Courses

• CAS LF 351: Introduction to the French Novel
  Close readings in the French novel from its origins to the nouveau roman. Attention to narration, themes, symbols, and schools. Investigation of the roman d'analyse, Romantic prose, realist fiction, and other types of narrative. Carries humanities divisional credit in CAS.
• CAS LF 401: Senior Independent Work
  
• CAS LF 402: Senior Independent Work
  
• CAS LF 452: The Age of Versailles
  Seventeenth-century developments in classical theater, the novel, poetry, and fairy tales in relation to the vision of an all-powerful monarchy. Creative responses to a culture of constraint, as seen in works of Corneille, Racine, Molière, LaFayette, La Fontaine, Aulnoy. Cannot be taken for credit in addition to CAS LF 562.
• CAS LF 453: The French Enlightenment
  Topic for Spring 2013: Confession, Autobiography, and the Enlightenment Self. Focus on reading Rousseau's landmark Confessions (1782, 1789) in dialogue with precursors (Augustine, Montaigne) and later French (existentialist, avant-garde, feminist) reinventions of autobiography. Enlightenment cultural milieux. Motives, forms, plots, styles, enduring challenges of narrative life writing and subjectivity. Confession in everyday life and the contemporary blogosphere.
• CAS LF 456: The Postcolonial Novel
  An examination of postcolonial novels by contemporary writers. Discussion of linguistic and literary issues related to the process of decolonization, including debates about continued use of French by modern African novelists.
• CAS LF 457: Medieval French Literature
  Explores French literature at the time of France's political and cultural emergence. Analyzes France's nation-formation through military expansion, relationship with the Catholic Church, cultivation of language, and France's cultural prestige through chivalric ideals, women's roles and voices, scholastic education.
• CAS LF 459: French Lyric Poetry
  A survey of French poetry from Ronsard to Apollinaire. Concentrates on the giants of the nineteenth century: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. Poems read in detail, and placed in historical and cultural context. Attention to the emergence of new forms: the prose poem and vers libre.
• CAS LF 460: Twentieth-Century French Literature II
  A close study of the major literary movements from the beginning of the century to the "Nouveau Roman," through an analysis of representative works by Proust, Gide, Sartre, Camuus, Beckett, Valéry, Apollinaire, and René Char.
• CAS LF 469: Nouvelles Identités Françaises: Immigration et Citoyenneté dans le Cinéma Francophone
  Examines the shaping of French identity in French and Francophone films. Special attention to issues of family and education, discrimination, religion, and language. Questions of marginalization and of citizenship are discussed in relation to immigration and ethnicity.
• CAS LF 475: Senior Seminar
  Topic for Fall 2011: The Gaze in the French Novel. Study of texts, from La Princesse de Clèves to Proust's La Prisonnière, in which the gaze plays an important, dynamic role. Topics include gender and the gaze; theories of looking in art, literature, and cinema.
• CAS LF 491: Directed Study: French
  Application Form available in department.
• CAS LF 492: Directed Study: French
  Application Form available in department.
• CAS LF 500: French Phonetics
  Students work to improve their own pronunciation through study of the distribution and articulation of French sounds, liaison, "mute e," and intonation, and through oral practice in the language laboratory. Written exercises and phonetic transcription reinforce theoretical points. Conducted in French.
• CAS LF 503: The Structure of French: Phonology
  The sound system of standard French, with comparison to Quebecois. Questions about the mental representation of linguistic information, processes of word formation, and language variation and change are discussed. Frequent problem sets allow students to discover linguistic regularities. Conducted in French.
• CAS LF 504: History of the French Language
  Prosodic, phonetic, and morphosyntactic changes from Classical Latin to Modern French, highlighting common roots between French and other Romance languages. Sociopolitical events in the history of French. Standardization, linguistic unification of France post-Revolution, and the worldwide spread of French. Conducted in French.
• CAS LF 506: Topics in French Linguistics
  Topics vary by semester. Taught in French. Also offered as CAS LX 506.
• CAS LF 550: Studies in Eighteenth-Century French Literature
  Topic for Fall 2009: Seductive Fictions. The novel?s flourishing and firm establishment as a modern genre in pre-Revolutionary France. Eighteenth-century narrative techniques, social transformations, and theories of storytelling as, for better and worse, an art of seduction. Authors include Montesquieu, Prévost, Rousseau, Diderot, Laclos, and Charrière.
• CAS LF 551: Modern French Theatre
  Origins and definitions of major theatrical forms, especially tragedy. Close analysis of both theoretical and theatrical texts. Application of dramatic theory (Artaud, Grotowski) to plays by Claudel, Cocteau, Giraudoux, Anouilh, Genet, Beckett, and others.
• CAS LF 554: Emile Zola and Naturalism
  Transformations of nineteenth-century Réalisme into Naturalisme by Zola within such controversial novels as Thérèse Raquin and the masterpieces of the Rougon-Macquart series.

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