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.

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.

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.

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.

This course considers the history of the Cannes Film Festival and employs a diverse array of published and audio-visual materials to foster student fluency in written and spoken French. The course seeks to promote understanding of how a minor festival in a town on the Côte d’Azur would develop and come to gain world-wide recognition, rivaling the Oscars in matters of glamour, star allure, and cinematic cachet. To document the operation and impact of this annual event as well as the festival’s formative role in French film culture, the course will rely on French radio shows, newspapers reports, magazine and TV coverage, along with selected films, memoirs, and a bande dessinée.

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.