Course Catalog

This course is designed for students interested in international business or who intend to work or travel for business in French-speaking countries. Students will learn about the present economic questions and climate in France and Europe, learn about practices and traditions that make French business different from its counterparts in the United States or elsewhere (according to students' interests). Taught in French.

This course is bilingual in nature and outlines the historical and literary contexts of the Renaissance from a Franco-centric perspective. Students will study texts by a range of Renaissance authors (including Erasmus, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, Louise Labé, Montaigne, Marlowe and Shakespeare) while learning about earlymodern book culture, medicine, cartography, religion, colonization, magic, monsters, witchcraft and plagues. They shall also seek to comprehend how France became dominant in language and literature throughout Europe for centuries to follow.

By promoting careful analysis of two landmarks of French literature while building skills in language and cultural semantics, oral and written communications, this course aims at helping students weave together literary meaning and cross-cultural belonging. By becoming more familiar with French literary language and mindscapes, students will further their understanding of L’Esprit français, the special relationship between literature and culture, writers and intellectual history in France.
The choice of works and pairings will differ every year according to the instructor’s interests.

Studies France's development from a provincial peasant society, hampered by weak governments and enduring colonial wars, to a technologically sophisticated industrial democracy and a major international power. Studies France's cultural, social, and economic contexts, evolving party system, and institutions and policy-making processes to better understand this phenomenal change and its consequences for France's role in the world. The ability to read in French will facilitate research, but is not required.

Studies the literary works, poetic aspirations and legal trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire, while tracing their tremendous influence on 19th-century French literature and their contribution to the emergence of modernity. Readings include Madame Bovary, Trois contes, Bouvard et Pecuchet, and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal among other works, as well as a range of critical and philosophical commentaries.

Shows the evolution of modern French culture in its relationship to cinema. Examines the early influence of literature and theater on cinema and its subsequent detachment, to be recognized as an art in itself with its own particular form. Emphasizes the viewing and discussing of one film each week: two class meetings plus one film per week. One or two off campus visits organized per semester.Taught in French.

Studies the numerous facets, whether real or imaginary, of the close relationship between Paris and cinema. Analyzes films made by famous directors such as Clair, Carne, Godard, Malle, Rohmer, Polanski, Collard, Kassovitz, and others. Taught in French, essays and exams can be written /
taken in English.

From the early Romantic period to the end of the XIXth Century, women’s folie furieuse or melancholia have been the subject of fascination and depicted in numerous literary works, from the French novelist Balzac’s Adieu to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or the American Charlotte Perkins’ The Yellow Wallpaper.

The lives and works of French women artists such as Camille Claudel, the sculptress Louise Bourgeois, the writers Marguerite Duras or Chloé Delaume, the recent legitimization and recognition of the bodies of work of Séraphine de Senlis, of Aloïse Corbaz, are testimonies of a drastic evolution in the way French society views women’s contributions to art history and culture but also to mental health and imagination: not only has the social gaze drastically changed its judgment of women, but madness and reason, “Art brut” and “official Art” have appeared closer to each other, certainly not the polar opposites our “enlightened” ancestors had made them to be. By including the study of Art Brut (Outsider Art) in particular, the course thus aims at bringing students to questions their views of art, and their judgement on complex, sometimes intricate personalities.
Visits to the Halle Saint-Pierre in Montmartre and the Collection ABCD in Montreuil, study trips to the Lausanne Collection de l’Art brut and/or to Villeneuve d’Asq’s LAM museum will allow students to visualize the disconcerting works created by rebellious, marginal and often solitary artists, experience the complexities of human expressions and the therapeutic value of art.

Topics change each semester.