This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of French and Francophone culture.

In this course we will read poems in French from a variety of writers and time periods, taking into account their stylistic features, emotional impact, and cultural resonance. Each day will be structured around the study of one key poem.Through in-class readings of related poems, writing workshops and secondary readings, we will explore how poetry brings us closer to words, language, knowledge, sensations, emotion, ourselves, and others.

Werewolves, vampires, phantoms, and fairies inhabit French fables, legends, fairy tales, short stories, novels, and film. The course studies supernatural fictional creatures in relation to concepts of physical and moral beauty, animality, good, evil, comfort, fear, kindness, familiarity and the uncanny.

In this grammar review course, students will learn how best to structure the French language and how to express themselves with concision and clarity. They will work to improve their writing in French by analyzing model texts and through frequent composition and revision. Aspects of grammar will be studied systematically -- tense use, the subjunctive, participles, etc. -- and in response to topics that emerge through the writing process.

Francophone philosophers from the Caribbean adopted a critical perspective and questioned aporias and blind spots of our history. We will read texts by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant (1928-2011), Patrick Chamoiseau to see how they reflected on issues such as colonialism. 

Love fascinated people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as it still does today. This course will examine understandings and uses of love in religious and secular literature, music and art. What is the relationship, for medieval writers, between the love of God and the love of human beings? What is the role of poetry in promoting and producing love? What medieval ideas about love continue to shape our modern understandings and assumption.

The Enlightenment laid the foundations for our current conceptions of democratic government, religious toleration, freedom of speech, and the scientific method. The readings for this course may include works by Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau.Prerequisite: FREN 3032

Advanced seminar in French and Francophone literature and culture. Topics vary. May be repeated for credit for different topics. Prerequisite: At least one literature or culture course beyond FREN 3032.

An exploration of a selection of poetry and prose works by Baudelaire to gain an in-depth understanding of one of the most celebrated poets in Western literature. Through close readings, we will examine poetry¿s relation to beauty and suffering, the structuring and de-structuring of poetic form, and the ethics of poetic modernity in Baudelaire in order to reflect more generally on what poetry affords us in life.

After an initial examination of the political and social conditions in France under the Nazi regime during World War II, this seminar explores the enduring legacy of those "Dark Years" by investigating how the complex and traumatic history of the Occupation has impacted French culture during the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty first.