Fall 2024

Reading and Composition (R&C)

Imagining the Nation Through Literature
FRENCH R1B : English Composition in Connection with the Reading of Literature

Fall 2024
Class No: 33837
Dwinelle 250
M, W, F
Instructor: Michael Arrigo
10:00 AM - 10:59 AM

Deriving from the Latin natūs ‘born’, the word nation has implied both shared political and genetic heritage. In his foundational work, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson ties the emergence of the nation-state to the same concerns with death and immortality that occupy religious thought (10). This class takes Anderson’s observation at his word, considering the nation not only as a political construct but as a means to cope with our own very real human anxieties regarding the survival of ourselves, our kin, and, more broadly, all others imagined as belonging to our community. In this class, we will explore the ways different literary texts seek to define the nation, its members, their memories and their identities. How are we to define Frenchness in the 21st century, as asked by The Class and L’Esquive? How do we understand the basis of our disenchantment when the nation state has failed (The Suns of Independence)? What are the limits of the nation and how are those lines drawn (Ourika) ? How do we correct lacunae in the national imaginary (Indigènes)? How do we begin to imagine the liberated nation in the colony (Sab)? What encounters are possible between the colonizer and the colonized, between the former colonizer and the formerly colonized (The Stranger and The Meursault Investigation)? This course will involve the writing of short papers in preparation of a more elaborated research project and will cover the basics of research, citation and integrating others' arguments into one's own. Readings are in English. Attendance for the first two weeks of class is required to remain enrolled.

Texts:

The Class (film, viewing link on bCourses)
L’Esquive ((film, viewing link on bCourses)
Indigènes (film, viewing link on bCourses)
The Stranger (Matthew Ward translation, to purchase)
The Meursault Investigation (to purchase)
Sab (in course reader available through Copy Central)
Ourika (available on bCourses)
Anderson – Imagined Communities – excerpts

This course is designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. The primary goal of this course is to develop students' reading and writing skills through a series of assignments that will provide them with the opportunity to formulate observations made in class discussions into coherent argumentative essays. Emphasis will be placed on the refinement of effective sentence, paragraph, and thesis formation, keeping in mind the notion of writing as a process. Other goals in this course are a familiarization with French literature and the specific questions that are relevant to this field. In addition, students will be introduced to different methods of literary and linguistic analysis in their nonliterary readings.

Verbal Ecologies
FRENCH R1B : English Composition in Connection with the Reading of Literature

Fall 2024
Class No: 25670
Dwinelle 179
M, W, F
Instructor: Benjamin E Beitler
9:00 AM - 9:59 AM

Where is language in the environment? Over the past five decades, linguists and critics have debated this question, elaborating concepts and methodologies permitting the study of language’s ecology. More than a metaphor, this verbal ecology describes how words, gestures and other forms of communication leave their trace in the material world, informing everything from how crops are grown to how we perceive our own bodies. To study verbal ecology is thus to join in a collective effort to discern language’s effects not only in books and conversation but in forests, oceans and rainstorms as well. In parallel, for those who work in the language arts, verbal ecology poses a set of political possibilities stemming from the discipline’s basic refusal to separate investigations of the material world, on the one hand, and research into symbolic representations, on the other. These possibilities were evoked by linguist Michael Halliday when he declared that, “classism, growthism, destruction of species, pollution and the like [...] are not just problems for the biologists and physicists. They are problems for the applied linguistic community as well.”[1]

In this seminar, we will ask how the imaginative works of a trio of writers might offer insights into the verbal ecologies in which we all live. We will begin by close-reading Natalie Sarraute’s Tropisms (Unit 1), a book that queries the borders between people and their environment by taking for its object of study the affective states from which consciousness emerges. Sarraute’s texts present an experience of words as objects that shape mood and thought as much as light, heat or other environmental factors: we will read them as experiments in writing that explore the theoretical postulates articulated within the verbal ecological paradigm. From there, we will move onto Patrick Chamoiseau’s Caribbean epic Texaco (Unit 2), a text bringing together two key currents in ecolinguistics: on the one hand, an investigation of the discursive practices that underwrite historical forms of environmental racism; on the other, a consideration of the ecological relationships between different languages. Offering a history of Martinique as told by the island’s most marginalized peoples, Texaco will lay the groundwork for our class’s discussion of the connections between racialized capitalism, language loss and ecocide. Finally, an examination of Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels (Unit 3) will permit us to ask how non-human animals participate in verbal ecologies of all kinds.

