French and Romance Philology

Advanced work in language skills. Readings in French literature. Prerequisites: FREN BC1203 or an appropriate score on the placement test.

NOTE: This course does not fulfill the Columbia College and GS language requirement.

Advanced work in language skills. Readings in French literature. Prerequisites: FREN BC1203 or an appropriate score on the placement test.

NOTE: This course does not fulfill the Columbia College and GS language requirement.

Advanced work in language skills. Readings in French literature. Prerequisites: FREN BC1203 or an appropriate score on the placement test.

NOTE: This course does not fulfill the Columbia College and GS language requirement.

Translation of French texts--both critical and literary, focusing on particular questions or themes.  FREN BC1204: French Intermediate II or the equivalent level is required.

An exploration of the early periods of French literary creation (Medieval-17th century) through works of fiction, poetry, and theatre. Special attention is given to texts that use tradition to bring about change, to provoke, to contest social norms, and to test the expected parameters of literary expression. 

Since the last decades of the twentieth century there has been a dramatic increase in the number of women writers from the Middle East and North Africa. This advanced course, which will be taught mainly in French, provides a window into this rich and largely neglected branch of world literature. Students will encounter the breadth and creativity of contemporary Middle Eastern and North African women’s literature by reading a range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, short stories, memoirs and poetry available in French or in translation, and by viewing films that are from or about Iran, Lebanon, Algeria, and Egypt. How do Middle Eastern women authors address women’s oppression – both social and physical – and enunciate issues such as the tension between tradition and modernity, sexuality, identity and class from a female perspective? What literary traditions and models do they draw on? How different are those texts written in French for a global audience, as opposed to those written in Persian or Arabic? What are the effects of reading them in translation? Authors will include Marjane Satrapi, Shahrnush Parsipur, Assia Djebar, Maïssa Bey and Nawal El Saadawi.

The course will offer students an understanding of fundamental underlying concepts that structure French society and that are necessary to grasp if one wants to follow current events in France. This course could be of interest not only to CC students but also to students enrolled at SIPA or Teacher’s College.

Moreover, this course would allow for a comparative approach to how same events are covered in US, or other foreign media, and in France.

Given that this course will deal with current events, the readings will depend entirely on how the news unfolds. Students will be given an introduction to the various media outlets available to them: the press, television and online sources. As the course unfolds, I will adapt the choice of sources that best follow events as they happen. 2022 for example, will be the year France assumes the presidency of the European Union. It will also be the year of the presidential elections. For such events, I will propose specific institutional sources. On the other hand, events that could not be anticipated will require some form of guidance in terms of sources.

In spite of the obvious unpredictability of the specific content of this course, certain key concepts necessary to understand current events in France will be presented. These may vary slightly from one semester to another, but would include, without being limited to: the structure of government and public institutions, political parties, unions and “associations”, social benefits and “the welfare state”, public vs. private sector, “Paris is France”, universalism, secularism and “laïcité”, cultural exceptionalism, the figure of the intellectual, national identity, immigration, geography of France and demographics, relation to Europe, geopolitics, globalization and sovereignty. Of course, the choice of themes and concepts in a given semester would be influenced by dominant topics in the French news.

The course is an introduction to visual arts and art professions in the context of French and francophone arts and cultural institutions. Students will experience arts through presentations, workshops, discussions with art professionals, guest visits, and visits to art museums and galleries. Students who take the class can apply for unpaid internships in an art institution in the spring following the class. In these internships, students will use some of the French language skills they have acquired in the class.

Prerequisites: FREN UN3405 must be taken before FREN UN3333/4 unless the student has an AP score of 5 or the director of undergraduate studies permission. The goal of FREN UN3405 is to help students improve their grammar and perfect their writing and reading skills, especially as a preparation for taking literature or civilization courses, or spending a semester in a francophone country. Through the study of two full-length works of literature and a number of short texts representative of different genres, periods, and styles, they will become more aware of stylistic nuances, and will be introduced to the vocabulary and methods of literary analysis. Working on the advanced grammar points covered in this course will further strengthen their mastery of French syntax. They will also be practicing writing through a variety of exercises, including pastiches and creative pieces, as well as typically French forms of academic writing such as “résumé,” “explication de texte,” and “dissertation.

This class provides an introduction to the history of France and of the francophone world since the Middle Ages. It initiates students to the major events and themes that have shaped politics, society, and culture in France and its former colonies, paying special attention to questions of identity and diversity in a national and imperial context. Modules include a combination of lecture and seminar-style discussion of documents (in French).

This course is part of a two-course sequence and is a core requirement the French and Francophone Studies major.  

This class offers a survey of major works of French and francophone literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Emphasis will be placed on formal and stylistic elements of the works read and on developing the critical skills necessary for literary analysis. Works will be placed in their historical context.

