A course designed for students who have completed Basic French or two years of high-school French. The emphasis will be placed on building vocabulary and reinforcing familiarity with grammar. Through the reading of short texts, students will be encouraged to express themselves with confidence and accuracy on a variety of topics both in speaking and in writing.

Intended to help students fine-tune their command of French and develop a good sense for the most appropriate ways of communicating ideas and facts in French, this course emphasizes translation both as an exercise as well as a craft in its own right. The course will also address grammatical, lexical and stylistic issues. Translation will be practiced from English into French, and vice versa, with a variety of texts drawn from different genres (literary and journalistic). Toward the end of the semester, students will be encouraged to embark on independent projects.

Intended to help students fine-tune their command of spoken and written French, this course focuses on short works of fiction around which students are encouraged both to write short weekly papers and to discuss these with the rest of the class. The atmosphere is warm and intimate, and the reading is intended to provide students with the very best shorter works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors: Daudet, Constant, YourcenarSand, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Gide, Sartre, Camus, Robbe-Grillet. Short reviews of grammar will also be conducted throughout the course.

This is the first in a two-part series of courses designed to introduce students of French to masterpieces of French literature. The course is designed to give students a solid grounding in the history and development of French literature and ideas from the Middle Ages to the middle of the eighteenth century. This course will focus on the romance of Tristan and Iseult, the poems of Marie de France, the birth of Humanism (Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais and Montaigne), poets of the Pléiade, French Classicism (Racine, Molière), the crisis in French thought (Descartes, Pascal), and the rise of the Enlightenment with Bayle, Voltaire and Diderot. Open to students with at least two years of French.

An in-depth study of how women, whose thoughts, actions, attitudes and behavior were viewed as threatening the prevailing social order and moral code, are portrayed at various historical periods in plays, poetry, novels and short stories. In analyzing these works, all critical approaches - traditional, formalistic, sociological, psychological, archetypal and feminist - will be brought to bear. Among the texts read: Carmen by Merimée, Manon Lescaut by Prévost, Cousin Bette by Balzac, Nana by Zola, Théroigne de Méricourt by Herireu, Les Epaves by Baudelaire, Thérèse Desqueroux by Mauriac. All readings in French; the course is conducted in French.

A study of representative works by three authors who were instrumental in affecting and shaping thoughts, feelings, and attitudes - on religion and faith in general, political freedoms and institutions, social values and the art and sciences - that still prevail. In our reading we trace those ideas that represent radical departures from old norms, beliefs, and practices and examine closely the literary forms and techniques used by each respective writer to convey his message convincingly and artistically. Taught in English.