As this is an R1b course, students will be expected to draw from our readings and discussions inspiration for their own research projects. These will be completed in a step-by-step fashion via a series of three tiered assignments, each one coming at the end of a unit. More information about these tiered assignments will be given over the course of the semester. Besides the tiered research assignments, students will also be asked to complete smaller writing tasks designed to hone specific skills necessary for doing college-level research, as well as two micro creative writing projects called interunit reflections.

[1] Halliday, M. A. “New ways of meaning: The challenge to applied linguistics.” In Pütz, Thirty

years of linguistic evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 92

This course is designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. The primary goal of this course is to develop students' reading and writing skills through a series of assignments that will provide them with the opportunity to formulate observations made in class discussions into coherent argumentative essays. Emphasis will be placed on the refinement of effective sentence, paragraph, and thesis formation, keeping in mind the notion of writing as a process. Other goals in this course are a familiarization with French literature and the specific questions that are relevant to this field. In addition, students will be introduced to different methods of literary and linguistic analysis in their nonliterary readings.

Intensive French for Speakers of Spanish or Other Romance Languages
FRENCH 1R

Fall 2024
Class No: 27246
Dwinelle 228
M, TU, W, TH, F
Instructor: Ariel Shannon Hixon
12:00 PM - 12:59 PM

This course is specifically designed with the needs and strengths of native or proficient speakers of one or more Romance languages in mind (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian or Catalan), so that the similarities with French can be used to promote specific learning paths. This is an intensive French language course, which combines TWO semesters in ONE, covering all the materials usually covered in two semesters. The course provides an accelerated introduction to French, allowing students who successfully complete it to enroll in French 3, gaining faster access to Upper Division courses. The general objectives are to provide students with the basic tools for oral and written communication in French, but also to offer them the opportunity to learn about French culture and life, to reflect on intercultural differences and similarities and to become more aware of ‘multilingual subjects’ in our plurilingual society.

Part of the work will be done in class with your MTWTHF instructor, part will be done independently at home using the Student Activities Manual and various resources on bCourses (reading, listening, completing exercises, recording speech). Daily class attendance is mandatory.

Prerequisites: Level 4 or higher (or equivalent) of Spanish or another Romance Language (Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, or Catalan) or departmental permission on a case by case basis.

Required Text:

Chez nous, 5th edition, Julia M Cozzarelli, Pearson Higher Learning Publishing, 2015. Textbook+ Student Activities Manual

Making Heads or ‘Tales’: Fiction and Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment
FRENCH R1B : English Composition in Connection with the Reading of Literature

Fall 2024
Class No: 25673
Dwinelle B-33B
Tu, Th
Instructor: Alexis Stanley
11:00 AM - 12:29 AM

This course will focus on the intersection of fiction and philosophy in a series of texts written during the European Enlightenment. We will examine both the philosophical uses of fiction and the fictional uses of philosophy to address why and how a selection of 18th-century authors chose to invent rather eccentric stories in order to convey important critiques of their contemporary society. Many of the fictions we will read rely on the idea of an “innocent gaze,” often connected with a figure of alterity (such as a foreigner, a social outcast, or a woman), which enables a character to provide a fresh perspective on their surrounding world. But what does it mean for a philosopher to speak through the voice of such fictional beings, and why is this such an important feature of Enlightenment literature?

We will read and analyze a selection of texts from the French and British traditions that explore the following themes and questions: what role do literature and fiction play in the development of a philosophical reflection on the world? What is the relationship between philosophy, fiction, and “truth”? How does the intersection of fiction and philosophy alter our conception of literary genres? Does it matter whether philosophical fictions are believable or not? And how do considerations of cultural difference, sexuality, and gender (whether that of the author or of a story’s protagonist) impact the philosophical merit of a work?

