Courses in French
Note: This page contains all of the regular courses taught by this department. Not all courses are offered every year. Check the searchable schedule to see which courses are being offered in the upcoming semester.
FREN 111Y Intensive Introductory French
Credit: 0.75
This is a year-long course offering the equivalent of three semesters of conventional language study. Work for the course includes required practice sessions with an apprentice teacher (AT), which will be scheduled at the beginning of the semester. Class meetings and AT 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. There are normally eight to nine hours of class instruction in the first semester (including AT sessions). This course is intended for students who have had no prior experience with French or who are placed in FREN 111Y-112Y on the basis of a placement exam administered during Orientation. Offered every year.
FREN 112Y Intensive Introductory French
Credit: 0.75
This course is a continuation of the first semester of intensive introductory French. During the second semester, the class continues the study of the fundamentals of French with the addition of more literary and cultural materials, introduced with a view toward further developing reading comprehension and writing ability, expanding vocabulary, and enhancing cultural awareness. Prerequisite: FREN 111Y or permission of the instructor. Offered every year.
FREN 213Y Intermediate French
Credit: 0.5
This is an intermediate-level course open to students who have successfully completed FREN 111Y-112Y or who qualify by virtue of a placement test. It 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 will serve as points of departure for class discussion. Course requirements include attendance at one extra discussion section per week with a language assistant. Attendance at a weekly French table is strongly encouraged. Prerequisite: FREN 111Y-112Y or equivalent. Offered every year.
FREN 214Y Intermediate French
Credit: 0.5
This course is the continuation of the first semester of intermediate French. Please see the description for FREN 213Y.
FREN 321 Advanced Composition and Conversation
Credit: 0.5
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 will focus on the discussion of articles from the current French and Francophone press, films, other media, and Web sites, and on developing the fluency in French to perform linguistically and culturally appropriate tasks. The composition component will seek to improve the ability to write clearly and coherently in French. In order to foster these goals, the course will also provide a review of selected advanced grammatical structures and work on literary excerpts.
FREN 323 Approaches to French Literature I
Credit: 0.5
In this course, we will 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 of related social and philosophical trends, students will develop skills necessary for close reading, explication de texte, and oral discussion. We will read complete texts rather than excerpts whenever possible. It is especially recommended for students with little or no previous exposure to French literature. The course will be conducted in French.
FREN 324 Approaches to French Literature II
Credit: 0.5
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the study of three major literary genres--poetry, theater, and the novel--from the French Revolution to the twenty-first century. Readings will include the works of authors such as Hugo, Baudelaire, Lamartine, Balzac, Mallarmé, Colette, Cocteau, Camus, and Sartre. The course seeks to help students gain a deeper understanding of French literary history and of its relationship to major social and philosophical movements. In addition to exploring certain themes, we will see how the literature reflects important societal and intellectual debates of the time. The course will continue the development of the skills of literary analysis, guided discussion, and essay writing in French. The course will be conducted in French.
FREN 325 Contes et Nouvelles: Exploring French Short Fiction
Credit: 0.5
Many of the best-loved and most original writers in French--Voltaire, Flaubert, Maupassant, Camus, Yourcenar, to name a few--experimented with short forms of fiction while simultaneously cultivating other literary genres. This course will focus on short works of fiction as a means of exploring both the French literary tradition and the parameters of the short story genre. It will include examples of the folktale, 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, such as Propp's Morphology of the Folktale and Todorov's Introduction à la littérature fantastique, will also help guide our understanding of the genres of short fiction. The course will be conducted in French, with occasional theoretical readings in English. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y-214Y or the equivalent; FREN 321 or 322 recommended. Normally offered every third year.
Instructor: Cowles
FREN 328 Modern French Civilization
Credit: 0.5
We will 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 twentieth century. Films and themes may include: La Grande Illusion, Lacombe, Lucien, and World Wars I and II; Coup de Torchon, Indochine, and the colonial experience; Milou en Mai, and the fifties and sixties; and La Haine or Welcome and the impact of immigration. Students will be regularly required to view films outside of class. We will also read a textbook on contemporary France to supplement the films, and students will be required to complete an independent research project on a topic related to class discussions. The course will be conducted in French. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y-214Y or equivalent; FREN 321 recommended. Normally offered every other year.
FREN 337 French Drama Workshop
Credit: 0.5
This course is designed to build on the oral and written skills of students at the advanced level. Students will undertake critical writing, creative writing, and performance activities. Coursework will also include attention to pronunciation, with the goal of increasing sensitivity to phonetics, intonation, and expressiveness in French. Students will regularly perform improvisations, short scenes they write themselves, and scenes from authors such as Molière, Ionesco, and Camus. The largest single component of the course will be the analysis, interpretation, and staging of a French play or series of scenes in the original. The course will be conducted in French.
Instructor: Cowles
FREN 340 Identity in Francophone Novel
Credit: 0.5
This course will examine the theme of individual and cultural identity in the Francophone novel, focusing primarily on texts from the 1970s and '80s (with the possibility of incorporating works from the end of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first). We will explore literary expressions of issues of belonging, otherness, ethnicity, and assimilation in a wide range of social and political contexts, including working-class Montreal, rural and urban postcolonial West Africa, Judeo-Maghrebian communities of North Africa, Arab-Muslim immigration in Western Europe, and the French Caribbean. Authors may include Albert Memmi (Tunisia), Jean-Marie Adiaffi (Ivory Coast), Mariama Bâ (Senegal), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Michel Tremblay (Quebec), and Leila Houari (Belgium). Secondary readings will engage a number of critical approaches, ranging from postcolonial to anthropological-mythological. The course will be conducted in French. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y-214Y or equivalent; FREN 321 strongly encouraged. Normally offered every third year.
