| source Northwestern (X) |
level |
department FRENCH French (X) |
In 2005 and 2007, riots broke out in major cities throughout France, revealing to the world the deep tensions and inequalities that plague French society. At the same time, in Fall 2007, a majority of the prestigious French literary prizes were awarded to writers from ÂOverseas France and French-speaking writers from outside of France, following which, in March 2008, 40 well-known writers from all over the French-speaking world wrote a manifesto calling for a Âlittérature-monde in French (a world-literature that distinguishes itself from its Anglo-Saxon counterpart). Both these sets of events reflect the challenges that French national and cultural identity has been facing since the end of world war two, challenges posed by its colonial history and immigration, feminism, the advent of a public discussion of non-normative sexual orientations, the growing importance of the European Union, and globalization. Come and explore with us, through fiction and film, various facets of France as a multicultural society in order to better understand how events such as the riots and the upheaval in the literary world come to be.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
In this course, we will be examining a variety of texts, representing different periods and genres of French and Francophone literature. In particular, we will be exploring changing notions of the Âself through the centuries.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
In this course we will trace the development of the French novel from the 18th to the early 20th century through the study of four novels and novellas. Our discussion will center on the differences between these texts and the ways in which these differences are related, on the one hand, to changing historical and cultural contexts and, on the other hand, to differences in sub-genre, narrative voice, and other narrative structures.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
This course presents a systematic and in-depth review of grammar. This study is geared toward a functional and communicative purpose and should help the students acquire a functional competence in French. The rules will essentially be applied through oral and written exercises and translations. The themes and matter considered in this particular course will be pursued in 302, 303 and 309.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
The goal of this course is the development of oral proficiency through speech functions, conversational routines and patterns, so as to build confidence in the practice of the French language. In order to achieve this goal, emphasis will be put on extensive examination of French press and French television news, French movies, the reading of a book related to the author studied this quarter, and spontaneous expression through dialogues and discussion, and even debates. Special emphasis will be placed on group work and culturally appropriate usage. The students will participate actively in the choice of the materials.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
The Renaissance in France was a period characterized by abundant artistic, literary and philosophical production, but also by intense political and religious upheaval. Even as the country was torn apart by civil strife and the Wars of Religion, the sword gave way to the pen as a new and powerful instrument of Ânational consciousness. This course explores sixteenth-century French literature within the context of those turbulent times, discussing literary texts in and as historical events. We will be paying special attention to issues of imitation and genre as well as the emergence of subjectivity and the rise of literary ÂnationalismÂ. Authors will include François Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Joachim du Bellay and Michel de Montaigne.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
This course offers an introduction to French-Japanese cultural relations and to the influence of Japanese aesthetics on a variety of French literary and artistic forms. Our survey extends from the mid-nineteenth century Japanophilia of the age of Impressionism to contemporary French manga, by way of travel narratives, haiku about the First World War, and New Wave film. Through discussions of these diverse works (which range from popular culture to the avant-garde), we will explore broader questions about the relationship between cultural difference and artistic practice in modern France. The course includes a required trip to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
In this course, we examine the emergence of difference as a category through which French intellectuals have critiqued dominant identity formations and philosophical universalisms from the Revolution to the present. Although the French Revolution embraced a universalistic model of republican citizenship, the question of how to define and police the boundaries of national identity gained prominence in the nineteenth century with the re-emergence of racialist thinking and French imperial expansion. With the events of the Occupation, the Holocaust, decolonization, globalization, and multicultural immigration in the twentieth century, however, writers and intellectuals from France and the Francophone world devised new theoretical models for thinking critically about the role of differencesÂcultural, religious, gender, and racial within identity formations, often in dialogue with the philosophical developments of existentialism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and poststructuralism. Looking at a series of widely influential theoretical texts produced by political theorists, philosophers, and literary critics, we will compare and contrast the figures of alterity they contain, asking what models exist in France today for conceptualizing sameness and difference, universalism and particularism, and the often paradoxical relations between the terms of these binary oppositions. Taught in French.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will introduce the students to the troubadours, poets of the South of France in the Middle Ages, and the Occitan language in which they wrote. We shall focus on learning to read the texts in the original language, and on understanding the phenomenon of love, often called Âcourtly, that was the troubadours greatest subject. We shall study the language in Paden, An Introduction to Old Occitan, and learn to translate troubadour poetry in that book; read a book of English translations, Paden and Paden, Troubadour Poems from the South of France (2007); and refer to selected essays in two recent collaborative histories, Gaunt and Kay, The Troubadours: An Introduction, and Akehurst and Davis, A Handbook of the Troubadours. We shall consider the performance of troubadour poetry in song as well as historical issues including the court, gender relations, and desire.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
In this course we will use the cultural dynamics between France and Japan as a point of departure for exploring the relationship between aesthetics, otherness, and globalization in twentieth-century French literature, theory, and film. We will study some of the particulars of this historical relationship: How did the myth of the Âbutterfly (as in Madama Butterfly) emerge? How was the haiku understood to be a modern form of poetry? Why does Japan always seem to be a privileged example in discussions of the ÂpostmodernÂ? But out of these particular cases we will develop broader historical and theoretical questions about cultural difference, otherness, and aesthetic form, specifically in relation to debates about globalization. Topics will include: ethics and alterity; exoticism and gender; translation and poetic form; and cinema and comopolitanism. Authors and directors will include: Loti, Duras, Resnais, Barthes, and Marker.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
French 101-A is the first quarter of elementary French. The aim of the course is to build skills in speaking, understanding, writing and reading French through class activities, study, and practice. French 101 uses a multimedia approach that incorporates texts, songs, videos, films, and the internet. Carries humanities credit (two-course limit for language courses).
