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Graduate Courses

Course Descriptions for the Fall 2009 semester

FREN 511 - INT MEDIEVAL FRENCH STUDIES  credits 3   Prof. Donald Maddox

Course taught in French

Discover the Middle Ages in French literature and French film.  Read about the epic struggles of Emperor Charlemagne and Roland; the exciting adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; the Quest for the Holy Grail; the tragic love affair of Tristan and Iseut; the bizarre legend of the Eaten Heart; the lyrics of the troubadours; the charming narrative lays of Marie de France; the devious antics of Renart the Trickster, and the scandals of the fabliaux.  Among the films: Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac and Le procès de Jeanne d'Arc; Marcel Carné's Les visiteurs du soir; and Jean Cocteau's L'éternel retour.  Readings are in modern French, though we will learn a bit of Old French along the way.  Mid-term; two short essays; final exam; lively discussions. 

FREN 584 - FRENCH CANADIAN LITERATURE   credits 3    Prof. Philippe Baillargeon

 Contemporary Canadian poets, novelists, and dramatists writing in French. Prerequisite: Satisfactory performance in courses beyond the 240 level.

FREN 592S – MICRO-TEACHING: PRE-PRACTICUM    2 credits   Prof. Rhonda Tarr

FREN 670 – EXPOSITORY PROSE     3 credits      Prof. Luke Bouvier

Course taught in French.The purpose of the course is to improve the ability to write effective French prose, in particular for the purposes of literary and cultural analysis.  Coursework includes discussion of short literary works in French, regular compositions on these works (including rewrites), stylistic exercises, vocabulary-building exercises and short translations.

Requirements:  Frequent short papers, rewrites, written exercises, translations.

FREN 671 - GRAD READING COURSE   3 credits   Prof. Nancy Lamb

Course conducted in English.

Primarily for graduate students in fields other than French and Francophone Studies who wish to acquire a reading knowledge of French for the purpose of conducting research in specialized areas of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Fine Arts, as well as for other objectives requiring reading competence in French.  In addition to work on the fundamentals of the language, selections for study may vary according to the needs and interests of the students in the course.

FREN 672 –Teaching Assistant Workshop   2 credits    Prof. Rhonda Tarr

Course taught in English.

A weekly workshop/class for all M.A. and M.A.T students teaching French language classes for the first time. The course will introduce current methods and ideas of language teaching and testing and will focus on the courses they are actually teaching. Text: van Patten and Lee, Making Communicative Teaching Happen. There are no exams or papers but there will be biweekly presentations.

FREN 681 – ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH CIVILIZATION 3 credits Prof. Julie Hayes

Course taught in French

FREN 897C- ST ROSSEAU: ENLIGHTENMENT  3 credits   Prof. Patrick Mensah

Course taught in French.
At first sight, the work of J-J. Rousseau appears to be marked by generic diversity and myriad self-contradictions, seemingly reflecting the multifaceted intellectual career of the man who composed it: the adventurer, dreamer, bel esprit, cultural theorist and critic, philosopher, antiphilosopher, literary artist, anti-artist, moralist, immoralist, feminist, anti-feminist, musician, political theorist, misanthrope, pessimist, idealist, and so on.  But does this diversity render all questions of a unified vision impertinent? Broadly speaking, the weaving together in one corpus of political theory and instances of "pure" literary invention, of metaphysical speculations on the origins and destiny of human society and institutions, and complex nd usually moving accounts of his own personal, unique, if problematic, involvement in that destiny: these factors act in concert to give Rousseau's work its enduring challenging and stimulating quality.  It is hardly surprising then that his work continues to engage the attention of some of the most prominent minds--structuralists (e.g. Levi-Strauss), philosophers (Gouhier, Derrida), literary theorists (De Man, Starobinski),and feminist critics (Kofman, Irigaray), to name only a few--in the human and social sciences today.  More interestingly for our purposes, the work combines a theory and radical critique of language and representation in general with an unrelenting "existentialist" reflection on issues of political and social ethics.  How do these two movements interact?  Adopting a primarily "literary" approach to this corpus, we shall attempt--through readings selected from both theoretical and fictional works--to arrive at an understanding of how the two challenge and/or complement each other.  We shall also attempt to trace the extent of their involvement with the French Enlightenment movement in its ideological struggle with the Ancien Regime, and identify ways in which they bear on theoretical issues in our contemporary literary culture.  Each attending student would be required do one oral presentation and a 15-20-page term paper.

We also offer Independent Studies