University of Bordeaux

This beginning French course focuses on developing oral and written competencies and understanding the basic sentence structure of French. Students learn the basics of introducing oneself in French, simple vocabulary, basic verbs, and conjugations in the present form.

From the contemporary to the extreme contemporary, this course offers a journey through literature. It provides an opportunity to discover, through the study of a few authors and excerpts from various works, how French literature of the last decades takes on a form of engagement and disengagement in the uncertainty that creates our present. The course sharpens sensitivity and broadens knowledge in the literary and cultural fields. It improves mastery of the French language to develop the capacities of analysis, synthesis, and criticism essential to intellectual work. The course focuses on the novel, the short story, and the theater on the path of renewal at the borders of reality and fiction: telling again and again, telling the real in times of crisis.

This course experiments with and develops the techniques and graphic gestures including drawing, imprint, stencil, monotype, screen printing, photomontage, frame-by-frame animation, and cut papers. Sessions are accompanied by image analyses to encourage students to explore to the many possible forms of representation and help situate their practice in the field of current creation. In addition to class sessions, a regular practice provides an opportunity to produce more elaborate works and gain autonomy and singularity.

This course introduces the lexicographical approach implemented in language dictionaries as well as different types of relation and construction of meaning in lexicon. The course covers synonyms, homonyms, antonyms, hyponymy, hyperonymy, derivatives and compounds, and the phenomena of multiple meanings. It provides an opportunity to practice categorizing and organizing the uses of words in the form of mock dictionary entries.

This course explores various concepts of economic inequality, including a consideration of measurement and data issues. It reviews key theories about the relationship between economic inequality and economic development, including the causes and consequences of inequality levels.

This course focuses on the emergence of the literary tale, both the scholarly and popular aspects, and the way in which its great models, particularly Giovanni Boccaccio’s THE DECAMERON and Giambattista Basile’s STRAPAROLA, depict the oral origins of the genre. As they relate to a corpus of classic literary tales (Perrault, Grimm), the course studies contemporary cinematic adaptations to examine the plasticity of the genre, including the emphasis of fairy tale in popular culture. It examines how these stories are appropriated and adapted to fit the current social and political discourse and discusses whether these adaptations are part of scholarly or popular culture. Films studied include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s LE DECAMERON (1971), Jacques Demy’s PEAU D’ANE (1970), and Pablo Berger’s BLANCANIEVES (2012).

This course contextualizes Supreme Court decisions by revisiting major societal shifts through the prism of American fiction, from the 19th Century to the present. The course begins with a brief introduction on mimesis and literature’s potential to relate and reflect historical events and, more simply, facts. It then focuses on numerous works of fiction contextualizing and referring to the following topics chronologically following the Supreme Court’s decisions: slavery (Dredd Scott v. Sandford), segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson), the New Deal, interracial marriage and race relations in the United States (Loving V. Virginia), the Pentagon Papers and the freedom of the press (New York Times v. United States), the limits of free speech (Texas v. Johnson), culture and political wars in the contemporary United States (Bush v. Gore/Citizens United v. FEC), same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), and Covid-19 and mask mandates (Lucas Wall, et al. v. Transportation Security Administration). 

This course studies French business with a focus on commercial, communication, and marketing strategies. Topics covered include selection of products, distribution channels, communication and business image, visual and sound identity, communication decisions, and business reputation. The course utilizes local, national, generalized, and specialized mass media.

This course presents the theories of international commerce from a classical and neoclassical perspective. The course covers the Ricardian model of exchange, the Heckscher-Ohlin model, and contemporary theories of international commerce.

This course analyzes anthropological texts and literature. It studies anthropologists including Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Franz Boas, and Bronislaw Malinowski. The course discusses these anthropologists and their writings as a group while comparing and connecting them to others.