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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Three meetings weekly.

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.

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. 

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.

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.