This course is also designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. The primary goal therefore will be to develop students' reading and writing skills through a series of assignments that will provide them with the opportunity to formulate observations made in class discussions into coherent argumentative essays. Emphasis will be placed on the refinement of effective sentence, paragraph, and thesis formation, keeping in mind the notion of writing as a process. In addition, students will be introduced to different methods of literary and linguistic analysis in their nonliterary readings.

Texts (to be read in English translation) will include: Voltaire, Micromégas (1752) and Candide (1759); Montesquieu, Persian Letters (1721); Graffigny, Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1747); Diderot, The Nun (1796) and Rameau’s Nephew (1805); Sterne, A Sentimental Journey (1768); additional short readings available on bCourses.

This course is designed to fulfill the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement. The primary goal of this course is to develop students' reading and writing skills through a series of assignments that will provide them with the opportunity to formulate observations made in class discussions into coherent argumentative essays. Emphasis will be placed on the refinement of effective sentence, paragraph, and thesis formation, keeping in mind the notion of writing as a process. Other goals in this course are a familiarization with French literature and the specific questions that are relevant to this field. In addition, students will be introduced to different methods of literary and linguistic analysis in their nonliterary readings.

Undergraduate Courses 

Intermediate Conversation
FRENCH 13

Fall 2024
Class No: 26933
Cory 237
M, W, F
12:00 PM - 12:59 PM
Intermediate French conversation. May not be repeated for credit.

Frogs, Old Books, and Language: Breaking Language Barriers in the Academy
FRENCH 24 : Freshman Seminars

Fall 2024
Class No: 32804
Dwinelle B3
TU
Instructor: Rebecca Tarvin, Mairi-Louise McLaughlin
4:00 PM - 4:59 PM

The creation of knowledge is a universal enterprise that lies at the heart of the academy. However, there are many barriers to effectively communicating and understanding knowledge. One major hurdle is the ubiquity of English as a central language for publishing and communicating academic research. This is an issue both for aspiring scholars who learn English as a second language while mastering complex topics as well as for members of our communities who would benefit from information that is currently unavailable in their primary language. Join an interdisciplinary team of professors, one specializing in Old Books, and the other in Frogs, for an introduction to translation and multilingualism in the academy. It combines short readings and lectures with active hands on translation and multilingual communication experience. During the semester, students will each translate abstracts for three research papers into a second language or into another creative format that communicates the research to a broad audience. Students will present their translated works and their experiences creating them in a final presentation at the end of the semester. Students will leave the class with a better understanding of the relationship between language and the Academy and equipped with tools to help break down language barriers.

Introduction to Romance Languages and Linguistics
FRENCH C26

Fall 2024
Class No: 26570
Social Sciences Building 170
M, W, F
Instructor: Oliver Whitmore
10:00 AM - 10:59 AM

This course introduces students to the linguistic and cultural structures that underlie the family of Romance languages. Through hands-on language analysis of written and audiovisual texts, students will analyze how the Romance Languages have evolved over time in key linguistic domains such as lexicology, semantics, morphology, syntax, and phonology. This course will also critique the social contexts that have resulted in the spread of these languages outside of Europe. Students will consider what it means to be a speaker of a Romance Language in today’s world.

By the end of this course, students will have an increased awareness of the variety of Romance speaker contexts. They will also be able to use their knowledge of language structures to help them passively understand selections of audiovisual and written texts from different times and places in the Romance-speaking world. Upon completion of this course, students may be interested in pursuing accelerated language sequences or pursuing a major or minor in the Romance Language departments (French, Italian, Spanish & Portuguese) at UC Berkeley.

(Enrollment Note: Students can enroll in any section regardless of the Romance language they have studied. )

Prerequisite:No prior linguistics knowledge is necessary for this course. This course is taught in English but requires at least intermediate knowledge of one or more Romance Language. This is equal to completion of 2 semesters of a university course in French, Spanish, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, or other. Native speakers and Heritage speakers are welcome. Please contact Oliver Whitmore (whitmore.1@berkeley.edu) for more information.

