University Bulletin (2010-2011)

FREN 10a Beginning French
Prerequisite: Students enrolling for the first time in a French course at Brandeis must take the online placement exam at www.brandeis.edu/registrar/newstudent/frentest.html. Students must earn a C- or higher in FREN 10a in order to enroll in a 20-level French course.
For students with no previous knowledge of French and those with a minimal background. Intensive training in the basics of French grammar, listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing within the context of French and Francophone cultures. Usually offered every semester.
Staff

FREN 20b Continuing French
Prerequisite: A grade of C- or higher in FREN 10a or the equivalent. Students enrolling for the first time in a French course at Brandeis must take the online placement exam at www.brandeis.edu/registrar/newstudent/frentest.html. Students must earn a C- or higher in FREN 20b in order to enroll in a 30-level French course.
Continued work in French grammar, listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing within the context of French and Francophone cultures. Usually offered every semester.
Staff

FREN 32a Intermediate French: Conversation
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Prerequisite: A grade of C- or higher in FREN 20b or the equivalent. Students enrolling for the first time in a French course at Brandeis must take the online placement exam at www.brandeis.edu/registrar/newstudent/frentest.html. Students must earn a C- or higher in FREN 32a in order to enroll in a 100-level French course.
Focuses on improving the speaking ability of students who wish to develop greater fluency in conversation while discussing contemporary French and Francophone cultures. Students continue to improve their skills in listening, comprehension, reading, and writing. Usually offered every year.
Staff

FREN 34a Intermediate French: Topics in French and Francophone Cultures
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This is an experiential learning course. Prerequisite: A grade of C- or higher in FREN 20b or the equivalent. Students enrolling for the first time in a French course at Brandeis must take the online placement exam at www.brandeis.edu/registrar/newstudent/frentest.html. Students must earn a C- or higher in FREN 34a in order to enroll in a 100-level French course.
Focuses on increasing the knowledge of students who wish to develop greater understanding of fundamental principles of French and Francophone cultures, such as education and identity. Students continue to improve their skills in listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing. Usually offered every year.
Staff

FREN 92a Internship
May be taken with the written permission of the undergraduate advising head.
Combines off-campus internship experience related to French and Francophone studies with written analysis under the supervision of a faculty sponsor. Students arrange their own internships. Counts only once toward the fulfillment of requirements for the major or the minor. Usually offered every semester
Staff

FREN 97a Senior Essay
Students should consult the undergraduate advising head before enrolling.
FREN 97a offers students an opportunity to produce a senior essay under the direction of an individual instructor. Students normally enroll in FREN 97a in the fall. Only under exceptional circumstances will students enroll in FREN 97a in the spring. Offered every fall.
Staff

FREN 98a Independent Study
May be taken only with the written permission of the undergraduate advising head.
Reading and reports under faculty supervision. Offered as needed.
Staff

FREN 98b Independent Study
May be taken only with the written permission of the undergraduate advising head. Reading and reports under faculty supervision. Offered as needed.
Staff

FREN 99b Senior Thesis
May be taken only with the written permission of the undergraduate advising head.
Students who successfully complete FREN 97a (Senior essay) in the fall and who have a 3.5 GPA in all French courses may apply to extend the essay into a thesis in the spring.
Staff

All courses are conducted in French unless otherwise noted. The abbreviation FECS denotes French and European Cultural Studies courses, which are taught in English.

