Spring 2023 Courses

Spring 2023 Courses

Language Courses

FRE 001-003: Elementary French
FRE 021-023: Intermediate French
See Placement Guide or Catalog Descriptions

Undergraduate Courses

FRE 100: Composition in French
Prof. Toby Warner

The primary goal at this level is to introduce students to upper-division study in French. Together we will read and discuss a variety of works, including novels, poetry, comics, essays, films, and theater. Students will develop interpretive and analytical skills with broad applicability and practice writing in French in a clear and persuasive manner. We will also encounter a variety of expository and analytical writing styles, and emphasize organization, correct syntax, and vocabulary building.

GE Units: ArtHum, WC, WE

Required for French major/minor

FRE 117B: The Classical Moment
Prof. Noah Guynn

This course will be devoted to the career of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, otherwise known as Molière. We will read representative works from all the major phases of the playwright's career and will supplement our readings with clips from Ariane Mnouchkine’s celebrated film-biography Molière (1978) and from video productions of Molière's plays. Our emphasis throughout the term will be on theatrical depictions of power and dissent, order and disorder, convention and eccentricity. As serious as those subjects may sound, we will also do our best to find the pleasure in Molière's plays, which are outrageously funny.

There will be three writing assignments: a character study (2 pages), a scene study (3 pages), and an analysis of a full play (5 pages).  There will also be an emphasis on active, informed class participation. Students who enroll should plan to prepare their readings with care, to attend class regularly, and to intervene frequently in discussions.

FRE 141: Selected Topics in French Literature - History and Memory in 20th century Fiction and Film
Prof. Jeff Fort

This course will examine a set of texts and films that take up the question of memory, in several senses of the term: as personal or individual recollection, as the imprinting of historical events, and as the production and survival of cultural artifacts, including books, movies, videos, photographs, statues, libraries... How do such artifacts embody or communicate historical experience? Under what conditions is this communication blocked or obfuscated? What are the limits of memory, and how does an understanding of memory change over the course of an extremely agitated, violent, and destructive century? How does the intimacy of personal memory relate to memory as History? Beginning with Marcel Proust’s celebrated investment of memory as a powerful means of complete, if elusive, preservation, we move to the postwar period and to more fragmented, dissociated, and inaccessible forms of memory. The texts and films of the course stage a cultural struggle between memory and oblivion, often in the name of bearing witness to historical events that might otherwise remain in the shadows, but that forcefully return to make demands on those who would forget them. Likewise we see how some writers and filmmakers have made it their business to produce work that seeks to bring historical memory to the surface, and into public acknowledgment, despite pressures to keep them hidden.

Graduate Courses

FRE 214: Studies in Narrative Fiction
Prof. Julia Simon