2020-21 French Courses

Course Numbering and Labeling

After French 10, students are considered to have then skills to take any of the advanced courses in then department. Course numbers refer to topics, and do not correspond to the level of difficulty of a course.

Upper level French courses are labeled according to topic. The general  topic appears on the registrar's site.  These courses change each term. The offering for a given term is listed in the department's website.

2020-21

SUMMER 2020 FRENCH COURSES

French 3: Introductory French III @ ARR (McConnell)

French 8: Exploring French Language and Culture @ ARR (McConnell)  Practice in the active use of the language combined with an introduction to major aspects of French society. Each week students will write papers and participate in discussions based on books, articles, and films emphasizing social and historical concepts.  In the event that French 8 isn't offered, you may take French 10, with the understanding that your next French course will be French 8.  Dist:SOC; WCult:W

French 10.19: À la recherce du bonheur @ 10A*see note below* (Beasley): The events of the past few months in particular have led many of us to reflect on what constitutes happiness and what makes us as individuals truly happy.  In this course we will enter into dialogue with French writers and thinkers who have long been attracted to this subject.  We will explore happiness from all angles and across centuries.  Has the concept of happiness changed from the Middle Ages to the present?  How have authors written about le bonheur?  Why have they chosen this subject?  Is there anything particular about bonheur in the French context? 

This course was first offered in winter 2020. Over the spring term it was adapted for an online format.  There will be some asynchronous work, but for the most part we will meet as we would have if the course were being held on campus.  This is a discussion based course that will enable you to improve your spoken and written French, as we create a conversation with the past and present and construct our own interpretations of this fundamental concept.

* This course is scheduled at the 10A time slot.  The course will, however, be both synchronous and asynchronous given the current situation.  Students should plan to dedicate the 10A slot to this course, although we may not meet synchronously for the full time allotted every Tuesday and Thursday.*

French 40.04: Classical Comedy: Molière @ 2A *see note below* (Beasley): Molière is France's best known and most universally loved playwright.  Over three hundred years after his death, his plays continue to dominate the French stage and stages across the world.  In this course, we will explore Molière's creative genius to understand his profound and lasting influence.  This course has been redesigned for the summer 2020  online offering.  Some of the questions we will explore asynchronously but primarily synchronously are:  What was and is the role of theatre in society?  Why is Molière so important to French culture?  How was a play staged in 17th-century France?  How have the staging of Molière's plays changed over time?  What is the relationship between politics and theatre?  What is comedy? How did the public experience Molière's comedy?  In addition to studying French theatre and its history, we will create our own theatre troupe. 

*This course is scheduled at the 2A time slot.  The course will, however, be both synchronous and asynchronous given the current situation.  Students should plan to dedicate the 2A slot to this course, although we may not meet synchronously for the full time allotted every Tuesday and Thursday.*

2020-21

FALL 2020 FRENCH COURSES

 

FRENCH COURSES FALL 2020

*All Fall 2020 courses are remote with synchronous components*

French 1: Introductory French I at C, F 

An introduction to French as a spoken and written language. The work includes regular practice in class and scheduled drill-sessions in understanding and using the spoken language. Written exercises and elementary reading materials serve for vocabulary building and discussion. Never serves in partial satisfaction of the Distributive or World Culture Requirements.

French 2: Introductory French II at D, E, F

Rapid review and continued study of the fundamentals of French, with intensive work in vocabulary building. More advanced practice, in classroom and drill-sessions in the use of the spoken language. Open to students by qualifying test or to students who have passed French 1. Never serves in partial satisfaction of the Distributive or World Culture Requirements.

French 3: Introductory French III at C, D, E, F  

Given on-campus as the final course in the required sequence and off-campus as part of the L.S.A. curriculum, this course is designed to develop reading, writing, and speaking skills, with emphasis on expansion of vocabulary and reinforcement of grammatical structures. Some discussion of texts and films of literary or cultural interest. Frequent oral and written assignments and tests, both on-campus and off, plus daily drills when taken on-campus. Open to students by qualifying test or to students who have passed French 2 or French 11. Never serves in partial satisfaction of the Distributive or World Culture Requirements.

