FREN 3030- 001 French phonetics

FREN 3030 is an introductory course in French phonetics. It provides basic concepts in articulatory phonetics and phonological theory and offers students techniques for improving their own pronunciation. The course will cover the physical characteristics of individual French sounds, the relationship between French sounds and their written representation (orthography), the rules governing the pronunciation of "standard French", the most salient phonological features of selected French varieties, phonetic differences between French and English sounds, and ‘la musicalité de la langue française’, i.e., prosodic phenomena (le rythme, l’accent, l’intonation, la syllabation). Practical exercises in 'ear-training' (the perception of sounds) and 'phonetic transcription' (using IPA) are also essential components of this dynamic course. Prerequisite: FREN 2020.

TR 9:30AM - 10:45AM (Rey)

CAB 187

FREN 3031- 001 Finding Your Voice in French

Are you looking for a class that is focused on making things and doing creative projects in French?? Ready to put on your headphones and discover the thrilling new voices and perspectives within the French-speaking world of podcasts??  This course will offer you the opportunity to explore the world of French culture while also developing your voice in written and spoken French through the creation of a series of podcast episodes. Over the course of the semester, you’ll tell stories, conduct field recordings and interviews, and find your way through important questions about language, identity, power, and politics.  Come for the fun podcasting project, and stay for the ways you’ll cultivate your own sense of style, tone, creativity, and expressiveness in French!  Whether it means starting to feel more like yourself when you write and speak in French, or enjoying sounding wonderfully different from yourself, this course will encourage you to deepen your appreciation for the profound and transformative process of starting to think in French and to think of yourself as a Francophone person. 

MWF 12:00PM - 12:50PM (James)

CAB 407

FREN 3031- 002 Finding your Voice in French

Are you looking for a class that is focused on making things and doing creative projects in French?? Ready to put on your headphones and discover the thrilling new voices and perspectives within the French-speaking world of podcasts??  This course will offer you the opportunity to explore the world of French culture while also developing your voice in written and spoken French through the creation of a series of podcast episodes. Over the course of the semester, you’ll tell stories, conduct field recordings and interviews, and find your way through important questions about language, identity, power, and politics.  Come for the fun podcasting project, and stay for the ways you’ll cultivate your own sense of style, tone, creativity, and expressiveness in French!  Whether it means starting to feel more like yourself when you write and speak in French, or enjoying sounding wonderfully different from yourself, this course will encourage you to deepen your appreciation for the profound and transformative process of starting to think in French and to think of yourself as a Francophone person. 

MWF 1:00PM - 1:50PM (Geer)

CAB 211

FREN 3031- 003 Finding your Voice in French

Are you looking for a class that is focused on making things and doing creative projects in French?? Ready to put on your headphones and discover the thrilling new voices and perspectives within the French-speaking world of podcasts??  This course will offer you the opportunity to explore the world of French culture while also developing your voice in written and spoken French through the creation of a series of podcast episodes. Over the course of the semester, you’ll tell stories, conduct field recordings and interviews, and find your way through important questions about language, identity, power, and politics.  Come for the fun podcasting project, and stay for the ways you’ll cultivate your own sense of style, tone, creativity, and expressiveness in French!  Whether it means starting to feel more like yourself when you write and speak in French, or enjoying sounding wonderfully different from yourself, this course will encourage you to deepen your appreciation for the profound and transformative process of starting to think in French and to think of yourself as a Francophone person. 

TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM (Krueger)

CAB 291

FREN 3032 – 001 Text, Image, Culture

In this course, students will discover and engage critically with a broad sampling of French and Francophone cultural production representing a variety of periods, genres, approaches, and media. Students will read, view, write about and discuss a range of works that may include poetry, painting, prose, music, theater, films, graphic novels, photographs, essays, and historical documents. Prerequisite: FREN 3031..

TR 9:30AM - 10:45AM (Boutaghou)

CAB 042

FREN 3032 - 002  Text, Image, Culture “Contemplative reading and writing”

This section will explore ways of using contemplative practices to

- become more observant of how French-speaking artists (authors, filmmakers, poets, etc.) communicate through diverse media;

- rebalance writing habits to transform anxieties into productive energy;

- discover the joys of reading in French and sharing one's enjoyment with others both orally and in writing.

TR 11:00AM - 12:15PM  (Ogden)

French House 100

FREN 3032-003  Text, Image, Culture

In this course, students will discover and engage critically with a broad sampling of French and Francophone cultural production representing a variety of periods, genres, approaches, and media. Students will read, view, write about and discuss a range of works that may include poetry, painting, prose, music, theater, films, graphic novels, photographs, essays, and historical documents. Prerequisite: FREN 3031.

