Ian Curtis

This is a yearlong course offering the equivalent of three semesters of conventional language study. This course includes required practice sessions with a teaching assistant, which are scheduled at the beginning of the semester. Class meetings and practice sessions are supplemented with online activities and written homework. Work in class focuses primarily on developing listening comprehension and speaking skills while reinforcing vocabulary acquisition and the use of grammatical structures. Written exercises, short compositions and elementary reading materials serve to develop writing and reading skills and promote in-class discussion. This course is intended for students who have had no experience with French or are placed in FREN 111Y-112Y on the basis of a placement exam administered during Orientation. Students enrolled in this course are automatically added to FREN 112Y for the spring semester. No prerequisite, Offered every fall.

This course is a continuation of the first semester of intensive introductory French. During the second semester, students further the study of the fundamentals of French including literary and cultural materials, introduced with a view toward increasing reading comprehension and writing ability, expanding vocabulary, and enhancing cultural awareness. This course includes required practice sessions with a teaching assistant, which are scheduled at the beginning of the semester. Prerequisite: FREN 111Y or equivalent with permission of instructor. Offered every spring.

This course is designed for students interested in further developing their ability to speak, write and read French. The course includes a comprehensive grammar review and short cultural and literary readings, which serve as points of departure for class discussion. This course includes required practice sessions with a teaching assistant, which are scheduled at the beginning of the semester. Attendance at a weekly French table is strongly encouraged. Students enrolled in this course are automatically added to FREN 214Y for the spring semester. Prerequisite: FREN 111Y-112Y or equivalent. Offered every fall.

This course is the continuation of the first semester of intermediate French and includes a comprehensive grammar review and short cultural and literary readings, which serve as points of departure for class discussion. This course includes required practice sessions with a teaching assistant, which are scheduled at the beginning of the semester. Attendance at a weekly French table is strongly encouraged. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y or placement. Offered every spring.

This course is designed to provide advanced students with the opportunity to strengthen their abilities to write, read and speak French. The conversation component of the course focuses on the discussion of articles from the current French and Francophone press, films and web sites, with the aim of developing students' fluency in French and their performance of linguistically and culturally appropriate tasks. Through the composition component, students seek to improve their ability to write clearly and coherently in French in both analytic and creative modes. To foster these goals, the course also provides a review of selected advanced grammatical structures and work on literary excerpts. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y–214Y or equivalent. Offered every year.

In this course, we examine representative texts — lyric poems, plays, short stories and novels — from the Middle Ages to the French Revolution. In addition to gaining a greater understanding of French literary history and related social and philosophical trends, students develop skills necessary for close reading, explication de texte and oral discussion. It is especially recommended for students with little or no previous exposure to French literature. FREN 321 is recommended. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y-214Y or equivalent. Offered every year or alternating with FREN 324.

Many of the best-loved and most original writers in French experimented with short forms of fiction while simultaneously cultivating other literary genres. This course focuses on short works of fiction as a means of exploring both the French and Francophone literary tradition and the parameters of the short-story genre. It includes examples of the folk tale, the fairy tale, the philosophical tale, the realist short story, the fantastic tale, the existentialist short story, the fragmentary narrative in the style of the "nouveau roman," and more recent Francophone fiction. Selections from theoretical works also help guide our understanding of the genres of short fiction. FREN 321 is recommended. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y–214Y or equivalent. Generally offered every third year.

We examine some of the social, cultural and political issues in contemporary France, as well as their historical context, by analyzing representative films and texts from the 20th and 21st centuries. Students are regularly required to view films outside of class. We also read a textbook on contemporary France to supplement the films, and students are required to complete an independent research project on a topic related to class discussions. FREN 321 is recommended. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y–214Y or equivalent. Generally offered every other year.

This course is designed to build on the oral and written skills of students at the advanced level. Students undertake critical writing, creative writing and performance activities. Coursework also includes attention to pronunciation, with the goal of increasing sensitivity to phonetics, intonation and expressiveness in French. Students regularly perform improvisations, short scenes they write themselves and scenes from authors such as Molière, Beckett and Camus. The largest single component of the course is the analysis, interpretation and staging of a French play or series of scenes in the original. The course will be conducted in French. FREN 321 is recommended. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y-214Y or equivalent. Generally offered every third year.

In Paris, in 1953, a famous juvenile court judge concluded that the recent war—the one we now call World War II—was responsible for an alarming increase in cases of juvenile delinquency. During the war, children were deprived of food, and their fathers were sent to German labor camps. These kids witnessed scenes of destruction and misery. According to this judge, such deprivation and instability, along with the emotional trauma of war, caused psychological abnormalities in children, who consequently adopted unhealthy behaviors—absenteeism, running away, vagrancy, theft, prostitution, and worse. This course explores the rise of crime and violence among young people, as well as the feeling of revolt in metropolitan France in the post- war period, through literature, film, and the judicial, pedagogical, and psychological thinking of the time. FREN 321 is recommended. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y-214Y or equivalent.

The period extending from the belle époque to World War II saw the birth, ascendancy and worldwide influence of French avant-garde poetry. We study this phenomenon chronologically, beginning with the Symbolist "cult of literature" epitomized by poet Stéphane Mallarmé, moving on to "anti-literature" such as the Paris Dada movement, and ending with the Surrealist and post-World War II periods, when the literary avant-garde established itself as a powerful institution in its own right. We study poems and some shorter prose texts by a range of authors including Anna de Noailles, Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, Aimé Césaire and André Breton. Also discussed is the relationship between literature and other arts such as painting and film. FREN 321 is recommended. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y-214Y or equivalent. Generally offered every third year.

Special Topic

This course offers an opportunity to study on an individual basis an area of special interest — literary, cultural or linguistic — under the regular supervision of a faculty member. It is offered primarily to candidates for honors, to majors and, under special circumstances, to potential majors and minors. Individual study is intended to supplement, not to take the place of, regular courses in the curriculum of each language program. Staff limitations restrict this offering to a very few students. To enroll in an individual study, a student must identify a member of the MLL department willing to direct the project and, in consultation with him or her, write a one-page proposal for the IS, which must be approved by the department chair before it can go forward. The proposal should specify the schedule of reading and/or writing assignments and the schedule of meeting periods. The amount of work in an IS should approximate that required on average in regular courses of corresponding levels. Typically, an IS earns the student 0.25 or 0.5 units of credit. At a minimum, the department expects the student to meet with the instructor one hour per week. Because students must enroll for individual studies by the end of the seventh class day of each semester, they should begin discussion of the proposed individual study by the semester before, so that there is time to devise the proposal and seek departmental approval.