More Information

Winter Quarter

Dept	Course No and Title	Instructor
FRENCH (W19)	2B INTERMEDIATE	STAFF
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 2A or equivalent. See Schedule of Classes for section times.
FRENCH (W19)	60 GRAMMAR/COMPOSITION	NOLAND, C.
French 60: Advanced Grammar and Composition Professor Carrie Noland Winter, 2019 French 60 is a fun way to review what you learned in second year French language courses. We play games, write slam poems, and tell stories while simultaneously mastering the finer points of French grammar. We will have ample time for conversation as well as a variety of writing assignments. Readings include short excerpts from novels and poems by major French and Francophone authors, plus one longer work. In French.
FRENCH (W19)	1B FUNDAMENTALS	MIJALSKI, M.
Students are taught to conceptualize in French as they learn to understand, read, write, and speak. Students develop an awareness of and sensibility to French and Francophone life and culture through reading, film, the media, and class discussion. Classes are conducted in French and meet daily. See Schedule of Classes for section times.
FRENCH (W19)	1AB INTENSIVE FRENCH	MIJALSKI, M.
Accelerated first half of first-year French. Students are taught to conceptualize in French as they learn to read, write, and speak. Students develop an awareness of and sensibility to French and Francophone life and culture through reading, viewing, and discussion.
FRENCH (W19)	119 19TH CT FRENCH LIT	LITWIN, C.
FRE 119 – The Long-Nineteenth-Century French Novel No period in the history of French literature seems to have inspired greater novelists, and greater ambitions for the novel as a genre, than the 19th Century. Indeed, the relationship is strong between on the one hand the rise and the variety of a genre that ambitioned to portray modern society as such, and on the other an unprecedented experience of fast-pace capitalistic social and economic change and extraordinary political instability in the aftermath of the Revolution (three revolutions, three republics, two emperors, two monarchic restorations…). This course is dedicated to the close-reading of excerpts from masterpiece novels by authors ranging from Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, Sand, Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, to Proust. We will also read one novel in full. The seminar is conducted in French.
FRENCH (W19)	150 THE ABSURD	LITWIN, C.
FRENCH 150 – The Absurd We call absurd a system in which the inferences we draw from a certain set of premises contradict those very premises. Yet, what would happen if human existence was itself part of such a system? How would the life and the condition of humans be any different from the one we experience? In post-WW2 France these questions became so central in art, literature and philosophy, that the substantive “the absurd” was invented to refer to the works of a heterogeneous set of writers which featured among others Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet and Emil Cioran. Indeed, they did not and could not rally around a cause that was not one, and therefore they did not form a movement. Yet they did take part in a diverse philosophical, literary and aesthetic moment, which was marked by the traumatic experience of the two world wars and characterized by a profound sense of collapse of all the metaphysical foundations of the European continent's self-defining ideals of religion, culture, civilization and historical progress. They shared a somewhat common experience of impossible metaphysical reconciliation between the brutish factuality of existence and the human desire for meaning — a common experience of the inherent absurdity and irremediable sense of alienation of the human condition. This course sets out to explore how this metaphysical experience of the absurd resulted paradoxically in one of the most fecund and creative periods in artistic and literary forms. While we will focus primarily on essays and plays by the afore-mentioned writers, we will also discuss the philosophical background of these works and their relations with influential precursors such as Dostoevsky and Kafka. The course is taught in English.
FRENCH (W19)	50 LITERARY REBELS	FREI, P.
French 50 Prof. Peter Frei TuTh 12:30-1:50 HICF 100Q Literary Rebels Throughout its tormented history, France was the battleground for the invention of modern Western societies. Literature and the arts hereby played a strategic role in imagining, giving form to a new social and political order. From the late medieval gangster-poet François Villon, the philosophers of the French Revolution and the avantgarde writings of a Arthur Rimbaud to the contemporary reimagining of the social self in the works of Annie Ernaux, the figure of the “rebel” – radically questioning, even contesting the world and its laws – will allows us to better understand how literary fictions became not only the mirror of their time, but also how they can be read as agents of the social and political revolutions that will define modernity. The course will be taught in English. All readings will be available on Canvas at the beginning of the quarter. Grading: Midterm/Final exams as well as short reading/writing assignments throughout the quarter.
FRENCH (W19)	170 LITERARY REVOLUTION: RABELAIS AND HIS EUROPEAN AFTERLIFE	FREI, P.
French 170 / Euro St 101B Prof. Peter Frei Tu/Th 11:00-12:20 HIB 220 Literary Revolution: Rabelais and his European Afterlife The work of French writer François Rabelais offers a unique insight into the cultural, intellectual and political dynamics which make the Renaissance of the 16th century one of the most fascinating era’s in French and European history. Moreover, the reception of his fictions and the debates it provoked from the 16th to the 18th century allow us to better understand the stakes at the heart of the foundation of the modern Western world. We will first take a closer look at Rabelais’s writings in the context of their time and then turn to their literary, philosophical and political afterlife leading up to the French Revolution of 1789. The course will be taught in English. All readings will be made available on Canvas at the beginning of the quarter. Grading: Midterm/Final exams as well as short reading/writing assignments throughout the quarter. N.B. French minors/majors who are required to complete a course taught in French are asked to contact Prof. Frei in advance.