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
The aim of the course is to briefly repeat and then expand on skills in speaking, understanding, writing and reading French through class activities, study, and practice. It uses a multimedia approach that incorporates various types of texts, music, videoclips, and the internet. Classes are conducted in French except when explanation of grammar or other material may necessitate the use of English. Carries humanities credit (two-course limit for language courses).
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
In 2005 and 2007, riots broke out in major cities throughout France, revealing to the world the deep tensions and inequalities that plague French society. At the same time, in Fall 2007, a majority of the prestigious French literary prizes were awarded to writers from ÂOverseas France and French-speaking writers from outside of France, following which, in March 2008, 40 well-known writers from all over the French-speaking world wrote a manifesto calling for a Âlittérature-monde in French (a world-literature that distinguishes itself from its Anglo-Saxon counterpart). Both these sets of events reflect the challenges that French national and cultural identity has been facing since the end of world war two, challenges posed by its colonial history and immigration, feminism, the advent of a public discussion of non-normative sexual orientations, the growing importance of the European Union, and globalization. Come and explore with us, through fiction and film, various facets of France as a multicultural society in order to better understand how events such as the riots and the upheaval in the literary world come to be.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will examine representative works from the 19th century to the present, and will include novels, plays, and poems. The works selected are designed to give an overview of the main literary developments including from the 19th century to the 21st, including Romanticism, Realism, Symbolism, and the modern period. We will study the form of these works and how these forms relate to the content, thus acquiring a useful terminology for studying the structure and meaning of literary writing as well as a sense of the principal recent developments in French literary history.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
Move your written French up a notch or two! In this course we work on developing vocabulary, ease of expression, and an awareness of appropriate styles of writing. WeÂll address specific language functions (persuading, hypothesizing, etc.) and communicative needs (correspondence, reports, etc.) by analyzing French texts (chosen from the Web and print media), translating them for a better comprehension of French sentence structure and style, then writing our own texts. All writing exercises will be directed towards the creation of individual portfolios as a final project. Grammar will be reviewed and discussed in conjunction with the various themes and/or as needed. Students will be expected to do some research on their own outside of class.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
The goal of this course is the development of oral proficiency through speech functions, conversational routines and patterns, so as to build confidence in the practice of the French language. In order to achieve this goal, emphasis will be put on extensive examination of French press and French television news, French movies, the reading of a book related to the author studied this quarter, and spontaneous expression through dialogues and discussion, and even debates. Special emphasis will be placed on group work and culturally appropriate usage. The students will participate actively in the choice of the materials.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will consider issues raised by the growing prominence of visual art practiced by women in a royal institution (the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture) and a society that became increasingly hostile to the visibility and agency of women prior to the French Revolution. We will explore the training and status of women at the Academy, the politics of male and female patronage, the political sway of female figures associated with the royal sphere who functioned as patrons of the arts, such as the marquise de Pompadour; the construction of gender in paintings by prominent female artists such as E. Vigée Le Brun and A. Labille-Guiard, and the ambivalent art criticism that their works have generated to our day. We shall also investigate the entanglement of female art and politics during the French Revolution and, in particular, focus on Marie-Antoinette as both a female icon of official painting and the butt of pornographic caricature. Our readings in cultural history, art history, and gender studies will be accompanied by the discussion of paintings by women of the period and of recent films on Marie-Antoinette.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will be devoted to an intense engagement with one of the major figures in the history of literature, Marcel Proust, and to his In Search of Lost Time, which remains a crucial text in the development of modern thought. The focus will be on four volumes of the Search: SwannÂs Way, Within a Budding Grove, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Time Regained. We will explore ProustÂs reinvention of the novel as a form in relation to a number of Proustian problems and themes: his analyses of desire, perversion and sexuality; his reflections on the nature of time and memory; and his exploration of the relationship of art to life. We will also consider ProustÂs powers as a satirist and critic of ideology, who mercilessly dismantled the individual and collective illusions of his contemporaries.