FREN 104b Advanced Language Skills through Culture
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Prerequisite: A 30-level French course or the equivalent.
For students who would like to continue studying French beyond the foreign language requirement. Topics will vary, but all investigate aspects of French and Francophone cultures, such as French history through film, French Impressionism, issues of immigration, culture and cuisine, or understanding contemporary France. Reinforces the acquired skills of speaking, listening, comprehension, reading, and writing. Usually offered every year.
Staff

FREN 105a France Today: French Conversation
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Prerequisite: A 30-level French course or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
For students who have acquired knowledge of conversational French and wish to develop greater fluency in conversation. Role playing, vocabulary building, and guided speaking and writing activities will develop conversational skills for various situations. Discussions of contemporary texts and films assist in vocabulary building. Usually offered every semester.
Staff

FREN 106b The Art of Composition
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Prerequisite: FREN 104b or FREN 105a or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
A crucial course for students that helps develop greater competence in examining texts in order to write and speak in a more sophisticated manner. Focuses on composing summaries and descriptions, constructing arguments, and analyzing different types of writing to produce thoughtful compositions and textual analyses. Usually offered every semester.
Staff

FREN 110a Cultural Representations
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Compares literary works and other forms of cultural phenomena from different Francophone countries and from different historical periods. Usually organized around a theme such as alienation, integration, or cultural identity, it also develops written and spoken expression in French. Usually offered every year.
Staff

FREN 111a The Republic
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
The "Republic" analyzes how the republican ideal of the citizen devoid of religious, ethnic, or gender identity has fared in different Francophone political milieux. Course involves understanding how political institutions such as constitutions, parliaments, and court systems interact with reality of modern societies in which religious, ethnic, and gender identities play important roles. Usually offered every year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 113a Great French Novels
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Power, passion, and creativity in the French novel. Major novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Balzac, Stendhal, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust reflect France's social and political upheavals. Topics include psychological analysis, revolution and class conflicts, male and female relationships, and the creative process. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 114b Quest for the Absolute
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Imagination, the drug experience, even madness can convey absolute meaning. We read creative journeys in prose and poetry by Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Maria Krysinska, Senghor, Bonnefoy to explore topics of good and evil; racial and gender identity; love and intimacy; spiritual faith. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 120a The Middle Ages: Before France Was France
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Before the creation of the French nation-state in the sixteenth century, what we know as France today was a tapestry of feudal and postfeudal states. Modern students often find medieval culture much more exotic than many modern foreign cultures. We will try to understand and appreciate the alterity of the Middle Ages in works such as eleventh-century hagiographies, the Romance of the Rose, the knightly romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the poetry of the troubadours, Christine de Pizan, and François Villon. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 122b The Renaissance: When France Became France
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
The creation of the modern nation-state in the sixteenth century was inextricably linked to the literature and art of the period. The defense of French language and culture was the battle cry of the cultural vanguard of the Renaissance. The political and religious turmoil of the period is matched only by the intensity and beauty of its artistic creations. Works studied include Rabelais' Gargantua, Montaigne's Essays, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, as well as the poetry of Ronsard, du Bellay, and Louise Labé. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 130a Heart and Mind in French Classicism
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
An examination of the combat of heart, mind, and social convention in seventeenth-century masterpieces—Molière’s comedies, Corneille and Racine’s tragedies, Pascal’s Pensées, and the psychological novel La princesse de Clèves. Topics include the conflict of love and duty, social class, skepticism and religious faith, gender roles. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 131a Orientalism and Literature
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b. This course may not be taken for credit by student who took FREN 190b section 1 in fall 2006.
An examination of how French literature has often represented the "Orient" or "the East," in particular North Africa, parts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, as its opposite, its imaginary "other." Will also look at how some twentieth-century writers of North-African backgrounds have reacted to these misrepresentations. The course includes paintings, film, and readings in many different genres (novels, travel literature, etc.). Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Voiret

FREN 133b Visions of Change in the Enlightenment
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Studies philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot. They defined a new framework for thinking about human civilization and progress based on reason and knowledge. Longstanding notions of the universal relevance and truth of their ideas are challenged by our awareness of the diversity of cultures in the emerging global order. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Voiret

FREN 134b Masculine/Feminine
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This course may not be repeated for credit by students who took FREN 190b 2 in fall 2006.
Examines diverse representations of masculinity and femininity in French literature with special focus on historical and cultural aspects. Readings include: Racine, Andromaque; Rousseau, Emile; Stendahl, Le Rouge et le Noir; Duras, L'Amant; and articles from Beauvoir and Badinter. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Voiret

