French

This course examines the history of France from the Old Regime to the present day through a constitutional lens to provide a better understanding of current political events.

This course is specialized for international students. This class studies typological variations between languages spoken in different areas of the world whose linguistic roots are diverse. It examines the similarities and differences between these languages and how they show in several conceptual fields (spatial relations, movement, sensory perception); the link between language, culture, and cognition; as well as the effects of typological variations on the way we conceptualize our experiences with the world around us. This course draws on linguistic, anthropological, and cognitive studies carried out in different languages and cultures around the world.

This course presents key aspects of contemporary French culture and civilization. The course examines topics including those pertinent to the functions of French society, such as political parties and unions, the idea of public service (teaching, health, transportation, etc.), the French population and culture, French values, and French media.

This course covers how to choose pre-fermentation operations, assess the result, and determine and control any corrections to the harvest. It also discusses how to lead the transformation of grapes into wine depending on the type of product sought and regulatory and hygiene requirements; differentiate the production routes of traditional red wines; and differentiate the typicality.

This course provides both a first contact with the law and a critical reflection on it. It takes certain generalizations about the law that are often encountered in philosophy, politics, or economics, and shows that what may seem obvious is in fact more complex. Rather than presenting what the law is supposed to be or do, the course reveals its paradoxes by constructing problems dialectically. Course readings are chosen by preference from the corpus of philosophy and art (literature, cinema) to provide material for reflection and discussion that is common and interesting to all. It also addresses a few points of legal theory and technique to demonstrate the complexity of the issues and the difficulty of finding non-simplistic solutions. In all cases, the choice of texts demonstrates the diversity, even contrariness, of the opinions expressed and the theories elaborated, to avoid confirming unquestioned convictions.

This course offers an introduction to the major questions in the history of modern and contemporary art in the West, based on a historical and artistic panorama ranging from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. It addresses several themes and questions, including what art history is; what roles figure, movement, and nature play in representation in the West; what an artist and an art critic is; what place the museum and the market occupy in our relationship to art; and what the terms "modern art" and "contemporary art" mean. The course identifies the descriptive and critical terminology developed in France and abroad to comment on artistic productions, as well as the history of terms within the art world. It also mobilizes the fields of general knowledge in art history and archaeology to document and interpret an artistic production and an archaeological object.

This course practices the methodology of textual analysis using an anthology of texts of different genres from the 16th to the 21st century. 

This course considers the relationship between the noir genre and social criticism, particularly from the perspective of the Situationist International group which was active between 1957 and 1972. It compares texts from the Situationist International and several novels by Jean-Patrick Manchette, in particular Ô DINGOS! O CASTLES! (1972), one of the first novels of the writer, very marked by situationist themes (critique of architecture, play, merchandise); THE LITTLE BLUE OF THE WEST COAST (1976), which marks a shift towards a more perceptible formal research while continuing the critique of daily life alienated; and THE POSITION OF THE PRONE SHOOTER (1981), where social criticism seems to take a back seat in favor a return to the violent and very refined action novel.

This course investigates minorization, how it relates to categorization and differentiation, and to what extent minorization plays a role in mass violence and colonial situations. It introduces the concept of minorization, one of the fundamental questions in sociology for understanding the issues of today's society yet missing from the French university catalog, and its place in academic debate.

This course examines a controversial issue: the history of slavery in France and the United States from the 17th to 21st centuries. It first focuses on the history of two cities at the heart of triangular trade, Bordeaux and Charleston, and the way in which their elites thought and translated into their lifestyles, in their urban spaces and, today, in their museums, this historical fact over time. The course then considers how the American and French slaves, unwilling actors in the history of slavery, for their part, thought and translated their history, but also their emotions, in particular through writing. The autobiographies published between the 18th century and the 19th century are an appreciable complement for the researcher even if they raise the question of the subjectivity of their authors and their status as sources. Finally, the course questions the way in which French and American literature, including that dedicated to youth, thinks about and translates the history of slavery through specific examples. The publication of historical novels relating to these lively questions having always been consciously accompanied by civic and moral objectives and the formative function of literature for youth being undeniable, the course investigates if French and American publications think and translate in the same way this part of our history and, above all, whether they transmit the same values.