8 credits. This course is designed for students who wish to acquire a strong grasp of the French language and culture in the shortest time possible. Students with little or no previous experience of French will complete the equivalent of three semesters of college-level French. The semester course meets ten hours a week, using the French in Action video series as well as other pedagogical methods, and will be followed by a four-week stay at the Institut de Touraine (Tours, France). There the students will continue daily intensive study of the French language and culture while living with French families.

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.

This is the second installment of the French survey, beginning with Rousseau and ending with contemporary francophone fiction. The class will reflect on the impact of France's notion of the "mouvement littéraire" (Hugo's definition of Romanticism, Balzac vs. Flaubert's statements about Realism, Huysmans and décadentisme, etc.) to rethink the notion of genre (i.e., the prose-poem, the novella, the autobiography). While spanning over two centuries of poetry and prose, the course will introduce the students to themes and modes of discourse that have dominated French literary history. Experimental writings about the self (Senancour, Rousseau, Stendhal), the crisis of mimesis (Balzac, Flaubert, Sand, Sarraute), the aesthetics of crime (Baudelaire, Villiers de l'Isle Adam, Gide), the poetics of interiority (Proust). The last part of the class will be devoted to francophone authors (Césaire, Chamoiseau, Condé, Bouraoui). All works read in French. Three years of French required or permission by instructor.

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.

A study of texts dealing with events that changed the political, social and cultural history of France, by authors whose writing combined the best in expository and creative literature. We analyze the rhetorical and stylistic devices they used and practice applying these in short papers and oral presentations. The course is conducted in French; reasonable fluency in the language is expected. Among the readings: Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks; Villehardouin's Account of the Conquest of Constantinople, Commyne's Report on the 100 Years War; The Minutes of Joan d'Arc's Trial, Mignet's Fall of the Bastille, The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens, Michelet's Praise of Revolutionary Volunteers of 1792, DeToqueville's Appraisal of the 1848 Revolution, Lissagaray's History of the 1871 Paris Commune, Sarcey's Account of the Establishment of the Third Republic, Siegfried's Portrait of France between the two World Wars, Vercor's Observations on the Life and Feelings of the French during the 1940-1945 German Occupation; and deGaulle's farewell speech.

See Literature section for description.