MW 03:30PM - 04:45PM (Simotas)

CAB 066

FREN 3032-004  Text, Image, Culture

In this course, students will discover and engage critically with a broad sampling of French and Francophone cultural production representing a variety of periods, genres, approaches, and media. Students will read, view, write about and discuss a range of works that may include poetry, painting, prose, music, theater, films, graphic novels, photographs, essays, and historical documents. Prerequisite: FREN 3031.

MW 02:00PM - 03:15PM (Onyima)

PV8 102

FREN 3037  French for Global Development and Humanitarian Action

Designed for students seeking to develop advanced linguistic skills in oral and written French and cultural competence in preparation for careers related to global development and humanitarian action. Discussions and assignments revolve around case studies and simulated professional situations drawn from real-life global development and humanitarian aid initiatives in the francophone world.

MWF 10:00AM - 10:50AM (James)

CAB 191

FREN 3043 The French-Speaking World III: Modernities “How the Old becomes New”

In this course, we will reflect upon some of the key questions that arise when we engage in the process of literary, artistic, or intellectual creation. How do we make something new out of what is old? How do we nurture originality in the face of mounting societal pressures to conform? How can we learn from the past without becoming subservient to it? By examining the works of modern and contemporary writers, artists, and intellectuals who engage in explicit dialogue with the views and voices of their predecessors, we will explore different ways in which innovation stems from tradition. We will read the French writer Colette who, in writing a memoir of her parents, comes to discover how her identity is shaped by what she has inherited from each of them; the French-Chinese writer Cheng who, elected to the French Academy, writes in a French imbued with Chinese language and thought; the Belgian-Rwandan musician Stromae who rewrites and performs in the 21stcentury, the aria of Bizet’s 19th-century opera, which, in turn, was inspired by a short story published earlier by Mérimée; and the Belgian feminist philosopher Despret who revisits the thesis of human exceptionalism that undergirds Descartes’ philosophy of the 17thcentury by reapproaching it from multiple perspectives that respond to the ethical, political, and ecological exigencies of our own century.

TR 12:30PM - 01:45PM (Lyu)

NAU 142

FREN 3050 History and Civilization of France : Middle Ages to Revolution

You love France and are intrigued by its long and rich history? This course offers you the opportunity to explore your interests and deepen your knowledge of the major events, political figures, and the artistic, cultural, and intellectual movements, prior to the Revolution, that have shaped France as we know it and whose legacy is seen and felt to this day. Setting the stage with a survey of prehistoric and Roman Gaul, we will focus on the thousand-year period known as the Middle Ages, followed by the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and the Enlightenment. Subjects will be discussed in terms of both their original historical context and their evolving significance – often contested – to later and present generations. Films, visual images, and primary documents will supplement readings from secondary historical texts. Assignments will include group projects, in-class presentations, written papers, and quizzes.

TR 03:30PM - 04:45 (Ferguson)

French House 100

FREN 3559 :  New Course in French and Francophone Cultural Topics: Cultivating Your Voice in French Through Theater

Building on skills acquired in FREN 3031 (Finding Your Voice in French), this class helps students reflect on and become more confident in their oral use of French.  Students will learn key principles of French phonetics, intonation, and rhythm, and practice applying this knowledge by reading aloud and performing plays in a supportive and comfortable atmosphere.  Throughout, students will consider the role of the whole body in communication; explore the relationship between identity/character/mood and oral expression; and develop habits of noticing and assimilating new phrases.

Pre-requisites: FREN 3031 must be completed before this class; FREN 3032 must be completed before or during this class.

TR 02:00PM - 03:15PM (Ogden)

BRN 330

FREN 4031 - Writing with Style and Precision

In this course you will review and extend your knowledge of French grammar and style, becoming more confident about how best to structure the French language and how to express yourself with clarity and concision. Regular short writing assignments will begin with the analysis of a model text. You will revise first drafts of compositions in response to feedback and through peer editing in order to produce a polished final version. Key aspects of grammar, such as tense use – especially the past tenses – the subjunctive, participles, and so on, will be studied systematically and in response to questions that arise through the collective writing process.

