Transfer Student Courses in French (Division 371)

Fall Term, 1999 (September 8 - December 22, 1999)

To see what Transfer Student courses have been added or changed in French this week go to What's New This Week.

Other Language Courses

Section 001.

Prerequisites & Distribution: French 111 and 112 are designed for juniors, seniors, and graduate students interested in gaining a reading knowledge of the language. Completion of French 111-112 does not satisfy the LS&A language requirement. May not be elected for credit by undergraduates who have received credit for college French. No credit granted to those who have completed or are enrolled in 101, 102, or 103. (4). (Excl).

Credits: (4).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

This course is for undergraduate and graduate students who would like to gain a good reading knowledge of French in one term. The essentials of French grammar as well as vocabulary and idioms are presented for passive recognition, followed by translation and sight-reading exercises on materials taken from both humanities and sciences. The skills gained in the course should enable students to read technical writings of moderate difficulty. Toward the end of the term, students select a short article or a chapter of a book in their field of interest for outside reading. Classes meet four times per week in sections of 25 students. There are weekly quizzes as well as course-wide midterm and final examinations.

Cultural and Literary Studies

Section 001 – L'Art de voyager.

Instructor(s): Melissa Waldman (mwaldman@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: French 232. (4). (HU). May be repeated for a total of eight credits.

Credits: (4).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

Voyagers to the New World, out of this world, and to places around the world tell us about worlds invented and observed, as well as about themselves. We will examine where the travel narratives take us readers mentally and ideologically, as well as consider where we locate the narratives in relation to ethnography, utopian aspirations, history, and cultural critique. Can we identify characteristics that unify and distinguish travel narratives as a genre? What does travel – literally and metaphorically – make possible? Why does it appeal? Where does it go awry? We will use the travel narratives to get to discussions about the discovery of the New World, religious and industrial revolutions, colonization, morality, politics, and philosophy.

Readings and discussion will be in French. Evaluation will be based on class participation, one page reflections on each text, your own travel narrative, and two essays (four pages).

Cultural and Literary Studies

Section 002 – The Computer and the Rainbow.

Instructor(s): Donald Maxwell (maxwelld@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: French 232. (4). (HU). May be repeated for a total of eight credits.

Credits: (4).

Course Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~maxwelld/Fr270-'99.html

In this course, which will encourage open and group discussion, we will move from the infinitesimal world of DNA and genetic replication to the measureless realms of the big bang and the expanding universe and explore some scientific concepts that occur in literature. We will consider some basic differences between the cultures of “science” and “literature”, why there appears to be a “language barrier” in literature but not in science and why it is easier to translate a scientific text than a literary one.

Chance or serendipity plays an important role in scientific discovery and is an important theme in literature. We will explore this theme as well as that of free will and determinism in Voltaire’s Candide, Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, and Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste. We will also discuss and read about chance in discoveries of French science by Louis Pasteur, Henry Becquerel, and Marie Curie as well as read selections from James Watson’s La double hélice and view videos on both Voltaire and Proust. The course will end with audiotapes readings from Marcel Proust’s Combray.

The course will be entirely in French and there are NO SCIENTIFIC PREREQUISITES. Grades based on regular and active class participation, an oral presentation and two short papers that will involve visiting the course Webb page.

Texts:
Prévost. Manon Lescaut.
Voltaire. Candide.
Diderot. Jacques le fataliste.
Proust. Excepts from Combray (Germaine Brée).

Course Pack with short excepts from:

James Watson. La double hélice. (pp. 47-50 & 182-205)
Marie Curie. ‘La découverte du radium’
Stephen W Hawking. Une brève histoire du temps.
Jean d’Alembert. ‘Discours préliminaire’ (pour l’Encyclopédie)
Items relating to the centenary of the discovery of radium downloaded from the Webb.

Cultural and Literary Studies

Section 003 – “Flânerie et Modernité” (Nineteenth-Century Cultural Construction of Paris).

Instructor(s): Yannick Viers (yannick@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: French 232. (4). (HU). May be repeated for a total of eight credits.

Credits: (4).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

Paris, the “Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” will inspire our reading of a collection of graphic representations (literary and critical writings, caricatures, lithographies, architectural project, fashion prints, etc.) from the French Revolution to the Commune (1789-1871).

Through our “readings” we will investigate the impact of the political and industrial revolutions, the metropolis, the crowds, and other social phenomena on some Nineteenth-century cultural productions.

While “strolling” about these texts and their historical/economical/political contexts, we will also have the opportunity to reflect upon contemporary critical notions such as (post-) modernity, (urban) text, modern subjectivity, space, and power relations.