Meets Historical Studies, L&S Breadth

Meets Social & Behavioral Sciences, L&S Breadth

Perspectives on Housing
FRENCH 40

Fall 2024
Class No: 31326
Wheeler 106
M, W, F
Instructor: Liesl Yamaguchi
11:00 AM - 11:59 AM

Roiled by revolution upon revolution, inundated by massive migration, and all but razed to the ground and rebuilt by Haussmannization, nineteenth-century Paris was a volatile place to call home. For many, finding and keeping a place to live within the city walls was an impossible task; those who did stay housed were constantly confronting the gaze of the unhoused others. What transpired in those gazes? What made them possible—and sometimes, impossible? In this course, we will investigate the divisive politics of housing in three nineteenth-century French novels (Cousin Bette and Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac and L'Assommoir by Émile Zola), as well as some verse and prose poems (Baudelaire), excerpts from Les Misérables (Victor Hugo), and selected essays in critical theory.

PLEASE NOTE: Discussions and readings for this class will be in English; no knowledge of French is required.

Introduction to Translation Studies
French 48

Fall 2024
Class No: 26896
Online
M, W
Instructor: Mairi McLaughlin
5:00 PM - 6:29 PM

This course provides a general introduction to translation studies. Translation studies is a relatively new field which lies at the intersection of a range of disciplines from literature and linguistics, through gender and postcolonial studies, to cognitive and computer science. We will explore the history of the way that people have thought about translation from the ancient world and thinkers such as Cicero and Dao’an to the formal field of translation studies which emerged in the 1980s. We will also explore translation studies as a field today, discovering the many different theories and methods that can be used to understand what translation is as a linguistic, textual, and socio-cultural practice. This will involve looking not just writing about translation but also analyzing specific translations and the choices made by translators. One thread running throughout the course is the central role that translation plays in our multilingual world. We will discover that translation is ubiquitous but often invisible so we will discover the role that it plays shaping not just literature but also the media, science, technology, politics, diplomacy, the law, and business. The course will also highlight the importance of translators themselves.

You will be asked to carry out some translation in this course but this does not mean that you need knowledge of French or any other language; students can opt to translate between different registers and varieties of English instead of using another language.

Course books:
Munday, Jeremy, Sara Ramos Pinto, and Jacob Blakesley (2022) Introducing Translation Studies: Theory and Applications, 5th edn, Abingdon Oxon – New York: Routledge.
Venuti, Lawrence (2021) The Translation Studies Reader, 4th edn, London – New York: Routledge.

Paris: A Historical Anatomy of the World's Most Romantic City
FRENCH 80 : The Cultural History of Paris

Fall 2024
Class No: 25677
Valley Life Sciences 2040
M, W, F
Instructor: Nicholas Paige
3:00 PM - 3:59 PM

This class will offer students a historical exploration of the urban artifact that is Paris. Proceeding “forensically,” the class aims to peel back what is visible to today’s observer in order to uncover the historical, economic, and ideological forces that have produced one of the most visited cities in the world. Students can expect, first, to gain knowledge of the city’s infrastructure, from its historical center to its marginalized outer suburbs. More generally, we will attend to the overlapping layers in Paris’s built environment, which is also to say the way that the Instagrammable urban present is haunted by the displacements and traumas of the past. Rather than following a textbook, we will be reading a variety of primary and secondary texts (poems, a novel, a memoir, part of a play; ephemeral pieces and testimonials; selections from historical and sociological studies), as well as viewing a number of films and looking at a lot of visual works (paintings, engravings, photos, maps, graffiti). A brief data science unit studying recent trends in gentrification will complete our semester.

Advanced Reading and Writing
102

Fall 2024
Class No: 26574
Dwinelle 4114
TR
Instructor: Rachel Shuh
12:30-2:00 p.m.
All work in this class is conducted in French.

Students read a selection of works from different media and genres including short stories, poems, plays, letters, essays and films. Through close reading, students develop their analytical ability in French, paying particular attention to the different kinds of choices that writers make, and how these choices contribute to the making of meaning. Students also develop their skills as writers of academic French, focusing both on the content of their written work and on its form. By the end of the course, students are ready to meet the reading and writing requirements of upper division courses in the French department.

All Work for This Class Conducted in French; Completion French 4 at UCB or Placement Exam Required for Enrollment - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu(opens in a new tab). French 102 is the sole prerequisite to all UCB French courses numbered 103 and above; satisfies 1 course requirement in French major or French minor. Course open to native speakers of French only with instructor consent.