FREN 135a Rebellion Against Romanticism
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Liberation and selfhood in nineteenth-century France: short stories, novels, poetry, and theater. Topics include love and intimacy, the struggle for identity, gender roles, myth and folklore, religion and secularization. Authors may include Lamartine, Hugo, Desbordes-Valmore, Musset, Nerval, Sand, and Balzac. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 137a Literary Responses to Mass Violence
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Studies writers’ responses to humanitarian and political crises of the past hundred years, e.g., Camus’ La peste, Duras’ Hiroshima mon amour, Beckett’s Catastrophe, Diop’s Murambi, Sijie’s Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise, as well as texts written in response to the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Hale

FREN 142b City and the Book
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Analyzes the symbolic appearance of the city in French literature and film from the Middle Ages to the present day. The representation of the city in literature and film is contextualized in theoretical writings of urbanists and philosophers. Literary texts include medieval fabliaux, Gargantua (Rabelais) and Nana (Zola) as well as theoretical texts by Descartes, Ledoux, Le Corbusier, Salvador Dalí, and Paul Virillo. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 143a Existentialism: Identity and Commitment
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Sartre and Camus are known as the founders of French existentialism, a philosophy of the absurd, loneliness, freedom, and responsibility. Novels, plays, and essays are read on moral commitment and on black, Jewish, female identities in light of war, colonialism, and the Holocaust. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 145a Baudelaire and his World: Evil, Beauty, Finitude
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor..
The life and works of Baudelaire, germinal figure of a European literary and cultural revolution, including Les Fleurs du Mal, prose poems, and critical essays. Topics: sex and love, painting, music, laughter, the drug experience, good and evil, the city, and modernity. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan

FREN 147a Jewish Identities in France since 1945
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Prerequisite: FREN 106 or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
After the Holocaust, French thinkers such as Sartre, Levinas, and Memmi provided a foundation for reconstructing Jewish life. Topics include assimilation, Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, Muslim, black, and Jewish identity, the role of women, secularism, ethics, and religious faith. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Kaplan.

FREN 155b Contemporary Theater: Literature or Performance?
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This is an experiential learning course. Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Reading and in-class performance of plays ranging from Jarry’s Ubu roi and Beckett’s Godot to more traditional texts by Sartre and Giraudoux. Concludes with Yasmina Reza’s Le Dieu du carnage, recently attracting sell-out crowds, in Paris, London, and New York. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Hale

FREN 164a Haiti, Then and Now
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This is an experiential learning course. Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Studies Haiti's cultural history through literature, music, painting, film, and journalism. Topics include: Haiti's first inhabitants, the Arawaks and Taino; slavery and colonialism; the world's first black republic; dictators and presidents; Creole and French; Catholicism and Vaudou; the island's ecology; the 2010 earthquake and international aid. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Hale

FREN 165b Subsaharan Africa and the French Language
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Studies writing in French in Subsaharan Africa, with particular emphasis upon its cultural and historical contexts. Topics include Negritude, African languages, defining "tradition,' oral and written literature, Islam, film, and gender. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Hale

FREN 186b Literature and Politics
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Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
We will be interested in how the literary is political and the political literary. We will organize the class around the relationship of the individual and the community. Texts include: Montaigne’s Essais, Corneille’s Horace, Genet’s Les nègres, Arendt’s What is Politics?, Dumont’s Essays on Individualism, Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Randall

FREN 190b Advanced Seminar
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May be repeated for credit with permission. Refer to the University Writing section of this Bulletin for information regarding applicability to the writing-intensive requirement. Usually offered every fourth year.
Staff

COML 115b Fictions of Liberty: Europe in a Revolutionary Age
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The "Age of Enlightenment" fostered new notions of human rights that found their tumultuous proving ground in the French Revolution. Through writings from several genres and nations, this course explores some of the political, economic, religious, racial, and sexual "fictions of liberty" that have shaped our own time. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Lanser

