Students learn to communicate in French through verbal interaction with instructors and classmates. Comprehension of spoken French is stressed, and all classes are in French. Basic concepts of French grammar are introduced and practiced in written homework as well as in classroom activities. Readings based on cultural information provide frequent opportunities for discussion of French and francophone cultures. The language Laboratory program provides additional opportunities for listening practice.

Students review and develop their knowledge of French language and culture. Extensive reading and writing assignments are complemented by classroom discussion and small-group activities. Classes are conducted in French only. Prerequisite: French 1C or equivalent.

Exercices in French conversation drawn from readings and recordings of contemporary social, historical, political and artistic interest. Emphasizes comparisons and contrasts with corresponding questions in the U.S. Recommended for students going to France on E.A.P. Prerequisite: French 2C

In this course, we will focus on cultural encounters between France and Asia. In particular, we will study French and Francophone authors and directors who have explored in their work the complex relationship between France and India, China, and Vietnam from a historical, literary, and cinematic perspective. We will address questions of colonialism, identity formation, gender, and language and will try to situate Franco-Asian cultural exchanges within the larger context of the colonial, postcolonial, and transnational conditions. We will read novels by Octave Mirbeau, François Cheng, Linda Lê, and Marguerite Duras and will watch films by Dai Sijie, Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, and Anh Hung Tran.

This introductory course will explore representations of art in French literature from the 18th to the 20th century. We will examine how literary texts engage with other art forms (mainly plastic arts), how writers reflect upon their own activity and the aesthetic conventions of their time through the dramatic description of artworks. By reading closely short texts by Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire and Camus, we will cover a variety of genres including the novel, the short story, poetry and theatre. This course is given in French, and discussions will be primarily in French.

In this course, we will focus on French literature and culture at the end of the nineteenth century. In particular, we will discuss novels, poetry, short stories, paintings, art criticism, and films that explore major decadent themes such as the invention of the self and the construction of fin-de-siècle femininities and masculinities. We will question the role of language and narrative technique in the creation of the decadent literary space and explore the latter’s political and historical dimensions. We will study works by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Huysmans, Flaubert, Rachilde, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Mirbeau, Moreau, Redon, Visconti, and Buñuel.

This course will study various French novels that depict the French experience of World War II – the humiliation of defeat, the German Occupation, collaboration, deportation, and resistance. We will use Philippe Burrin’s study France Under the Germans to provide a historical perspective and then focus on the ways the different novels deal with the war, the different kinds of experiences they treat, and how fiction and historical reality are intermixed in the novels in strikingly different ways. We will also deal with the ways the novels present the devastating human losses and psychological effects of this war. One fictional film and sequences from a documentary film will also be shown and discussed in relation to the novels. Three short papers will be required, as well as a take-home final.

Required texts:
Philippe Burrin, France Under the Germans
Albert Camus, La Peste
Jean Dutourd, Au Bon Beurre
Vercors, Le Silence de la Mer
Marguerite Duras, La Douleur

This course will treat the work of three French writers of the eighteenth-century (Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot) in relation to the debates of their day concerning religion and politics—debates that they themselves played a large role in setting off. Our focus will include their critique of religion and the for them destructive role it played in modern societies
because of the way it had become involved with governments, rulers, and struggles
for political power. It will also include those works or portions of those works in
which these eighteenth-century writers discuss the potential benefits of religion for
society. Finally, it will include a discussion of the way they used literature—especially
comic literature—to defend their views concerning religion and to foster religious
tolerance. Same as ComLit 102W. Taught IN ENGLISH. Required prerequisite: satisfactory completion of the lower-division writing requirement.