91576 |
FREN 201 Intermediate French I |
Odile
Chilton |
M T . Th . |
8:50 am -9:50 am |
OLINLC 118 |
FLLC |
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. Students will meet in small groups with
the French tutor for one extra hour per week.
Interested students should consult with Prof. Eric Trudel
prior to registration. Class size:
20
91577 |
FREN 202 Intermediate French II |
Matthew
Amos |
. T W Th . |
1:30 pm- 2:30 pm |
OLINLC 206 |
FLLC |
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. Students will meet in small groups, with the
French tutor for one extra hour per week.
Interested students should consult with Prof. Eric Trudel
prior to registration. Class
size: 20
91575 |
FREN 215 French through Translation |
Odile
Chilton |
M . W . . |
10:10am-11:30 am |
OLINLC 118 |
FLLC |
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. Interested students should consult with Prof.
Eric Trudel prior to registration. Class
size: 20
91949 |
FREN 240 WHY LITERATURE? TOPICS IN French Literature |
Matthew
Amos |
. T . Th . |
3:10 pm -4:30 pm |
OLINLC 208 |
FLLC |
Serving
as an overview of modern French literature, this class will focus on an
assortment of texts (novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays) that reflect
on themselves as texts, on themselves as literature. From a variety of
different perspectives, they all ask the question: why literature? How
can literature serve as a response to a problem (be it personal or political),
or, taken from another angle, why is the questioning at the heart of literature
often seemingly the sole solution? This class will explore many of the
ways in which, over the past three and a half centuries, literature has
attempted to grasp its own essence. Readings from
Diderot, Rousseau, Stendhal, Balzac, Nerval,
Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Breton, Sartre and Duras (among others). Taught in French. Interested students should consult
with Prof. Eric Trudel prior to registration. Class size: 20
91950 |
HR
245 HUMANISM AND ANTIHUMANISM IN 20TH
CENTURY FRENCH THOUGHT |
Eric
Trudel |
.
T . Th . |
3:10
pm - 4:30 pm |
OLIN
202 |
HUM |
See
Human Rights section for description.
91951 |
FREN 344 THE LOST AND FOUND ART OF CONVERSATION: FROM
MONTAIGNE TO BECKETT |
Marina van Zuylen |
. . W . . |
1:30 pm -3:50 pm |
OLIN 301 |
FLLC |
Since
Socrates, conversation has been admired for its seamless ability to perform
thinking, to integrate knowledge into
society, and to supplement savoir (knowledge)
with savoir-vivre (the art of
living). But conversation, precisely because it clashes with the useful,
has often been condemned as merely artful,
dangerous for its proximity to the decadent and the idle. In his Essais, Montaigne
dwells on the relationship between idle conversational banter and
self-reflection. With Pascal, idleness
becomes the cornerstone of our existential malaise.
With the advent of the bourgeoisie, the art of conversation will retreat
backstage, replaced by a relationship to work that Paul Lafargue
(Marx's son-in-law) describes as an
excuse for not tackling la vie elle-même.
Paradoxically, work has become an escapist diversion and the time to
rest and to converse has been usurped by the false plenitude of mechanical
labor. Proust’s In Search of Lost
Time adds a new twist to this dichotomy: for the social climber,
conversation becomes work, a
laborious exercise in appearing rather than being. This course examines how these tensions are
played out both on a rhetorical and on a thematic level. After reading a
selection of critiques of “pure” work (Aristotle, Marx, and Nietzsche), we will
examine texts that expose the vanity of conversation (Pascal’s Pensées,
Molière’s Le Misanthrope), novels
that thematize the tensions between work and
conversation as social and cultural phenomena (Stendhal,
Le Rouge et le noir), and works that
offer up possible aesthetic theories of conversation (Proust, Contre Sainte Beuve
and excerpts from La Recherche).
We will also scrutinize instances where conversation becomes a
mere filler (Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot). Students will also read Paul Lafargue’s Le Droit à
la paresse and Corinne Maier’s Laziness, the recent French bestseller
attacking the dangers of work. Taught in French. Class size: 15