Advanced Reading and Writing
FRENCH 102

Fall 2024
Class No: 26573
Dwinelle 4114
M, W, F
Instructor: Liesl Yamaguchi
2:00 PM - 2:59 PM
All work in this class is conducted in French.

Students read a selection of works from different media and genres including short stories, poems, plays, letters, essays and films. Through close reading, students develop their analytical ability in French, paying particular attention to the different kinds of choices that writers make, and how these choices contribute to the making of meaning. Students also develop their skills as writers of academic French, focusing both on the content of their written work and on its form. By the end of the course, students are ready to meet the reading and writing requirements of upper division courses in the French department.

All Work for This Class Conducted in French; Completion French 4 at UCB or Placement Exam Required for Enrollment - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu(opens in a new tab). French 102 is the sole prerequisite to all UCB French courses numbered 103 and above; satisfies 1 course requirement in French major or French minor. Course open to native speakers of French only with instructor consent.

Advanced Reading and Writing
FRENCH 102

Fall 2024
Class No: 26575
Dwinelle 4114
M, W, F
Instructor: Vesna Rodic
10:00 AM - 10:59 AM
All work in this class is conducted in French.

Students read a selection of works from different media and genres including short stories, poems, plays, letters, essays and films. Through close reading, students develop their analytical ability in French, paying particular attention to the different kinds of choices that writers make, and how these choices contribute to the making of meaning. Students also develop their skills as writers of academic French, focusing both on the content of their written work and on its form. By the end of the course, students are ready to meet the reading and writing requirements of upper division courses in the French department.

All Work for This Class Conducted in French; Completion French 4 at UCB or Placement Exam Required for Enrollment - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu(opens in a new tab). French 102 is the sole prerequisite to all UCB French courses numbered 103 and above; satisfies 1 course requirement in French major or French minor. Course open to native speakers of French only with instructor consent.

Class and Gender on the French Stage
FRENCH 103A : Language and Culture

Fall 2024
Class No: 21513
Dwinelle 33
TU, TH
Instructor: Susan A. Maslan
9:30 AM - 10:59 AM

All work in this course is in French. How did the French see class and gender difference performed on the stage? In the theater, after all, everyone is playing a part. What does it mean that a lowly actress might play the part of a queen? What happens when, onstage, a slave and a master exchange costume and position? What about cross-dressing? How did plays create and negotiate gender roles? How were actors and actresses (who came from the lower classes up until the 20th century), regarded by the public? When was “celebrity” invented? What did it mean to ordinary people in the audience to see actors and characters violate the norms and expectations of class and gender hierarchy? Did theater turn the social world upside down as many critics and religious authorities claimed? Did it provide a safety valve to let pent up social pressures escape as social theorists conjecture?

We will study the structures and practices of neo-classical French theater and discuss the radical changes in theater during the 20th century. We will study historical context, censorship, critical and audience reception, costume, acting, and more.

We will start with Molière and work our way up to the twentieth century. We will watch performances on video, and watch some filmic adaptations, as well as read the texts. Authors include but are not limited to Molière; Beaumarchais; Jean Genet. We will read about five plays.

In the last week of class, students, in groups, will perform scenes from Reza, “Le Dieu du carnage” (this will not be a public performance).

All Work for This Class Conducted in French; Completion of FR102, Placement Exam, or Native Language Fluency Required for Enrollment. MUST HAVE TAKEN FRENCH 4 AT UC BERKELEY OR A FRENCH DEPARTMENT PLACEMENT TEST - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu(opens in a new tab). All readings will be available on bcourses.

Gender, Space, and Diversity in Medieval French Literature
FRENCH 112 : Medieval Literature

Fall 2024
Class No: 31383
Dwinelle 33
TU, TH
Instructor: Henry Ravenhall
1!:00 AM - 12:29 PM
All work in this class is conducted in French.

What makes a human? How is gender constructed? How might sex, class, and race be connected? Medieval literature presents intriguing, sometimes challenging, answers to these important questions. This course examines a range of early texts in French that address, respectively, the animal-human divide, the gender binary, sexuality and play, race and power, and feminist community-building. You will learn how to read medieval texts in their original forms, and you will get to handle manuscripts in the impressive collections at the Bancroft Library. No prior knowledge of medieval language is required as all texts will be available in modern French translation. Class discussion will be in French.

