in a movement towards abolition? How did authors depict enslaved individuals and how did these texts contribute to nineteenth-century discourses on gender and race in France? These questions will lead students to confront the ambiguous and complicitous intersections between abolition, antislavery literature, imperial expansion and racism prior to the definitive abolition of slavery in 1848 and the establishment of France’s Second Empire.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 14
Crosslisted Courses: PEAC 235
Prerequisites: None.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course begins with a brief history of European colonization and includes a unit on French expansion as it relates to immigrant communities in Paris. Next, the class will cultivate a broad sense of the period of independences, decolonization, and the formation of new nations as a period in world history, once again contextualizing the different waves of immigration to the city of Paris. Students will use Parisian sites and a variety of materials available locally to study immigration patterns and the recent development of the Parisian cityscape while privileging immigrant perspective. Weekly assignments, which can be done flexibly, will involve visits to museums, monuments, neighborhoods, markets, and cafés. A number of local scholars, artists, and activists will provide guest lectures to guide our study. Each student will devise a project that will involve exploring the city from a viewpoint that falls within their interest, defined through discipline or theme. The latter part of the course will consist of independent work involving exploration of the city through the prism of the student’s project and it will be done in close consultation with the instructor. Interviews and shadowing of individuals (with prior permission) who are living the immigrant experience will inform the final project, which will take the form of a multimedia journal.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Crosslisted Courses: FREN 236
Prerequisites: A special hybrid course offered for Wellesley students studying abroad at American University in Paris.
Distribution Requirements: ARS - Visual Arts, Music, Theater, Film and Video; LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites:
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes:
Units: 0.5
Max Enrollment: 25
Prerequisites: None.
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Notes:
Long Live the Queen!": Women, Royalty and Power in the Literature of the Ancien Régime. This seminar will examine historical, cultural and literary portrayals of female royalty in seventeenth-century France. An object of exchange in international relations, a physical "carrier" of the future king, a regent who can rule—but not in her own name—the queen poses thorny questions for political and artistic representations of power. An analysis of her social, symbolic, and politically ambiguous status reveals the paradoxes of a woman exercising sovereignty in a time when the king's body comes to define the State. Readings will include Corneille, Racine, Lafayette, Perrault, Saint Simon, and Saint-Réal.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: FREN 210, FREN 211, or FREN 212; and one additional unit, FREN 213 or above.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
The men-and women-who made up what we refer to today as the “Age of Enlightenment” hailed from a surprising variety of backgrounds ranging from the halls of Versailles, Parisian cafés, provincial Academies, to the literary underground of pornographers and pamphleteers. Starting from the premise that cultural transformations are achieved through social connections, this course will examine Ancien Régime fictional, historical, and political networks as a means of understanding the origins of the French Revolution. This course will introduce students to the concept of social networks as a sociological theory and as a recent digital humanities approach. Through experimentation with, and critique of, existing Digital Humanities projects, students will understand network theory as a means to analyze the social structures of historical actors and literary characters. No previous digital humanities experience required.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: One of the following - FREN 210, FREN 211 or FREN 212 - and one additional unit, FREN 213 or above.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course introduces students to the main theories and practices of translation and it provides a deep understanding of the ways translating can enrich one's own critical reading and writing processes. Practical training in translation between French and English is paired with readings from the major theories of translation from Cicero to the present, with further focus on contemporary applications of translation.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: One unit of FREN 210, FREN 211, or FREN 212, and one additional unit FREN 213 or above.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Comment dit-on ‘Boston’ en français? This course examines the historical, cultural, and literary ties between the city of Boston and francophone individuals and communities, past and present. We will consider such topics as French, Quebecois, and Haitian immigrations in the 17th, 19th, and 20th centuries; local French-language newspapers and publishing houses committed to printing French books; French immersion programs in Boston-area schools; depictions of Boston's high society and college campuses by major francophone writers (Beauvoir, Sarraute, Tocqueville, and others); and the influence of Julia Child’s Boston-based cooking show The French Chef on French avant-garde theater. Combining a range of readings with site visits and field projects, this course will expose students to local resources for French speakers as well as francophone community leaders. The course will culminate in a research project on a topic that students wish to explore further.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: One unit of FREN 210, FREN 211, or FREN 212, and one additional unit FREN 213 or above.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
France continues to have complex and uneasy relationships with regions of the world that it once dominated. Decolonial thinking examines the lasting effects of colonialism, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism on societies long after colonialism has ended. Our study of policy, literature, film, and art will show how political control in the Caribbean, economic domination by manipulating currency in West and Central Africa, and, in the case of Algeria, extreme violence, cultural and religious discrimination, and immigration policy can reinvigorate the colonial project.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: FREN 210, FREN 211 or FREN 212, and one additional unit (FREN 213 or above).
