If you are currently taking FREN2001 and you want to continue taking French classes, you will register for FREN2600 next. If you are currently taking FREN2600 or a 3000-level course, you may choose from the following options.
FALL 2023– Lincoln Center
FREN3230: Podcasts en tous genres— Professor Audrey Evrard
Monday/Thursday, 4:00 p.m.-5:15 p.m.
Ubiquitous across media platforms as stand-alone programs, companion features for TV series, and features of traditional radio programming, podcasts exist in a wide range of formats and cover countless topics, embraced by celebrities, radio professionals, academics, and audio documentarians alike as effective means of communication and entertainment. Focusing on a curated selection of popular, innovative, and thought-provoking podcasts recorded in French, this course allows students to deepen their oral and written communication skills and intensively practice them at an advanced level as they consider the structural specificities and content qualities of various podcasts’ episodes and series intended for native French speakers. By the end of the semester, students will conceive, design, write, and produce a podcast episode with peers in French.
FREN3301: France and Global Enlightenment— Professor Andrew H. Clark
Monday/Thursday 2:30 p.m.-3:45 p.m.
In this course, we will study the Enlightenment in France and beyond. As philosophes and others in France began radically to question the basic epistemologies that grounded notions of reason, faith, physical bodies, and one’s relation to another, data poured in from all over the world to confirm, contest, or undermine long-held truths. But these transactions with Asia, the New World, Africa, and other parts of Europe were not just unidirectional; they involved far more than the mere cataloguing and discussion of artifacts in the Royal Academies or the elegant exchanges and commentaries in the Republic of Letters and other emerging public spheres. Moreover, these transactions were far from innocent. They were imbricated in questions of empire, national conflicts, racial and ethnic superiority, commerce, and patriarchy, among other things. To address this global Enlightenment and its complexities, we will be reading literary, historic, scientific, philosophic, and travel writings written both in France and around the globe. As such, students should gain a much more expansive and transnational understanding of that famous question posed by Kant, “What is an Enlightenment?”
FALL 2023– Rose Hill
FREN3292: French Revolutions (1789-present)— Professor Joshua Jordan
Tuesday/Friday, 2:30 p.m.-3:45 p.m.
In this course, we will explore some of the most exciting and tumultuous episodes in French political and social history through the plural notion of French revolutions — from the Révolution française of 1789 to present-day movements of intense social and political ferment (1968, 2015…). Drawing on literature, film, art, and music from throughout the Francophone world, we will examine how these key moments in France and its colonies have entailed profound changes in popular relationships to institutions of power and have sometimes meant destroying and reconstructing those institutions from the ground up. We will explore how popular revolts have challenged what it means to belong to or to be excluded from a nation or a people — from the Haitian revolution and anti colonial struggles to movements for women’s and LGBTQ rights. We will examine how the revolutionary ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité and their shifting interpretations have spurred the social and political upheavals that continue to convulse the French republic to this day.
FREN3475: Narratives of the Sahel— Professor Sara C. Hanaburgh
Monday/Thursday, 10:00 a.m.-11:15 a.m.
This course examines Sahelian cultures and narratives as expressed through a variety of forms, including oral tradition, song, poetry, short story, the picaresque novel, detective fiction, graphic novel, and documentary and fictional film produced between the 1970s and the early 2020s. The Sahel is a vast geographical transitional expanse of land with the Sahara Desert to its north and the Savannah to its south. A transborder, transient, and fluid space spanning parts of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Sudan to name a few countries, the Sahel is where cultures, languages, and identities collide and unite. It is at once a space of disorder and contradiction, idleness and stillness, sound and silence. By consuming works by Omar Ba, Marième Mint Derwich, Boubacar Boris Diop, Amadous Hampaté Bâ, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Aïcha Macky, Monique Ilboudo, Moussa Konaté, and Abderrahmane Sissoko, among others, we will engage critically with various aspects of Sahelian culture by analyzing the roles and styles of the griot and griotte, the figure of the trickster and the interpreter; narratives of conquest and resistance; and examining religion, patriarchy, women’s agency, and ways in which the youth are increasingly changing the narrative.
FREN3605: Cultural and Literary History of Journalism— Professor Kari Evanson
Tuesday/Friday, 11:30 a.m.-12:45 p.m.
This course examines not only the history of the practice of journalism in France from the rise of mass media in 1830 to the present day, but also the cultural and literary representations of journalism and journalists. Particular attention will be paid to the figure of the grand reporter and the practice of reportage from 1890-1950. Students will read primary sources from the period in question and will be introduced to various theoretical approaches to the study of media.
To view flyers for these courses, please visit the department blog!
French at Fordham 