French

This course analyzes the comic, a narrative art that reads not only in each successive box but also in a complex system relating to the space of the board and album as a whole. It applies literary tools to the media to take into account the image and sequencing. The course focuses on the theme of “the quest” using comics from the French-Belgian domain: set in a medieval universe more fantasized than properly historical. It considers quests and conquests in antico-medieval fictions including literature, cinema, and games.

This course is broadly equivalent to A1 Basic User, Breakthrough Level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

This course focuses on the study of contemporary texts and recordings drawn from the French media (radio, television, newspapers, and films), as well as on the function and place of media in the French society. Exercises give students the opportunity to practice document analysis, grammar, phonetics, and general comprehension. Students also work on a project for the semester with two professors on a media topic of their choice.

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 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 is an advanced level C2 French course focused on perfecting grammar, writing, vocabulary, and oral expression. The course covers understanding and analyzing texts (news articles, scientific literature, literary excepts), speaking skills (debate, presentations), and writing (synthesis, supporting arguments, literary expression). 

This course is an initiation to writing for the theater, examining the link between writing and spoken text. It includes several writing exercises that lead progressively toward a short play which is then workshopped among the class. In addition to this practical dimension of writing, the course includes reading and discussion of the dramatic texts of various actors.

This course, the first in our intensive summer language program sequences, with its contiguous course FR12B, is roughly equivalent to the first two quarters or to the first semester of beginning French language instruction on students' home campuses. FR12A and FR12B introduce basic speaking, listening, reading and writing skills to the complete beginner and the beginner with limited previous knowledge of elementary French 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. Course material includes: K. Jansma, MOTIFS: AN INRODUCTION TO FRENCH, Heinle, 6th Edition, 2014. Through the FR12AB sequence, students gain the ability to communicate in spoken and written French and develop a foundation in French grammar, basic working vocabulary organized, and information on French and Francophone culture including greetings, leisure activities and sports, 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, and music and cuisine of the francophone world. Students engage in short conversations using simple sentences and basic vocabulary with occasional use of past and near future tenses. Covered in this course are the present, past, and near future tenses, along with high-frequency regular and irregular verbs, reflexive verbs, and the imperative and polite conditional moods, as well as subject and object pronouns, articles, prepositions, possessive and demonstrative adjectives, interrogative expressions, expressions of quantity, and time and weather expressions. Course grading is composed of class participation, small group and pair work, role play, written exercises, dictation, presentations of cultural products such as songs, films, audio texts, a variety of short, simple texts on cultural perspectives, and writing activities.

This translation course is taught at the first-year level. This course focuses translating both the tone and grammar of Francophone and Anglophone literature, and provides abstracts from English and French writers, mostly from the latter half of the twentieth century. The course first practices translating from English to French, and then from French to English. Students can choose to take one or two parts, whether English to French or French to English.