With the constant presence of twentieth-century critic Walter Benjamin, we will encounter a selection of works by Balzac, Barthes, Baudelaire, Daumier, Flaubert, Freud, Foucault, Hugo, LeBon, Maupassant, Michelet, Marx, Poe, Sand, Zola, etc.

Your grades will be based on two essays, three quizzes, written/oral reports, and active class participation.

Cultural and Literary Studies

Section 002 – The Gargoyle in the Church: Laughter and Literature in the Middle Ages.

Instructor(s): Liz Fackelman (facklelm@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: French 232. (4). (HU). May be repeated for a total of eight credits.

Credits: (4).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

This introductory course features a sampling of medieval French literature (in modern French translation), juxtaposing the various themes of "high literature" with their comic and paradoic counterparts and placing both in their historical and cultural context. We will meet the noble kings, brave knights, the saints, beautiful ladies and damsels in distress, but we will also meet their shadow selves: the peasant who would be a knight, the unfaithful ladies, a gambling Saint Peter disguised in a long black beard, a shepherd who outfoxes a lawyer and the Fox himself, Renard who gave his name to the animal with the bushy tail. No prior knowledge of the Middle Ages is assumed, and we will review languge as needed. The course is taguht in French. Prerequisite: French 232.

Cultural and Literary Studies

Section 001 – Modern Travel Narratives.

Instructor(s): Alina Clej (aclej@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: French 232, and 8 credits in courses numbered between French 250 and 299. (3). (HU). May be repeated for a total of 9 credits.

Credits: (3).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

Travel narratives whether by amateur travellers or professional ones (such as explorers, missionaries, or ethnographers) offer some of the best insights into inter-cultural communication and miscommunication. In this course we will examine a number of 20^th-century French and Francophone narratives, in which the discoveries and misunderstandings of the other are particularly meaningful in terms of how the “metropolitan” French viewed, and were viewed in turn by their “provincial,” “colonial” fellows. These ecounters reveal as much about collective ways of thinking, as they do about individual attitudes. The readings will consist of short pieces, excerpts from longer travel narratives, and journal articles by 20^th-century writers such as, Segalen, Saint-John Perse, Larbaud, Gide, Breton, Cesaire, Leiris, Levi-Strauss, Dadie, Memmi, Pieyre de Mandiargues, Genet, Duras, Oyono, Le Clezio, Maryse Conde. Evaluation will be based on class participation and discussion, and two short papers.

Cultural and Literary Studies

Section 001 – Marriage and its Vicissitudes.

Instructor(s): Peggy McCracken

Prerequisites & Distribution: French 232, and 8 credits in courses numbered between French 250 and 299. (3). (HU). May be repeated for a total of six credits.

Credits: (3).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

This course explores the representation of marriage in relation to medieval cultural institutions, social formations, and religious practices. We will explore the literary representations of marriage in the context of: the idealization of courtly, adulterous love; the dynastic organization of aristocratic families; the promotion of chastity in the medieval church; the importance of war and friendship between men; and the valorization of romantic love. Texts will include Chretien de Troyes’s Cliges and Erec et Enide; Marie de France’s Lais; La vie de Saint Alexis; La quete du saint graal; and selections from lyric poetry. Readings in modern French; course taught in French.

Cultural and Literary Studies

Section 001 – Voyages in Space, Society, and Time.

Instructor(s): William Paulson (wpaulson@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: French 232, and 8 credits in courses numbered between French 250 and 299. (3). (HU). May be repeated for a total of six credits.

Credits: (3).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

This course will explore the literature and culture of a crucial century and a half (roughly 1715 to 1851) in which France occupied the center stage of world history and its modern society and institutions came into being. Inspired by the rise of modern natural science and voyages to distant lands, writers of the Enlightenment produced a witty and disrespectful literature that criticized the customs, social structures, and beliefs of aristocratic society and the Church. Their ideas contributed to the great French Revolution of 1789, an epochal event in the creation of modern societies and politics. Its repercussions led succeeding generations in France to be preoccupied with history, time, loss, selfhood, and change – leading themes of what came to be known as romantic literature. Readings of short works by Voltaire, Madame de Graffigny, Bougainville, Diderot, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Madame de Duras, Balzac, and others. Additional readings in French history, particularly of the Revolutionary period, and films on related historical subjects. Three short papers, one oral examination.

Cultural and Literary Studies

Section 001 – Families: Stories of Sex and Violence.

Instructor(s): David Caron (dcaron@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: French 232, and 8 credits in courses numbered between French 250 and 299. (3). (Excl). May be repeated for a total of six credits.