French 8: Exploring French Culture and Language (Mefoude-Obiono) at E 

Practice in the active use of the language combined with an introduction to major aspects of French society. Each week students will write papers and participate in discussions based on books, articles, and films emphasizing social and historical concepts.  In the event that French 8 isn't offered, you may take French 10, with the understanding that your next French course will be French 8.  Dist:SOC; WCult:W

French 10: Introduction to French Literature

  • French 10.17: Saints, Martyrs, and Demons (Hollister) at D 

Many of French fiction's most iconic characters have been marked as holy or unholy, saintly or damned. This course will ask what the famous saints, martyrs and demons of French cultural history have to say about morality, politics, and social issues (notably class, gender, race, and sexuality). Works by Racine, Voltaire, Sade, Diderot, Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Eluard, Aragon, Bataille, Sartre, Barthes, Clouzot, Bresson, Césaire, and Yourcenar.

French 55: French Culture and Politics 

  • French 55.06 Politics and Intellectuals (Kritzman) at J 

The modern intellectual was invented in France at the time of the Dreyfus affair. In the twentieth century, French intellectuals were seen as moral guides and social critics. They engaged in philosophical speculations by bridging theory with practice. During political crises, intellectuals engaged in public debate as a means of influencing society. We will examine figures such as Zola, Benda, Breton, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, Aron, Foucault, Ben Jelloun, Derrida , Bourdieu, and Kristeva.

French 80: The Arts and French Gastronomy *counts toward pre-19th century requirement for major/minor* (Beasley) at K - remote with synchronous components

If you have taken French 10 and are experiencing technical difficulties enrolling in French 80 please email Faith.Beasley@Dartmouth.edu

Over the past 300 years the world has come to associate France with the gastronomic arts. In 2010 UNESCO named "le repas gastronomique des Français" to its list of the world's "intangible cultural heritage" sites.  This "meal" is much more than the food that is served.  It is an art form that engages all five senses.  We will explore the origins of French gastronomy and how France's relationship to food culture became an art and model for the world.  Particular attention will be paid to the way that words create, reflect, and transmit this art in France and to the world.     

This course is one of the two offered in 20-21 that counts toward the pre-19th century requirement for majors/minors. It can also serve as a subsitution for French 22 or 23 with permission from Professor Beasley. Please contact her with any questions about this course.

French 87: Independent Reading and Research (Arranged, all terms)

A program of individual study directed by a member of the staff. Open only to French, French Studies and Romance Language Majors. By special permission this course may be taken more than once. A proposal, signed by the faculty advisor, must be submitted to the Departmental Committee on Independent Studies and Honors Theses for approval by the fifth day of classes of the term.

French 89: Honors Seminar (Arranged, all terms)

Honors students will arrange a program of study and research during any term of the senior year on a tutorial basis with individual faculty members. A thesis, written in French, and a public presentation are the normal culmination of this course. A proposal, signed by the faculty advisor, must be submitted to the Departmental Committee on Independent Studies and Honors Theses for approval by the fifth day of classes of the term. For information about application procedures, please review the Honors Program section.

 

 

 

2020-21

WINTER 2021 FRENCH COURSES

**All classes are remote with synchronous components**

 

French 1: Introductory French I at F

French 2: Introductory French II at D, E, F

French 3: Introductory French III at E, F

French 11: Intensive French at E (Lerme): This 1-credit course is designed for students who have studied French for one to three years in high school, or those who have been exposed to French through family ties or have spent some time in a Francophone environment. It is also suitable for students with little or no knowledge of the French language, but who have a strong background in another Romance language (i.e. Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan, and also Latin).  French 11 is an accelerated course that combines French 1 and 2 in one term, offering an exciting and fast-paced atmosphere in which to learn French. The course will have a web-based component, which, through cultural, grammar and multimedia learning activities, will complement face-to-face work and prepare students for in-class work. Students will learn to talk about familiar events in the present and the past, as well as formulate plans for the future. Weekly cultural videos will situate in context the grammatical content of the course, making it relevant and meaningful. Students will be actively engaged in a variety of creative written and oral activities that will help them develop their language skills. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to sign up for French 3 or apply for our French LSAs in Lyon or Toulouse. With the goal of facilitating the acquisition of the target language, this course will be conducted entirely in French.

*does not count toward the major/minor*

 

French 7.05: Nature and Colonized Spaces (First Year Seminar) at BL (Sanders) This course is an interdisciplinary study of the concept of nature, and its relationship to colonialism. In the pre-industrial age, natural philosophers discovered and theorized nature through colonial encounters. During the term, we will read literary and scientific works from European writers who situate nature within colonized spaces. In theorizing a version of nature outside of Europe, they construct a version of nature which is intimately connected to the process of colonization. Through engagement with primary and secondary sources, students will identify how literary and scientific rhetoric represent nature within colonial spaces. Students will then interpret and analyze the consequences of this cultural heritage: nature as a space from which to extract resources, as an object of knowledge from which scientists objectively unlock the mysteries of life, or as an Edenic sphere whose beauty is destroyed through colonization.