TR 02:00PM - 03:15PM (Ferguson)

French House 100

FREN 4410 - The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment, or Les Lumières, was one of the most important movements in Western intellectual history. Its proponents fought against superstition and a corrupt monarchy with notoriously witty essays and with fictions that seemed, on the surface, to be about sentimentality, sex, or exotic lands. In this course, we will consider how famous philosophes such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau brought France into a new era and inadvertently inspired the American and then the French Revolutions. We will examine how their writings treated issues such as: slavery, women's sexuality, blasphemy, the conflict between religion and science, and moral relativism among various countries. We will also focus on strategies used by the authors to hide their provocative ideas from government censors.

W 03:30PM - 06:00PM (Tsien)

French House 100

FREN 4585 - Visions of the Mediterranean

Language use is often linked to a landscape. In this course, we will see how the mixture of French and other languages can be connected to the Mediterranean landscape. Capitals of the Maghreb and the Mashrek are still visibly Francophone, as we can see in the street of Algiers, Tunis, Cairo or Beirut. French in the Maghreb and the Mashrek can be considered a mixture, an encounter between several civilizations. In this course, we will discover four Francophone writers. Each author studied negotiates its representations of Maghrebian cities singularly, from a French or Francophone perspective. We will examine works by novelists, painters, filmmakers and photographers from the Mediterranean region.

TR 12:30PM - 01:45PM (Boutaghou)

French House 100

FRTR 2552 Beats Without Borders: French and Francophone Popular Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries

In recent years, music from the French-speaking world has been rapidly gaining new audiences thanks in large part to streaming platforms, social media, and increased international televisual exposure. While global listeners can consume and enjoy this music due to its universal appeal, details regarding historical and social context, lyrics, and musical style are often lost. To foster a better understanding of these topics, this class explores popular singers and their work, cross-cultural exchange, and musical practices in France and Francophone countries from the beginnings of music recording technology to the present. Some of the genres studied include French chanson, different varieties of rock, pop, hip hop, rap, slam, zouk, and raï. This course is taught in English. No prior knowledge of French or music is required.

MWF 10:00AM - 10:50AM (Ice)

CAB 368

FREN 5560/8560 Senses of Fiction

How has literary criticism engaged with the senses, and how does engagement with the senses lead us to reconsider the relationship between literature and material culture, science, affect, nature, and the environment? To answer these questions, we will focus primarily on olfaction, taking into account more broadly how we read fiction and the spectrum of senses.  Nineteenth-century France saw a surge of interest in smells and odor perception. Health reformers mapped the foul odors of Paris’s public spaces while individuals attended to the scent of their homes and their bodies. This heightened interest in eliminating, masking, and improving odors corresponded to an uneasy relationship between humans and their primitive past. Olfaction was generally considered a less refined, more animalistic sense. After all, as Freud pointed out, bipedal creatures rely on visual horizons, not scent trails, for safety. Quadrupeds sniff the ground; humans read poetry. Yet it is difficult to write about olfactory perception without turning to poetic devices such as metaphor and simile. To write about scent is to join a mode of communication unique to humans, with a sense considered by many to be an evolutionary throwback. Nonetheless, writers from Apollinaire to Zola have earned accolades and infamy for how vividly their words evoke smells.In this course we will explore the stench of city streets, the fragrance of perfume, olfactory perception and language, and the often surprising scent references in nineteenth-century works by authors including Baudelaire, Desbordes-Valmore, Zola, Huysmans, and Rachilde. Reading related texts of the era (books of etiquette, hygiene manual, scientific treatises, the popular press), we will consider how fiction and extra-literary writing on olfaction met, permeated, and illuminated one another. 

•             Open to graduate students with reading knowledge of French (primary works are in French)

•             Course conducted in French and English (depending on students’ backgrounds and the language of secondary readings)

•             Written work in French for most French MA students, or English for students from other departments and French PhD students writing their theses in English

T 03:30PM - 06:00PM (Krueger)

CAB 407

FREN 5570/8570 25 Years of French Literature of the Twenty-First Century, or French Fixxion Now!

When I first taught an iteration of this course, in the early aughts, contemporary French literature seemed to be in crisis. In his incendiary rant La littérature sans estomac (2002), for example, Pierre Jourde lamented the lack of aesthetic standards in the production of contemporary French fiction, claiming instead that the market had been overrun by mediocrity. Similarly, Jean-Philippe Domecq created a stir when he attacked a certain cadre of literary critics who, he claimed, do nothing but elevate the vast array of livres de divertissement to the status of “high art.” Acclaimed (and highly provocative) author Richard Millet, in L’Enfer du roman: Réflexions sur la postlittérature (2010), issued a scathing critique of the contemporary novel, lashing out against its role in the degradation of the French language. And in one of the few articles on the state of the field to have ever appeared in the New York Times, Alan Riding pondered the curious state of “French” literature in 2006, a year in which not only were the winners of four of the country’s most esteemed literary prizes awarded to “foreign” authors (American Jonathan Littel, to cite one example, won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix de l’Académie française for Les Bienveillantes), but one of the most popular novels of the year (in France as well as in the US) was actually written in the 1940s by a Russian-born émigré who would later disappear in the camps (Irène Nemirovsky, Suite française). All of which seemed to beg the question, as Riding asked: “Is French literature burning?”

