Gateway: Text, Image, Culture

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Required of all French majors and open to other qualified undergraduates, 3350 is a post-advanced level course designed to meet two goals. First, it prepares students for upper-division French courses and for direct matriculation overseas study programs by focusing on the development of critical thinking and advanced writing abilities. Second, it enhances students’ capacities to perform close reading and analysis by introducing them to a variety of texts and documents selected to increase their content knowledge of the culture, geography, history, literature, and artistic media of the French-speaking world. Individual sections of this course will emphasize specific approaches to French and Francophone cultures and literatures, such as the anthropological, the historical, the thematic, the formal (including notions of genre) and/or the rhetorical, depending on instructor expertise. Study and analysis will be carried out in class discussion, as well as through specific writing formats (such as explication de texte, dissertation, research paper) for which students will receive structured training, including systematic procedures for organization, drafting, and rewriting, as well as an introduction to research materials and methodology in the discipline. The final paper for each course will be designed to mobilize the reading, analytical and research competencies developed over the course of the semester. Prerequisite for this course is FREN 2551 (Composition and Style, formerly called Advanced Grammar & Writing) or FREN 2012 (Intensive Advanced French II) or direct placement through formal placement test results. FREN 3350 offers a broadly-defined introduction to the rich and varied literatures and other art forms of France and the French-speaking world, as well as to cultural documents. Course materials may include texts, from all historical periods and French-speaking regions, that might be categorized as “fiction”: among them, works of literature (novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays), “popular” narrative forms (comics, detective stories), films, music, and art, as well as those that might be categorized as “documents”: among them, essays, ethnographies, political and historical tracts, life writing and testimonials, journalism, studies, literature, documentary images, and films. In what context were these texts created, how were they crafted, and what impact have they had? What issues and problems do they illuminate within and beyond their communities of origin, and how do we appreciate their documentary or aesthetic value? In order to address such questions, students will be given methodological tools and techniques that will allow them to approach texts in a systematic, cogent, and critical manner, both for their content and their form. Key notions such as genre, ideology, autobiography and autofiction, (self-)censorship, and frame will be explored and applied to multiple readings of works selected.