Winter Quarter 2026

Winter Quarter 2026

• For day, time, room, and TA information, see our PDF Schedule or the class search tool Class Search Tool
• For all courses not described here, please refer to the General Catalog course descriptions: General Catalog

Language Courses

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

Undergraduate Course Descriptions & Flyers

• FRE 50 French and Francophone Cinema of the New Wave Period 
  Jeff Fort

• This course will explore films made between 1954 and 1966, a short period of time in which the New Wave rose and crashed, and many eminent filmmakers who were not directly a part of the New Wave made some of their most remarkable films. The course will place these films in the context of the cultural politics in which they were embedded, and will consider the relation between these formally innovative films and major historical events of the period - - especially the anti-colonial wars in Southeast Asia and Algeria - - as well as postcolonial realities more broadly, the rapid modernization occurring in France, conflicting forms of domesticity and labor, and tensions around evolving gender roles. Filmmakers will include Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Rouch, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Jacques Tati, Paula Delsol, Ousmane Sembène.
  Taught in English. Films will be shown in French with English subtitles.
  With approval, course may count toward the French major or minor.
  GEs: (AH); (VL); (WC); (WE).
   

  
• FRE 101 Poetry in French
  Claire Goldstein

• Sometimes simple like a nursery rhyme, sometimes intricate, poetry is an art form that uses all aspects of language – from the sounds and rhythms of phrases to the shape of words on the page – to create new connections, evoke strong emotions and forge associations. Poetry can express tender love or searing anger; regret, loss, or wonder: the whole range of human emotions and experiences. This quarter we will learn to analyze poetic form and techniques as we study poems from a wide range of French-language poetic movements from the past to the present. In learning to appreciate the detail and the complex layering of poetry, we will become more perceptive readers of the ways language functions in our world. Prerequisite: FRE 100 or permission of instructor. GE credit: AH, WC, WE.
   

  
• FRE 125 History and Memory: Literature / Film / Photography
  Jeff Fort
• This course will explore an interlinked selection of texts, films and photographic images that bring into relation a number of important issues in French culture and history of the 20th century. Beginning with the brief introductory section of Marcel Proust's monumental novel of memory, A la recherche du temps perdu -- which features numerous examples of the visual technologies of the period -- we will move on to mid-century films that use photographic images to explore the intersections of personal memory and large scale national histories around war (World War II and the Algerian War of Independence) and colonial theft of cultural artifacts. Films include Chris Marker's science fiction classic, La jetée, and Alain Resnais and Marker's film essay on African statuary and the ills of colonialism, Les statues meurent aussi. We will conclude with a novel by nobel laureate Patrick Modiano in which photography plays an important role, partly in the wake of the Holocaust, as both a reservoir of traumatic memory and an elusive medium that leaves out as much as it preserves. We will also look at numerous photographs relevant to this material. Time permitting, we will conclude with a Hollywood masterpiece that has many links to our French context: Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) was partly inspired by Proust, served as an inspiration for Marker's film, and was based on the French crime novel D'entre les morts. Throughout, we will see how literature, film and photography are able to bring the past, and even the dead, back to life, but in ambiguous technologically shaped forms. Prerequisite: FRE 100 or permission of instructor. GE credit: AH, VL, WC, WE.
• FRE 128 Decolonization
  Toby Warner

• In 1939, over 100 million people (about five percent of all humans then living) were citizens or subjects of the French empire which at that time covered about ten percent of the planet, stretching from the Caribbean across Africa to East and South Asia and the Pacific. By the mid-1960s, a majority of those who had been French imperial subjects were citizens of newly independent nations, while many others were French citizens living in overseas Departments. In this course we will study the history, culture and politics of decolonization in the francophone world. This will include a survey of francophone decolonial thought from the 1930s-60s, as well as forays into film, music, art, and literature. While carefully situating each movement and thinker in their historical context(s), we will also strive to understand decolonization as an ongoing struggle and grasp its relevance and urgency in the present. Prerequisite: FRE 100 or permission of instructor. GE credit: AH, WC, WE.

  

Graduate Course Descriptions

• FRE 390B Teaching French
  Julia Simon
• Designed for graduate teaching assistants with emphasis on problems and procedures encountered by teachers of lower division classes at the university. Prerequisite: Graduate standing.