1 - 9 of 9 results for: FRENCH

This course provides students with an introductory survey of literature and cinema from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be encouraged to consider the geographical, historical, and political connections between the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa by reading course materials, completing writing assignments, participating in class activities, listening to contextualizing lectures, and conducting student-led presentations. This course will help students improve their ability to speak and write in French by introducing students to new academic registers, vocabulary, and syntax. While analyzing novels and films, students will be exposed to a diverse number of intersectional topics such as national and cultural identity, race and class, gender and sexuality, orality and textuality, transnationalism and migration, colonialism and decolonization, history and memory, and the politics of language. Readings include the works of writers and filmmakers such as Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, Dani Laferrière, Djibril Tamsir Niane, Fatou Diome, Leïla Sebbar, Léopold Senghor, Mariama Bâ, Maryse Condé, and Ousmane Sembène. Taught in French. Students are encouraged to complete FRENLANG 124 or to successfully test above this level through the Language Center.

Why do dating sites rely on photographs? Why do we believe that love is above all a visual force? How is pleasure, even erotic pleasure, achieved through looking? While the psychology of impressions offers some answers, this course uncovers the ways poets, songwriters, and especially artists have explored myths and promoted ideas about the coupling of love and seeing. Week by week, we will be reflecting on love as political critique, social disruption, and magical force. And we will do so by examining some of the most iconic works of art, from Dante's writings on lovesickness to Caravaggio's Narcissus, studying the ways that objects have shifted from keepsakes to targets of our cares. While exploring the visual roots and evolutions of what has become one of life's fundamental drives, this course offers a passionate survey of European art from Giotto's kiss to Fragonard's swing that elicits stimulating questions about the sensorial nature of desire and the human struggle to control emotions.

This course takes students on a trip to major capital cities, at different moments in time: Renaissance Florence, Golden Age Madrid, Colonial Mexico City, Enlightenment and Romantic Paris, Existential and Revolutionary St. Petersburg, Roaring Berlin, Modernist Vienna, and bustling Buenos Aires. While exploring each place in a particular historical moment, we will also consider the relations between culture, power, and social life. How does the cultural life of a country intersect with the political activity of a capital? How do large cities shape our everyday experience, our aesthetic preferences, and our sense of history? Why do some cities become cultural capitals? Primary materials for this course will consist of literary, visual, sociological, and historical documents (in translation); authors we will read include Boccaccio, Dante, Sor Juana, Montesquieu, Baudelaire, Gogol, Irmgard Keun, Freud, and Borges. Note: To be eligible for WAYS credit, you must take the course for a Letter Grade.

Restricted to French majors with consent of department. Normally limited to 4-unit credit toward the major. May be repeated for credit.

Enrollment is limited to French/Italian Ph.D. students. Course is designed for French/Italian Ph.D. students to prepare for department milestone exams.

For students in French working on special projects or engaged in predissertation research.