COML 166b Literacy, Language and Culture
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This is an experiential learning course. Considers emergent literacy in cultures where different languages are spoken at home and school. Students will work directly on projects in Haiti and Lesotho designed to develop picture books for young children in their home languages. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Hale

ECS 100a European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Modernism
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Explores the interrelationship of literature, music, painting, philosophy, and other arts in the era of high modernism. Works by Artaud, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Mann, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Schiele, Beckett, Brecht, Adorno, Sartre, Heidegger, and others. Usually offered every fall semester.
Mr. Dowden

ECS 100b European Cultural Studies Proseminar: Making of European Modernity
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Investigates how the paradigm of what we know as modernity came into being. We will look at the works of writers and philosophers such as Descartes, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Petrarch, Ficino, Rabelais, and Montaigne. Artwork from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance will be used to understand better what "the modern" means. Usually offered every spring semester.
Mr. Randall

ENG 114b Gender and the Rise of the Novel in England and France
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Explores the emergence of the novel as a modern genre in the eighteenth century, asking why the novel arises first in England and France, and what the new genre's preoccupations with women and gender can teach us about European society, culture, and literature. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Lanser

FA 171a Impressionism: Avant-Garde Rebellion in Context
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Focuses on the major artists from the period 1863 - 1886, from the time of Manet and the Salon des Refusés through the eight group exhibitions of Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro, Morisot, and Cassatt and company. The antithesis of impressionism, its academic rivals, the backdrop of the sociopolitical context, the Second Empire, and the Third Republic will be provided, as well as the roots of the movement's dissolution. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Scott

FA 173b Picasso and Matisse
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Examines the major contributions of all periods of Picasso's career, with special focus on the development of Cubism, counterbalanced with the color expression of Matisse and the Fauves. The larger circle of artists, poets, and patrons associated with both these masters--from Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, and especially Georges Braque, to Gertrude Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire--forms the core subject matter. Usually offered every second year.
Ms. Scott

FA 174b Postimpressionism and Symbolism, 1880-1910
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The course curriculum covers postimpressionist artists Seurat, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, and more broadly, symbolist trends, expressionism, and art nouveau at the end of the nineteenth century. These trends are followed through chronologically to the early twentieth century in the art of Matisse and the fauves, and in German expressionism. Usually offered every fourth year.
Ms. Scott

HIST 130a The French Revolution
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The sources, content, and results of the French Revolution; its place in the broader context of the democratic revolution of the West. A study of the events and analysis of the elements involved. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

HIST 133a Politics of the Enlightenment
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This course may not be repeated for credit by students who have taken USEM 6b in previous years.
The Enlightenment as a source of the intellectual world we live in today. Examination of some of the political, philosophical, and scientific writings of the philosophers. Usually offered every third year.
Mr. Hulliung

HIST 134a Nineteenth-Century Europe: From Revolution to National Unification (1789-1870)
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The demographic, economic, and French revolutions; Napoleonic imperium; instability and revolt in restoration Europe; romanticism; urbanization and industrialization; revolutions of 1848; national unification and ethnic politics; the "liberal era." Usually offered every second year.
Staff

HIST 145b Introduction to Modern France
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Explores French politics and society from 1789 to the present. Emphasis on the shocks from which it has had to recover, including revolutions, wars, and foreign occupation, the implantation of stable institutions, and the continuing role of intellectuals in French society. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Jankowski

HIST 192b Romantic and Existentialist Political Thought
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Readings from Camus, Sartre, Beckett, and others. Examination and criticism of romantic and existentialist theories of politics. Usually offered every second year.
Mr. Hulliung

LING 112b Sociolinguistics: Language Variation and Change
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Open to first-year students.
Introduces language variation and change, encompassing historical linguistics (how languages change over time), dialectology (regional variation in language), and sociolinguistics (relationships between language and society). Explores how factors like age, gender, and social class influence human behavior and social organization. Usually offered every third year.
Staff