Why and how did the psyche become so closely intertwined with politics in postwar France? What does it mean to consider the psyche as an object of critique and how does it shift in relation to sex, class, and race? The goal of this course is to explore different articulations of the psychic and the political in postwar French and francophone philosophy, literature, and film. We will expand beyond the psychoanalytic understanding of the psyche and attend to the ways in which it was criticized, transformed, and reimagined by movements such as antipsychiatry, feminism, Marxism, poststructuralism, and queer theory. By doing so, we will also discuss a constellation of concepts such as alienation, desire, ideology, subjectivity, and neurodiversity. We will pay attention to the form and content of the works studied, but also to their cultural, social, and political contexts. Key historical themes of French and francophone history that we will discuss include decolonization, deinstitutionalization, May 68, the sexual revolution, and the rise of women’s and gay rights. 

Asylum/Asile is an experiential learning class conducted in collaboration with Project Rousseau, a holistic non-profit organization that helps young people in communities with the greatest need.  

Since migrant youth and families began arriving in New York by bus from the southern border, Project Rousseau has been on the frontlines serving them. A large proportion of these migrants are Francophone asylum seekers who need support with their application. This class will teach the theory and practice of asylum law, the specific sociohistorical, cultural, and political contexts that motivates Francophone asylum seekers, especially in the case of Mauritania and Guinea, and the ways in which translation is critical to this process. The class will culminate in students assisting Project Rousseau’s Francophone clients with their asylum applications. 

The class is offered in the Fall. Interested students will be able to apply for internships with Project Rousseau in the Spring Semester. 

How did people conceive of and talk about love on either side of the Pyrenees? This course will explore the many faces of desire in medieval French, Occitan, Arabic, Hebrew and Romance (proto-Spanish) literature to ask a broader question: what would be our understanding of lyric poetry, often taken to originate with the troubadours, if we incorporated the poems and songs of Al-Andalus? After anchoring ourselves in history, we will survey the major events and trends that attended the emergence of new poetic and musical forms both in Andalusia and in France between the 8th and the 14th centuries. We will study how these works were composed, read, performed, and transmitted. Weekly readings will combine scholarship with primary texts exploring the many facets of erotic experience: from sexual contact to love from afar, love as madness, love mediated by birds, rejection of marriage, gender fluidity and queerness. We will also think about the literary forms in which these themes are expressed, including dawn songs, bilingual love poems, treatises on achieving female orgasm, conduct manuals, and hybrid texts combining prose and verse.

Translations will be provided for most material, but reading knowledge of modern French is required.

The seminar prioritizes a particular branch of French-language film theory and criticism that broadly deals with aesthetics, at the expense of reception and apparatus theories. We follow its history from the silent film-era writings of Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein to the intersection of film aesthetics and French theory in the work of Barthes, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Rancière, to the most recent inquiries into such notions as montage, découpage, and mise en scène (Aumont, Barnard, Kessler). Weekly films will accompany the readings in order to put pressure on theory, but also to help dissipate its excessive maleness. Because French film aesthetics has been influential around the world and—vice versa—because world cinema has been crucial for the development of French film aesthetics, we will also see American, Italian, Soviet, Japanese, Iranian, Malian, and Taiwanese films, in addition to French films.

All films will be presented with English subtitles. There are no prerequisites for the course, but students wanting to enroll must be committed to attending the Tuesday night 6–9pm screenings, in addition to the 12:10–2pm seminars on Wednesdays.

This course will be dedicated to the study of three authors whom Nietzsche called masters of Seelenprüfung(examination of the soul) and whose heritage he explicitly embraced both stylistically and philosophically: Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère. In French literary history these writers are traditionally known as “moralists of the seventeenth century” or “classical French moralists.” The term moralist was not used in the seventeenth century and did not appear until the nineteenth century, when these three writers were grouped in anthologies. Yet their affinities were clear even at the time of the production of these works: when La Bruyère published his Caractères (1696) he explicitly referenced La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (1678) and Pascal’s Pensées (1670) to outline the similarities and differences between his work and theirs. These three prose writers were called moralistes because of their focus on moeurs (human behavior). Their perspective is not at all moralizing in the trivial sense of the term (denouncing behavior that falls short of a stated norm). The moralistes are relentless analysts of the complexities and inconsistencies of human behavior and they present their observations in the form of pithy statements with varying degrees of generalization. In La Rochefoucauld, the embrace of the short form is explicit and systematic. In Pascal, it is due in part to the unfinished and fragmentary nature of the work. In La Bruyère, the use of the short form coexists with its opposite. Part of the attraction of these writers for modern readers is their mistrust of appearances and their exacting search for hidden motives, making them forerunners of the “hermeneutics of suspicion”.