Completion of FR102, Placement Exam, or Native Language Fluency Required for Enrollment. MUST HAVE TAKEN FRENCH 4 AT UC BERKELEY OR A FRENCH DEPARTMENT PLACEMENT TEST - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu.

The Marginal at the Center
FRENCH 118A : Eighteenth-Century Literature

Fall 2024
Class No: 31193
Dwinelle 134
TU, TH
Instructor: Susan A. Maslan
12:30 PM - 1:59 PM
All work conducted in French.

In this course, we will consider important literary representations of those who were conceived of as marginal, as outsiders, as unwanted, or even as unrepresentable. We will read texts that represent enslaved Persians, Peruvian princesses, Tahitians, extra-terrestrials, and those very familiar outsiders, that is women and children. We will think about the unexpected centrality of such figures to the enlightenment, to the ways in which writers and philosophers sought to analyze and critique their own society and even to the ways they sought to understand what humanity was. Working with these texts will allow us to ask primordial questions about what is natural and what is social, what is just and what is unjust, how and why social, political, and economic inequality characterize the worlds we inhabit, how Europe engaged with, imagined, and sometimes oppressed the non-European world and how such engagement shaped French identity.

All Work for This Class Conducted in French; Completion of FR102, Placement Exam, or Native Language Fluency Required for Enrollment. MUST HAVE TAKEN FRENCH 4 AT UC BERKELEY OR A FRENCH DEPARTMENT PLACEMENT TEST - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu

Introduction to French Linguistics
FRENCH 146

Fall 2024
Class No: 23098
Dwinelle 183
M, W, F
Instructor: Richard Kern
2:00 PM - 2:59 PM
All work in this class is conducted in French.

Ce cours est destiné aux étudiant·e·s qui désirent se familiariser avec les bases de la linguistique française. Aucune expérience en linguistique n’est requise, mais une bonne connaissance du français parlé et écrit s’impose. Le cours abordera les domaines principaux de la linguistique : la phonétique et la phonologie, la morphologie, la syntaxe, la sémantique, et la pragmatique, ainsi qu’une introduction à la sociolinguistique et la diversité de variétés qui existent autour du monde. Le but sera de présenter des concepts et des outils essentiels qui permettront une exploration ultérieure plus approfondie. Nous commencerons par un bref survol historique pour encadrer la discussion de notions telles que « langue », « langage », « signe », « mot », « phrase » et « grammaire ». Ensuite nous explorerons les sous-disciplines indiquées ci-dessus, avec des exercices pratiques pour concrétiser les principes présentés en classe et dans le manuel. Nous considérerons les différences (considérables !) entre le français parlé et le français écrit, nous étudierons la langue dans le contexte de son emploi dans la communication (y compris la communication en ligne), et nous finirons par appliquer des approches linguistiques à l’analyse du discours et l'analyse de la conversation.

En plus de faire deux examens et des exercices réguliers, chaque étudiant fera une petite étude/enquête/observation/analyse sur un domaine abordé dans le cours et présentera un exposé oral qui résumera les questions posées, la méthodologie employée, les résultats de l’analyse, et les conclusions. Par exemple, vous pourriez enregistrer un entretien avec un/e francophone et en faire une analyse phonologique ; vous pourriez faire un sondage sur les attitudes des francophones vis-à-vis certains usages ; vous pourriez rechercher les réformes orthographiques, ou la féminisation des noms de métiers et fonctions, ou les lois qui gèrent l’emploi du français dans différentes circonstances de la vie sociale, une variété du français régionale, ou un autre sujet qui vous intéresse.
Manuel: Léon, P., & Bhatt, P. (2017). Structure du français moderne: Introduction à l’analyse linguistique, Quatrième Édition. Canadian Scholars.
Extraits de Ayres-Bennett, W. & McLaughlin, M (Eds) (2024). The Oxford Handbook of the French Language.