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Every other year
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course seeks to open a window onto French literature and culture by exploring the travel writing of key nineteenth-century French authors. We will explore armchair travel narratives, anti-tourism essays, and travelers' real-time journals, as well as literary works that showcase travel. Writers studied include Honoré de Balzac, Chateaubriand, Maxime Du Camp, Gustave Flaubert and George Sand. Our discussions will pay particular attention to how these literary voyagers depict cross-cultural encounters and negotiate cultural differences.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: FREN 210, or FREN 211, or FREN 212, and one additional unit FREN 213 or above.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
An examination of sexualities and genders in France, from the ancien régime to the present, that signifies the ways in which sexuality and gender have been conceptualized differently in France than in places like the United States. At the end of the semester, the course will focus on recent changes in discussions of gender and sexuality and address the issue of whether traditional paradigms for explaining gender and sexuality in France still apply or whether the French might be entering a new sexual era.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: FREN 210, FREN 211, or FREN 212; and one additional unit, FREN 213 or above.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Fall and Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes:
The term belle époque (1880-1914) evokes images of Parisian boulevards, bustling cafés, glittering shop windows, and Montmartre cabarets, all symbols of modern consumer culture. No emblem of the era is as iconic as the Eiffel Tower, constructed for the World's Fair of 1889 as a tribute to French technology and progress. During the years preceding World War I, Paris was the center of the European avant-garde-indeed, the capital of modernity. While cultural ebullience is its hallmark, this period also witnessed the definitive establishment of a republican regime, the expansion of an overseas empire, and the integration of the countryside into national life. Drawing on historical documents and literary texts as well as films, posters, and songs, this interdisciplinary course examines French culture, politics, and society during the era that ushered France into the modern age.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: FREN 210, FREN 211, or FREN 212; and one additional unit, FREN 213 or above.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course approaches contemporary France through its material culture(s), asking what literary and filmic representations of everyday objects and consumer habits tell us about social values. In the decades following World War II, France simultaneously experienced rapid economic growth and the collapse of its colonial empire. Yet in the midst of these sweeping upheavals, many authors and filmmakers made a seemingly paradoxical choice: to focus on the minutiae of daily life—its consumer goods, architectures, and routines. Through close analysis of novels and films, we will consider what such a choice reveals about France’s attempts to define itself in a post-colonial and increasingly post-industrial Europe. For instance: What might a young couple’s frenzied shopping sprees suggest about class mobility? How might a woman’s rote familiarity with her kitchen appliances comment on gender roles? We will also examine how authors and filmmakers from former French colonies have used material culture to critique notions of belonging and citizenship, and how their critiques inform ongoing debates in France.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: FREN 210, FREN 211, or FREN 212; and one additional unit, FREN 213 or above.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Every three years
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
This course explores the way the French view their past through myths created to inscribe that past into national memory. We will examine modern French history and culture from the perspective of les lieux de mémoire, evaluating both thematically and chronologically the symbolic events (Bastille Day), institutions (the Napoleonic Code), people (Joan of Arc), and places (Sacré-Coeur) that have shaped French national identity. We begin by analyzing such concepts as the nation, the hexagon, and the colonial mission civilisatrice and go on to examine the legacy of key moments in French history, among them the French Revolution and the era of Napoleon, the establishment of the Third Republic and an overseas empire, the two World Wars, the Algerian conflict, and the events of May 1968.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: FREN 210, FREN 211, or FREN 212; and one additional unit, FREN 213 or above.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature; HS - Historical Studies
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
An exploration of great works of French and Francophone theater from the seventeenth century to the present. Students will read the classical playwrights Molière, Corneille, and Racine, as well as lesser known but worthy early modern women dramatists, Catherine Bernard and Olympe de Gouges; the course will follow the aesthetic and thematic shifts brought on by Marivaux, Beaumarchais, and Hugo, and compare these to the theater of contemporary Francophone playwrights such as Yasmina Réza, Marie N’Diaye, and Wajdi Mouawad. Close attention will be paid to the historical settings and material conditions in which the plays first appeared, and how they have since been adapted and reprised in different political contexts and by troupes with varying objectives. Students will watch performances and grasp the unique position that theater occupies within the French cultural tradition.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Prerequisites: FREN 210, FREN 211, or FREN 212; and one additional unit, FREN 213 or above.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Typical Periods Offered: Every three years
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes:
From Hollywood’s casting couches, to the Copenhagen City Hall and the highest echelons of the French media establishment, to the feminists in Mexico and Argentina and the demands of those in Japan, Iran, and Egypt, the #MeToo movement has raised a global wave of protests against sexual abuse. The expression of women’s voices has been undeniably transformed since the hashtag's emergence, but the aims and results of the movement, and the consequences faced by those accused, have varied from place to place. Students will consider #MeToo from a comparative and multilingual perspective, analyzing texts and media from around the globe, in a collective effort to grasp how culture, language, and nation condition the international struggle for women’s rights.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 12
Crosslisted Courses: WGST 336
Prerequisites: At least one Language & Literature course at the 200-level in any modern language department or by permission of the instructor.
Distribution Requirements: LL - Language and Literature
Other Categories: CSPW - Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing
Typical Periods Offered: Every three years
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Not Offered
Notes:
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Open to juniors and seniors.
Typical Periods Offered: Spring; Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall; Spring
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: Permission of the department.
Typical Periods Offered: Fall
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Fall
Notes: Students enroll in Senior Thesis Research (360) in the first semester and carry out independent work under the supervision of a faculty member. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with Senior Thesis (370) in the second semester.
Units: 1
Max Enrollment: 15
Prerequisites: FREN 360 and permission of the department.
Typical Periods Offered: Spring
Semesters Offered this Academic Year: Spring
Notes: Students enroll in Senior Thesis Research (360) in the first semester and carry out independent work under the supervision of a faculty member. If sufficient progress is made, students may continue with Senior Thesis (370) in the second semester.