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will consider developments in French and Francophone cinema since the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on the works of directors associated or in dialogue with the ÂNew Wave. We will examine the reinvention of cinematic form by these filmmakers, but we will also explore how such formal innovations may be understood as attempts to respond to the historical events and social processes that transformed French culture in that period, most notably the traumas of the Second World War, the emergence of consumer culture, and the processes of decolonization and globalization. Among the directors whose works will be discussed are Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Tati, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
The course concentrates on the writing of Marguerite Duras, one of the most prolific, influential, and controversial writers in 20th century France. In her lengthy career (1943-1996), Duras composed a corpus spanning the modernist and postmodern eras and comprising journalism, theatre, short stories, a childÂs story, realist, experimental, and postmodern writings, fictionalized autobiographies, film scenarios, and films. Critics have aligned Duras variously with the nouveau romanciers, Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic feminisms, and postcolonial writing. We will consider her creative work in relation to the revolutionary thought of her postwar group as well as of such 1960s thinkers as Guy Debord and to possibilities of what one critic terms 'the desire called Utopia.' We will have several video viewings outside of class at a time to be determined on the first day.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will first interrogate theories of gender by contemporary feminist thinkers in visual arts such as Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock to lay the ground for an investigation of the increasingly hostile construction of women as subjects, judges, and mainly makers of visual art in eighteenth-century French cultural discourse. Readings will then include works by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot which fueled a generalized hostility against womenÂs cultural authority, as well as works from 20th-century feminist cultural history (Joan Landes, Lynn Hunt, Madelyn Gutwirth) which investigate the turn against female power in the public sphere in prerevolutionary decades. A good part of the course will be devoted to discuss the construction of a gendered identity in paintings by female painters of the period (Vigée-Lebrun, Labille-Guiard and others) and to analyse the issues raised by these works both in contemporary reviews and in modern scholarly articles
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
French 101-C is the third quarter of elementary French.: Class meets once a week, Wednesdays 6:15-9:15. The aim of the course is to build skills in speaking, understanding, writing and reading French through class activities, study, and practice. French 101 uses a multimedia approach that incorporates texts, songs, videos, and the internet. We cover chapters 15-20 of Voilà .
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
There is no consensus as to when the Enlightenment began or when it ended. Enlightenment cannot be defined as a narrow set of philosophical principles or ideals. The term generally refers to eighteenth century French philosophy, but the movement spread throughout much of Europe, including Russia and Scandinavia. The Enlightenment, les Lumières, Aufklärung. In Shadows of Enlightenment, we will explore the movement, the attitudes, and the philosophical outlook that led the century to question so critically and insistently traditional customs and institutions. The readings are selected from various media including poetry, drama, fiction, autobiographical memoirs, and philosophical treatise. There are no prerequisites for this class. All texts are in English.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
Introduction to French literature, focusing on poetry and shorter works literary prose. Emphasis will be on close textual analysis of specific works, but students will also be given an overview of major periods and genres.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will cover poetry from the 16th to the 20 centuries. We will start with the analysis of a few representative poems to learn about poetic form, language, and expression. Then our course will become historical, and we will read some of the best-known and most representative poems from the Renaissance and the 17th century. We will read poetry from Romantic age in the early 19th century. We will read poems of the late 19th century by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine that are considered the beginning of modernity, and we will then study the Surrealist poets and poets from outside France who write in French. The class will consist of close readings and analyses of individual poems. Students will prepare some of these readings for each class. Students will write several papers, and the last paper will compare several poems with similar themes.
Score: 12.257154 Details | Listing | Web page