All Work for This Class Conducted in French; Completion of FR102, Placement Exam, or Native Language Fluency Required for Enrollment. MUST HAVE TAKEN FRENCH 4 AT UC BERKELEY OR A FRENCH DEPARTMENT PLACEMENT TEST - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu

Francophone Diasporas of Southeast Asia
FRENCH 151A : Francophone Literature

Fall 2024
Class No: 31380
Morgan 109
M, W, F
Instructor: Alan Yeh
12:00 pm - 12:59 pm

In this course, we will discuss narratives produced by francophone authors and filmmakers of Southeast Asian descent, particularly of the Vietnamese diaspora. As we read, we will pay close attention to the ways in which our authors take up exile, displacement, and loss both thematically and aesthetically. With many of our texts foregrounding histories of imperialism, colonialism, and migration in (and out of) the region formerly known as l’Indochine française, we will come to understand how “Indochina,” “Southeast Asia” and “Vietnam” exist in collective memory across national and diasporic contexts. To do so, we will examine how these different spatial imaginaries impact the way our authors represent and reckon with contested identities and fractured memories in their works. Our discussions will uncover expressions of diasporic agency behind textual and visual strategies of representation, resistance, and negotiation as well as practices of resilience and survival in the face of war, catastrophe, and rupture.

FR102, placement test or native fluency required for enrollment; all work conducted in French.

Required texts include: Phạm Văn Ký, Frères de sang*; Lý Thu Hồ, Printemps inachevé*; Marcelino Truong, Give peace a chance : Londres 1963-75; Rithy Panh, L’image manquante (film, streaming link provided); Doan Bui, Le silence de mon père; Kim Thúy, Ru; Linda Lê, “Les pieds nus”*; “Vinh L.”*; Héroïnes. (*PDFs available on bCourses)

Fraternité(s) : charité, amitié, mutualité et solidarité en France de la Réforme à l’État Providence (1550-2000)
FRENCH 171 : A Concept in French Cultural History

Fall 2024
Class No: 26572
Evans 41
TU, TH
Instructor: Déborah Blocker
11:00 AM - 12:29 PM
All work in this class is conducted in French.

The rise of the ideals of “liberty” ("liberté") and “"quality”("égalité") during the French Revolution has been widely studied. The concept of “fraternité” (fraternity) has, however, received far less attention. Yet, “fraternité”, as well as its ancestors “charité” (charity) and “amitié” (friendship), and its modern-day successors, “mutualité” (mutuality) and “solidarité” (solidarity), have become central to the French’s modern-day understanding of social-welfare, and of a well-functioning society more generally. “Fraternité” is often mobilized in this respect to counter what the French understand to be the shortcomings of individualism. In this class, we collectively attempt a genealogy of the concept of “fraternité” in France, from the 16th century to the present day.

To reflect on how the French have imagined the links between social actors and society, we weave together literary and cultural analysis, philosophy and rhetoric, the history of ideas, political theory, as well as sociological and historical approaches. Our readings include philosophers (Montaigne, Rousseau, Simone Weil), theologians (François de Sales, Vincent de Paul), sociologists (Serge Paugam on l’“attachement social”), historians of ideas (such as Marie-Claude Blais on “la solidarité”) and historians of literature (as in Antoine de Vitry’s recent literary history of “fraternité” in the 19th century). We also study two major French literary works, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Émile Zola’s Germinal — and we watch enticing filmic adaptations of both. The class is organized chronologically, dwelling at length on the French Revolution and the 2nd Republic (1848), during which the question of “fraternité” took center stage. It ends with an inquiry into the role of “fraternité” when the French welfare state was erected (ca. 1930 to 1975). Careful attention is given in this respect to the program of the Conseil National de la Résistance, a document drafted by the French Resistance in 1943-1944, with the aim of outlining the institutions of post-war France.