Credits: (3).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

If you were to choose between your family and your friends, who would you choose, and why? When is the family an oppressive structure? When is it a recourse against social and political oppression? What are the links between heterosexuality and capitalism? Is homosexuality inherently subversive? How are the private and the public spheres articulated, and for what purpose?

The focus of the course is the twentieth century and the modern family. In addition to short theoretical texts dealing with the construction of the modern bourgeois family, we will read a variety of literary texts that challenge existing models and/or propose alternative ones.

Tentative reading list includes authors such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jean Cocteau, Emile Ajar, Heervé Guibert, Denis Lachaud, and others.

Cultural and Literary Studies

Section 001 – Cultural History of France: From the Middle-Ages to the Revolution.

Instructor(s): Rachael Criso (rcriso@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: French 235. (3). (HU). May be repeated for a total of 9 credits.

Credits: (3; 2 in the half-term).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

A survey of French civilization: literature, history, art, and society. We will discuss Romanesque and Gothic art, the role of women in medieval society, witchcraft and the Church, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the centralization of power, and the emergence of absolutism. Slides and films will complement lectures, reading, and discussions of monuments, events, and social structures. Conducted in French.

Other Language Courses

Section 001.

Instructor(s): Lara Mangiafico (lmangia@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: French 232, and 8 credits in courses numbered between French 250 and 299. (3). (Excl).

Credits: (3).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

The purpose of this course is to present methods of teaching secondary level foreign languages. The course is designed for prospective middle and high school teachers who are competent in their language skills and now seek to focus that competency into a personal teaching style in a foreign language classroom. Issues such as curriculum development and instructional models of teaching will be addressed. Throughout the course, student will actively and reflectively practice their teaching skills in preparation for effective student teaching. Please note that this course should be taken by students enrolled in the teacher certification program at the school of Education, and preferably the term just prior to student teaching.

Cultural and Literary Studies

Section 002 – The 18th Century Epistolary Novel.

Instructor(s): Melinda Waterhouse (melinw@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: Three courses in French numbered 300 or above. (3). (Excl). Laboratory fee ($35) required. May be repeated for credit.

Credits: (3).

Lab Fee: Laboratory fee ($35) required.

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

Originating in the tradition of personal correspondence and letter manuals of the seventeenth century, the epistolary genre, or the novel by letters, of the eighteenth century quickly became one of the century's most popular literary forms. Because of its ability to incorporate multiple points of view in letters penned by many different correspondents, the epistolary novel facilitated commentaries on women's issues, the role of the "other" or the foreigner in France, contemporary society, current politics, and romantic adventures from various perspectives. This course will address novels representative of each of these categories and will examine how the letter, unlike other fictional forms, contributes uniquely to the discussion of these issues in literature.

The following works, either in their entirety or in excerpts, will be studied for their portrayal of the lover's voice, the woman's voice, the voice of the other, and the voice of social scandal:

• Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd),
• Isabelle de Charrihre (Lettres de Mistriss Henley),
• Frangoise de Graffigny (Lettres d'une Piruvienne) and
• Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses).
• Another short text by Isabelle de Charrihre (Lettres trouvies dans des portefeuilles d'imigris), which depicts the voice of Revolution, may also be included in the course.

In addition to providing an opportunity to explore the eighteenth-century epistolary novel and the cultural context that enabled its fruition, this course will help students with reading, writing and speaking skills in French. To this end, a weekly journal, two shorter papers (5 pages), an oral presentation, a viewing of the film Les Liaisons dangereuses, a longer final paper (7 pages), and daily class participation will be required and will provide the basis for grading.

Cultural and Literary Studies

Section 001 – 20th-Century Gay Male Cultures.

Instructor(s): David Caron (dcaron@umich.edu)

Prerequisites & Distribution: Three courses in French numbered 300 or above. (3). (Excl).

Credits: (3).

Course Homepage: No Homepage Submitted.

This course will focus on some of the most famous names and trends in gay male culture, literature, and film in twentieth-century France. Several of the authors we will read are in fact major names in twentieth-century high culture, which seems to indicate an ambiguous relationship between gay male identity and mainstream culture. Texts will be read in their social contexts, such as Parisian life in the 1920s, the revolutionary politics of the 1970s, or the AIDS crisis. Among other issues, the course will explore the difficulties in defining a gay community in France, the resistance to identity politics, the ambiguous relationship between gay men and North Africa, notions of homosexuality as subversive, the reasons for the denial of AIDS until the late 1980s, etc. LITERATURE: André, Gide, L'immoraliste and parts of Si le grain ne meurt. Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe (part 1 only); Jean Genet, Journal du voleur; Hervé Guibert, Le protocole compassionnel; Excerpts from Renaud Camus, Tricks; Guy Hocquenghem, etc. FILM: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Querelle.