Course

FREN 201   Intermediate French I

Professor

Odile Chilton

CRN

95082

 

Schedule

Mon Tu Th  9:20 -10:20 am     OLINLC 210

Distribution

OLD: D

NEW: FOREIGN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE & CULTURE

For students who have completed three to five years of high-school French or who have already acquired a solid knowledge of elementary grammar.  In this course, designed as an introduction to contemporary French civilization and culture, students will be able to reinforce their skills in grammar, composition and spoken proficiency, through the use of short texts, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as video.

 

Course

FREN 202   Intermediate French II

Professor

Odile Chilton

CRN

95083

 

Schedule

Mon Tu Th  10:30 -11:30 am    OLINLC 118

Distribution

OLD: D

NEW: FOREIGN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE & CULTURE

For students with three to four years of high school French or who have acquired a solid knowledge of elementary grammar. In this course, designed as an introduction to contemporary French civilization and culture, students will be able to reinforce their skills in grammar, composition and spoken proficiency, through the use of short texts, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as video.

 

Course

FREN 220   French through Film

Professor

Odile Chilton

CRN

95084

 

Schedule

Mon Wed     1:30 -2:50 pm       OLINLC 118

Distribution

OLD: D

NEW: FOREIGN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE & CULTURE

In this intermediate course we will explore major themes of French culture and civilization through the study of individual films ranging from the silent era to the present and covering a wide variety of genres. We will examine the interaction between the French and their cinema in terms of historical circumstances, aesthetic ambitions, and self-representation.

 

Course

FREN 270   Advanced Composition and Conversation

Professor

Marina van Zuylen

CRN

95085

 

Schedule

Wed             3:00 -4:20 pm       OLINLC 206

Fr                1:30 -2:50 pm       OLINLC 210

Distribution

OLD: B/D

NEW: FOREIGN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE & CULTURE

This course is primarily intended to help students fine-tune their command of spoken and written French. It focuses on a wide and diverse selection of writings (short works of fiction, poems, philosophical essays, political analysis, newspaper editorials or magazine articles, etc.) loosely organized around a single theme.  The readings provide a rich ground for cultural investigation, intellectual exchange, in-class debates, in-depth examination of stylistics and, of course, vocabulary acquisition.  Students are encouraged to write on a regular basis and expected to participate fully to class discussion and debates.  A general review of grammar is also conducted throughout the course.

 

Course

FREN  / LIT 3211   Modern French Plays

Professor

Justus Rosenberg

CRN

95440

 

Schedule

Mon Wed     4:30 – 5:50 pm  ASP 302

Distribution

OLD: D

NEW: FOREIGN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE & CULTURE

Related interest: Theater

A study of plays, “revolutionary” in their own right, misleadingly referred to as The Theater of the Absurd or of Cruelty. Their authors bring to the stage, in unusual forms, images and symbols, works that are simultaneously realistic in their depiction of human motives and values, expressionistic or surrealistic in their episodic structure, explicit of implicit in their ideology. No projecting back at its spectators a comforting image of a social milieu with which they are familiar; no articulation of sentiments and beliefs to which they can all subscribe; no systematic simplification of every issue to give them the satisfying impression of having understood the point or message of the play. What they offer is more challenging, appeals as much, if not more, to our mind as to our emotions and aesthetic sensibilities. Aware of this we read, discuss, write and time permitting, conduct a workshop, on: Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame; Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and The Bald Soprano; Genet’s The Maids; Sartre’s The Devil and the God Almighty; Adamov’s Professor Taranne; Arrabla’s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria. Students with an adequate command of French are encouraged to read in the original text and discuss it in French during a weekly tutorial for two extra credits.

 

Course

FREN 338   Reading for the Plot: Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola

Professor

Marina van Zuylen

CRN

95086

 

Schedule

Th               4:00 -6:20 pm       OLIN 310

Distribution

OLD: D

NEW: FOREIGN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE & CULTURE

Cross-listed:  Literature

This course addresses the complicated relationship nineteenth-century French novelists entertained with the notion of literary entertainment.  While they welcomed the feuilleton format (publishing their novels in cliff-hanging installments), novelists often resisted the hostile take-over of a public begging them to surrender stylistic experimentation for plot, aestheticism for entertainment.  This conflict of interest figures prominently in the novels studied in the course (i.e., Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir, Balzac’s Illusions perdues, Flaubert’s Education sentimentale, Zola’s L’Œuvre, Huysmans’ A Rebours ).  In addition to primary readings, we will read secondary material about plot (Aristotle, Lukacs, Barthes, Brooks, D.A. Miller), resistance to pleasure in art (Plato, Augustine, Baudelaire, Adorno), and mimesis (Auerbach, Genette, Derrida, Prendergast).  Students will be expected to have read Illusions perdues over the summer.   Students will be able to purchase the long novels in English and in French and will have the possibility to read one with the other.  Taught in French.