French 8: Exploring French Culture and Language at C (McConnell) and D (Mefoude Obiono): Practice in the active use of the language combined with an introduction to major aspects of French society. Each week students will write papers and participate in discussions based on books, articles, and films emphasizing social and historical concepts.  In the event that French 8 isn't offered, you may take French 10, with the understanding that your next French course will be French 8.  Dist:SOC; WCult:W

French 10: Introduction to French Literature

  • French 10.10: Du mal/On evil at J (St. Clair): This course proposes a look at "evil" in French literature, art, and film (1665-1966). What does "evil" designate? A concept, or an ethical category?  A limit of the thinkable and sayable? The proof of human freedom? Is there a semiotics of evil? Can it be represented, or does its excess necessarily elude our attempts to pin it down (as when something "hurts," or "fait mal")? What is its relationship to the violence of history (from the death of God to the ravages of time passing by)? How does literature challenge us to think about what it means to be a witness to evil?
    Plays by Molière; novels, short-stories or essays by Voltaire, Balzac, Maupassant, Sartre; poems by Baudelaire, Musset, Verlaine, Hugo, Louise Michel; paintings and caricature by Daumier, Caillebotte, Manet, Meissonnier. Film by Gillo Pontecorvo (La Bataille d'Alger). Excerpts of readings from Hannah Arendt, Terry Eagleton, Georges Bataille, Raymond Williams, Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth.

 

French 24: Introduction to French Literature and Culture III: Nineteenth Century at K (St. Clair): This course examines the nineteenth-century renewal of literary form and vision from the French Revolution to the First World War. We will study the social and historical developments of French culture as they are reflected in various literary genres (narrative, poetry, dramatic theory and practice), literary criticism, philosophy, historiography, and the other arts. Emphasis will be placed on France's growing self-awareness as a nation and on the analysis of aesthetic and intellectual issues represented in the major literary movements of this period including romanticism, realism, symbolism, art for art's sake, naturalism, fin de siècle decadence, and modernism. Readings may include works by such authors as Chateaubriand, de Staël, Stendhal, Hugo, Musset, Sand, Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Michelet, Zola, and Huysmans.

French 25: Introduction to French Literature and Culture IV: Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries at C (Hollister): This course examines the radical transformations of literary form and vision that characterize twentieth-century France with its two World Wars, its colonial conflicts, and the challenges to French identity posed by immigration and globalization. We will use lyric poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography, and film to explore literary movements such as surrealism, existentialism, the new novel, the theater of the absurd and écriture féminine, as well as the recent impact of immigrant and minority writers. Readings and films may include works by Proust, Breton, Colette, Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Delbo, Cixous, Sebbar, Resnais, Malle, and Kassovitz.

French 45: Dartmouth meets the French Enlightenment at D (Sanders): Can we trace Tri-Kap's origin to the secret societies, masonic lodges, salons and cafés that arose prior to the French Revolution? This course will trace the migration of texts from France to Dartmouth where 18th-century literary societies - Social Friends (1783), United Fraternity (1786), Phi Beta Kappa (1787), and later Tri-Kap (1842) – read French Enlightenment texts on human rights as well as on the forms of sociability recently developed in France and at Dartmouth.

French 78: Senior Major Workshop at K (Hollister)  As part of this culminating experience, each major will work on an independent project, either a senior thesis or expanding upon work begun in a previous course. The independent project will be developed within the framework of this course using a selection of critical texts that can be viewed as models of literary, cultural, and historical analysis. Lectures by a variety of faculty members will supplement the readings. Students will gain mastery in literary and cultural analysis, close analytical reading skills and composition in French.  French 78 may be used to continue research on your honors thesis.  This course is open only to French and Italian Department senior majors or by petition, which is due by the fifth day of classes of Fall term.

French 87: Independent Reading and Research (Arranged, all terms) A program of individual study directed by a member of the staff. Open only to French, French Studies and Romance Language Majors. By special permission this course may be taken more than once. A proposal, signed by the faculty advisor, must be submitted to the Departmental Committee on Independent Studies and Honors Theses for approval by the fifth day of classes of the term.

French 89: Honors Seminar (Arranged, all terms) Honors students will arrange a program of study and research during any term of the senior year on a tutorial basis with individual faculty members. A thesis, written in French, and a public presentation are the normal culmination of this course. A proposal, signed by the faculty advisor, must be submitted to the Departmental Committee on Independent Studies and Honors Theses for approval by the fifth day of classes of the term. For information about application procedures, please review the Honors Program section.

