Concurrent Enrollment in or completion of French 102 or its equivalent required for enrollment. This class is taught entirely in French. What does it mean to write?

What does it mean to write in French? In this course, we will read texts by authors who write in French even though they grew up speaking other languages, including English, Arabic, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole, and Hungarian. We will also read texts by authors from the Hexagon who are deemed to be canonically “French,” even though they grew up speaking non-standard language varieties and experiment with writing in non-standard French. For some of these authors, French makes possible an exciting escape from their mother tongue. For others, French represents a melancholic distance between one’s past and present selves; and for still others, French is an everyday reminder of the history of violent colonial imposition. Together we will investigate how aspects of identity—such as nationality, religion, race, class, gender, and sexual identity—influence these writers’ attitudes towards the French language. We will ask how writing that experiments with multiple languages and/or language registers might challenge the enduring myth of the monolingual native speaker.

This course builds in the time for you to reflect on your own positionality as a writer and French language learner. Graded assessments for this course will take the form of both analytical and creative writing assignments.