French

This course provides an overview of the political history of France from 1815-1940. It covers the failed Second Republic, neither democratic nor liberal; the return of imperial France, a final transition between an authoritarian regime and a liberal regime; the Third Republic, a severe struggle between the royalists and republicans; and the radical party, aimed at a liberal democracy. The course highlights how, through the end of the 19th century, the installation of the Republic was fraught with economic crises and political oppositions. 

This course explores how space is navigated in the modern novel. It focuses on Kafka’s LE CHATEAU, which describes various types of places (roads, bridges, inns, walls, corridors) and disturbed perceptions of space-time, to see how literature places the modern subject in the wide world. The course considers the difference between places and spaces: physical and geographical space, private and public space, foreignness and strangeness, borders and limits, cultivated and uncultivated. It observes how a text, narrative or descriptive, constructs a space and the symbolic role it can give it.

This course develops linguistic skills to increase cultural competences for a more comprehensive understanding of the French way of life. It studies the main media of information and their credentials, the organization of information in a newspaper, the press review, and the press design. The course includes a visit to the printing house of the newspaper Sud Ouest.

This course, the third in our intensive summer language program sequences, with its contiguous course FR34A, is roughly equivalent to the third and fourth quarters of French language instruction on students' home campuses. FR34A and FR34B provide students who have a working knowledge of the basic skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing in French the opportunity to expand and improve these skills with an emphasis on the introduction of new, intermediate-level, forms of grammar and communicative skills within a French-immersion context. Placement in this course is determined by students' previous experience and the results of a language assessment taken prior to arrival. Successful completion of this course combined with FR34B targets the low-Intermediate French level. Course material includes: MOTIFS: AN INRODUCTION TO FRENCH, Heinle K. Jansma, 5th Edition, 2011, and RÉSEAU: COMMUNICATION, INTEGRATION, INTERSECTIONS by J.M. Schultz and M.P. Tranvouez, Prentice Hall, 1st Edition, 2010. Through the FR34AB sequence course, students gain the ability to communicate in spoken and written French and develop a understanding of intermediate French grammar points as well as a working vocabulary including health and illness, vacation time, family structures, schooling and values of the French Republic, the distribution of household chores, environmental protection, cuisine, grocery shopping and eating habits, the workplace, café life, multiethnic society, youth culture, and the geography, music and cuisine of the francophone world. Following the 34AB course sequence, students should be able to engage in short conversations in French, using both simple and more complex sentences and vocabulary, with occasional use of past and future tenses as well as conditional and subjunctive moods, on familiar topics and express their basic everyday needs using the indicative, imperative, conditional and subjunctive moods, regular, irregular, and reflexive verbs, as well as use object and relative pronouns, articles, prepositions, possessive and demonstrative adjectives, interrogative expressions, and expressions of quantity. Through the FR34AB sequence, students reflect upon basic cultural differences as reflected in a variety of French and Francophone contexts, such as varying levels of familiarity/formality, etiquette, family structures, relations between men and woman, urban life, social-cultural representations of France, the professional world, the political world, etc., as well as in cultural products such as film, performances, news, and music Assignments include class participation, small group and pair work, role play, games, individual and group presentations, written exercises, grammar, dictation, presentations of cultural products such as songs, films, audio texts, a variety of short and simple texts on cultural perspectives, and writing activities.