Instructor: Dairon
FREN 341 Francophone Poetry
Credit: 0.5
This course will focus on lyric poetry from a number of French-speaking regions including Canada, the Antilles and French Guyana, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. In analyzing the poetry, we will examine the relationship between concepts of human purpose and dignity, on the one hand, and modern urbanized life, on the other; the sense of connection between the individual and the land; and modes of self-definition in the context of social groups. We will read a selection of poems, ranging from those which evoke universalizing images of the human experience to those which reflect and sometimes also advocate intense political engagement with contemporary struggles in the postcolonial world. The work to be studied will come primarily, though not exclusively, from twentieth-century poets including Paul Chamberland, Gilles Vigneault, Anne Hebert, Aime Cesaire, Leon-Gontran Damas, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Andree Chedid, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Jean-Marie Adiaffi, and Veronique Tadjo. The course will be conducted in French. Prerequisite: French 213Y-214Y or equivalent. French 321 strongly encouraged but not required. Normally offered every third year.
FREN 343 Seventeenth-Century French Literature
Credit: 0.5
The works of French literature and thought in the seventeenth century embody what the French call "le classicisme": the golden age of the national literary tradition. The belief still persists that French literature of the period, such as Racine's tragedies or Boileau's Art poétique, rivaled the great works of antiquity. This course will introduce students to the literature and intellectual history of seventeenth-century France and will examine the concept of the Baroque, the ideals of the classical aesthetic which succeeded it, and the tensions that may lie beneath the classical facade. Readings will include such works as Pascal's Pensées, plays by Corneille, Molière, and Racine, selected poems by La Fontaine, and what is often considered the first psychological novel, La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de Lafayette. The course will be conducted in French.
Instructor: Staff
FREN 345 Heart and Reason: Eighteenth-Century French Prose
Credit: 0.5
We will explore the competing forces of la raison and la sensibilité as they affect developing notions of the self and of individual freedom in eighteenth-century France. Our readings will include some of the major works of Enlightenment thought, representative of several genres: philosophical narratives, plays, novels, and autobiographical texts by such authors as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Graffigny, and Laclos. Our considerations of the tensions between the heart and reason will also provide some glimpses of the underside of the French Enlightenment and will reveal an ongoing dialogue between the center (Paris) and a variously constituted periphery. The course will be conducted in French. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y-214Y or equivalent; FREN 321 strongly recommended. Normally offered every third year.
Instructor: Cowles
FREN 346 Romantics and Realists
Credit: 0.5
We will read major novels and plays produced during one of the most turbulent eras of French history, from the wake of the French Revolution to the establishment of France's first viable democratic regime, the Third Republic. Works by authors such as Stendhal, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola will provide us with a perspective on the social and political upheavals of the time. In addition to intrepreting these works in relation to their historical background, we will try to understand and compare the authors' aesthetics of literary creation, their understanding of the individual's role in society, and the opposition of idealism and material forces that they portray. The course will be conducted in French.
Instructor: Cowles
FREN 348 Twentieth-Century French Prose
Credit: 0.5
Though centered on the novel, this course may examine various genres including drama, short narrative, and even film. Close readings of classic modern texts will serve to illuminate questions such as the role and nature of the subject, narrative coherence and incoherence, the incorporation of marginal voices into the literary mainstream, and the relationship between literature and modernism. These texts will be situated in historical and intellectual context. Authors studied may include Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, and Marguerite Duras. This course is designed to accommodate advanced students as well as those with little or no previous experience in French literature. The course will be conducted in French.
Instructor:Guiney
FREN 352 Baudelaire to Valéry
Credit: 0.5
We will explore the relationship between poetry and modernity, as well as learn techniques for the close reading of French poetic texts. Authors will include Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé in addition to Baudelaire and Valéry. The literary and philosophic consequences of the development of a poetic language that rejects all reference to the outside world, striving toward the pure or absolute text, constitutes the primary focus of the course. The course will be conducted in French. Prerequisite: FREN 213Y-214Y or equivalent; FREN 321 recommended. Normally offered every third year.
Instructor: Cowles, Guiney
FREN 353 Myth and Meaning of the French Revolution
Credit: 0.5
Few events in world history were as cataclysmic as the French Revolution. The purpose of this course is to acquaint students with the basic events of the revolution and to expose them to the conflicting interpretations of those events, particularly as they are portrayed in literature and film. In so doing, the course will explore different authors' visions of history and the creation of a mythology surrounding the Revolution. Discussion of fictional narratives will be enriched by allusions to revolutionary art and music in order to elucidate the role of symbol in political ideology. Readings will include selected essays and excerpts from historical narratives, as well as major works by Beaumarchais, Balzac, Hugo, and Anatole France. We will also discuss major feature films by directors Renoir, Wadja, Gance, and others. The course will be conducted in French.
Instructor: Cowles
FREN 361 Symbolism to Surrealism and Beyond
Credit: 0.5
The period extending from the belle époque to World War II saw the birth, ascendancy, and worldwide influence of French avant-garde poetry. We will 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 period, when the literary avant-garde established itself as a powerful institution in its own right. We will study poems and some shorter prose texts by a range of authors including Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, and André Breton. We will also discuss the relationship between literature and other arts such as painting and film. The course will be conducted in French.
Instructor: Guiney