Lately, however, after many years marked by the legacy of the retour au récit (Echenoz, Toussaint, Redonnet, Michon…), signs of a new kind of creative and even socially-conscious dynamism have emerged. From the roman d’enquête, “reparative” narratives informed by an ethics of healing and care, innovative “image-texts,” récits de filiation, and documentary-style "exofictions" and "empiritexts" to novels that exhibit a fascination for animots, transfuges de classe, and a particularly Gallic iteration of eco-consciousness (I’m not sure whether to call it “nature writing” or not), the literary scene seems to have been enlivened by the inescapably present world in which authors—indeed, in which all of us—dwell. The recent crowning of Annie Ernaux as the latest Nobel Prize winner marks this moment—and seems to acknowledge this trend—in a significant and symbolic way. Rather than propose a definitive answer to Riding’s problematic and expressly provocative question, then, this survey of some of the most acclaimed and/or widely read prose works of the last 25 years (more or less) invites participants to ascertain the situation for themselves. Along with introducing a number of essential and readily available resources for scholars and enthusiasts of contemporary French literature, including the major journals, anthologies, radio programs, websites, and blogs, the course will also seek to provide opportunities to read and, more importantly, critique cutting-edge criticism on the works under consideration. Consider this part of the seminar a practicum on critical writing about contemporary French writing.

While we will read all primary texts (and some critical analyses) in French, the course will be taught in both French and English depending on the object of our analysis (and, of course, on our collective mood).

F 9:30AM - 12:00PM (Blatt)

French House 100

FREN 5585/8585  The Intimacies of French Empire

The central goal of this interdisciplinary seminar is to explore the intimate as an essential site for understanding the workings of colonial power and the experiences of those subjected to it in the French empire from the seventeenth century to the present. We will begin with foundational scholarship in postcolonial studies on the management of bodies and sentiments in imperial contexts and then explore a new wave of scholarship that challenges us to expand our conceptions of the intimate beyond the biopolitics of sexuality and reproduction.

Three overlapping questions will orient our exploration:

First, what are the relationships that constitute “domains of the intimate” in colonial and postcolonial contexts? Recent work on the intellectual, social, and cultural worlds of French colonialism and Francophone anti-colonialism suggest that we look beyond the domestic arenas of marriage, concubinage, or parenthood, to consider such relations as friendship, intellectual partnership, political solidarity, workplace collaboration, wartime camaraderie, patronage, rivalry, or the emotional interiority of the self. Scholars have always acknowledged the power and violence shot through the intimate, but important theorists like Franz Fanon and recent work on French colonial law and violence remind us that these can be constitutive sources of brutal intimacy in the prison, plantation, or torture chamber.

Second, and related, what are the spaces of the intimate? If the household, school, census office, and public health bureau are well-established sites of colonial biopolitics, what of the political party or parliamentary chamber, workshop or factory, farm or plantation, ship or barracks, battlefield or sports pitch, newspaper office or religious community, neighborhood or café, among others? Or the imagined spaces of personal correspondence, written narratives, creative works, or political treatises?

Finally, what are the material forms through which intimacy is created, articulated, negotiated, and challenged? How do these enduring materialities shape not only the power dynamics of colonialism itself, but also the possibilities of resistance and democratic reconstruction after the end of formal empire? What impact do they have on the sources that sustain the historical and humanistic study of the intimacies of empire, and with what consequences for the scholarly geographies of the field?

Readings will cover a broad chronological span from the early modern period to the postcolonial present. We will have the opportunity to discuss some of these texts with their authors, who will join our seminar in person or virtually.

The seminar will allow students in a variety of fields to develop conceptual and theoretical understandings of imperial intimacies, as well as of the history of French colonialism, and to think more deeply about how that history intersects with their own research and teaching agendas. It will offer preparation for teaching, research, and other endeavors in French history and culture, European studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, global history, and related fields. This course is cross listed with HIEU 5585/8585.

R 03:30PM - 06:00PM (Horne)

PV8 102