 

 

Updated 10/21/20

2020-21

SPRING 2021 FRENCH COURSES

French 1: Introductory French I at E

French 2: Introductory French II at BL, C

French 3: Introductory French III at C, D, E - please note - *C class is synchronous remote with on campus components*

French 8: Exploring French Culture and Language at C (Sanders) Practice in the active use of the language combined with an introduction to major aspects of French society. Each week students will write papers and participate in discussions based on books, articles, and films emphasizing social and historical concepts.  In the event that French 8 isn't offered, you may take French 10, with the understanding that your next French course will be French 8. Dist:SOC; WCult:W

French 11: Intensive French at F: This 1-credit course is designed for students who have studied French for one to three years in high school, or those who have been exposed to French through family ties or have spent some time in a Francophone environment. It is also suitable for students with little or no knowledge of the French language, but who have a strong background in another Romance language (i.e. Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalan, and also Latin).  French 11 is an accelerated course that combines French 1 and 2 in one term, offering an exciting and fast-paced atmosphere in which to learn French. 

French 10: Introduction to French Literature

  • French 10.10: Du Mal/On Evil at J (St. Clair): This course proposes a look at "evil" in French literature, art, and film (1665-1966). What does "evil" designate? A concept, or an ethical category?  A limit of the thinkable and sayable? The proof of human freedom? Is there a semiotics of evil? Can it be represented, or does its excess necessarily elude our attempts to pin it down (as when something "hurts," or "fait mal")? What is its relationship to the violence of history (from the death of God to the ravages of time passing by)? How does literature challenge us to think about what it means to be a witness to evil?

French 20: Interpreting French Cultures at E (Sanders): Students will acquire the analytical skills to interpret French and Francophone cultures.  To prepare students to be "culturally competent," the course will focus on how and why we read signs of culture, whether through the lenses of history, symbols, politics or class and power.  We will explore a variety of cultural objects in conjunction with the writings of authors who may include Balibar, Barthes, Baudrillard, Condé, Fanon, Foucault, Le Goff, Nora and Wieviorka.

French 40.02: French and Francophone Poetry from Baudelaire through Cesaire at F (Elhariry): Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Eluard, André Breton, Paul Valéry, Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, D.T. Niane and Andrée Chedid are poets of radically different backgrounds connected by abiding preoccupations of a modernist vision. These poets will be studied in order to explore the traditions and counter-traditions of French and Francophone poetry.  

French 50: French Literature: Major Figures

  • French 50.07: Reading Modernity for Filth: Baudelaire/Flaubert at K (St. Clair): It is by a fortuitous, if strange, twist of literary fortune that two publications from the winter of 1857—both of which would later come to be regarded as uncontested masterworks of high modernism in the French literary canon—saw their authors hauled before Second Empire courts and put on trial for obscenity: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. This course will pursue a perhaps inadvertent insight made during the trials against these two core figures in French – and world – literature: namely, that the so-called crimes (of shocking moral corruption, of prurience and obscenity, etc.) of which Baudelaire and Flaubert were accused have much to do with the formal complexity and aporias that one finds in their works. What one finds there, in other words, is less "filthy" material per se than a stylistics that opens up space for dangerously unruly sociocritical readings; that brings into visibility and legibility desires and subjectivities typically confined in the nineteenth century to the grisaille silencieuse of "History's" margins; and that seeks to bring out into representation repressed historical and political traumas occasioned by the "shocks" of modernity (Benjamin). One finds, in other words, in Baudelaire's poetry and in Flaubert's novels a distinct literary politics; a critical use of literature against the abuses of the present order of things. A way of reading modernity for filth

French 87: Independent Reading and Research (Arranged, all terms) A program of individual study directed by a member of the staff. Open only to French, French Studies and Romance Language Majors. By special permission this course may be taken more than once. A proposal, signed by the faculty advisor, must be submitted to the Departmental Committee on Independent Studies and Honors Theses for approval by the fifth day of classes of the term.

French 89: Honors Seminar (Arranged, all terms) Honors students will arrange a program of study and research during any term of the senior year on a tutorial basis with individual faculty members. A thesis, written in French, and a public presentation are the normal culmination of this course. A proposal, signed by the faculty advisor, must be submitted to the Departmental Committee on Independent Studies and Honors Theses for approval by the fifth day of classes of the term. For information about application procedures, please review the Honors Program section.

 

Updated 2/9/21