The goal of this class is to show students how the archelogy of concepts such as “fraternité” can be reconstructed by historians of culture, and what such reconstructions can bring to our understanding of the contemporary world. It is also designed to incite students to ponder French societal models in comparison with those of their country(ies) of origin, thereby encouraging them to think critically about how social ties are imagined (and engineered) on both sides of the Atlantic — and worldwide. All readings, lectures, class discussions and coursework are conducted in French. Students majoring in History, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, Geography, and Religious Studies are especially welcome in this class, provide they are proficient in French. General training on how to conduct bibliographical research in the humanities is provided, and written exercises include the writing of a final paper with an optional research component

Selected readings:
Michel de Montaigne, Essais (excerpts); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (excerpts); Simone Weil, Étude pour une déclaration des obligations envers l'être humain; Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (excerpts); Émile Zola, Germinal (excerpts) ; François de Sales and Vincent de Paul (a variety of writings on charity), Le programme commun de la Résistance française; Serge Paugram, L’Attachement social: formes et fondements de la solidarité humaine (excerpts); Marie-Claude Blais, La Solidarité, histoire d’une idée (excerpts) ; Alexandre de Vitry, Le Droit de choisir ses frères ? Une histoire de la fraternité (excerpts).
Films:
Robert Hossein, Les Misérables (1982); Claude Berri, Germinal (1993).

Completion of FR102, Placement Exam, or Native Language Fluency Required for Enrollment. MUST HAVE TAKEN FRENCH 4 AT UC BERKELEY OR A FRENCH DEPARTMENT PLACEMENT TEST - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu.

Pronoun Wars
FRENCH 173 : Linguistics and Literature

Fall 2024
Class No: 26652
Dwinelle 4114
M, W, F
Instructor: William Burton
1:00 PM - 1:59 PM
All work in this class is conducted in French.

What pronouns do you use? This seemingly innocuous question has sparked bitter and sometimes violent controversy in the English– and French-speaking worlds in the past ten or fifteen years. Related concerns, like new gender-neutral pronouns and antisexist language, have also caused strife. This course proposes a history of these pronoun wars that traces them to the decisive encounter between structural linguistics, experimental literature, and feminist, queer and trans activism. It will be structured around Monique Wittig’s pronoun trilogy: L’Opoponax (1964), Les Guérillères (1969), Le Corps lesbien (1973).

This is a course in intellectual and literary history. As such, we will read historiography (writings by historians) about linguistics, feminism, and literature. But we will focus on primary sources from an array of academic disciplines (anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism, sociology), literary texts (novels, experimental prose, poetry), and ephemera (activist pamphlets, newspaper articles).

Assignments: Attendance; active and continuous participation; midterm close reading; term paper or creative project. Participation is a major part of the grade; this is a good class for you if you want to work on your participation and public speaking skills.

Readings by Roland Barthes, Émile Benveniste, Hélène Cixous, Colette Guillaumin, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Piaget, Monique Wittig and more.

Completion of FR102, Placement Exam, or Native Language Fluency Required for Enrollment. MUST HAVE TAKEN FRENCH 4 AT UC BERKELEY OR A FRENCH DEPARTMENT PLACEMENT TEST - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu.

Littérature et cinéma: le grand siècle à l’écran
FRENCH 175 : Literature and the Visual Arts

Fall 2024
Class No: 31327
Anthro/Art Practice Bldg 115
M, W, F
Instructor: Nicholas Paige
1:00 PM - 1:59 PM
All work in this class is conducted in French.

The cinema has always been a voracious consumer of literature — pillaging it for its narratives — and the literature of “Classical” France is no exception. In this course, we’ll be examining how filmmakers have set about adapting a number of works for the screen. Certain works are obviously “literary,” with plots and characters and so on, while others are more like documents filmmakers seek to bring to life. Some adaptations seek to modernize, smoothing over bumps between then and now; some seek to estrange the sources, as if the seventeenth-century were another planet; some freely riff on the source material in an attempt to “make it new.” The class will focus on adaptations of works by Molière, Perrault, Racine, Lafayette, and a few others, including Louis XIV himself.

“Completion of FR102, Placement Exam, or Native Language Fluency Required for Enrollment. MUST HAVE TAKEN FRENCH 4 AT UC BERKELEY OR A FRENCH DEPARTMENT PLACEMENT TEST - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu.

Women Directors
FRENCH 178 : Studies in French Film

Fall 2024
Class No: 26568
Dwinelle 187
TU
Instructor: Damon Young
2:00-5 p.m.
All work in this class is conducted in French.

The history of cinema is usually narrated as a history of Great Men — from the Lumière brothers to Jean-Luc Godard to Quentin Tarantino. But some of the most original and enduring works of French-language cinema have been authored by women. In this course, we will study films by Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Céline Sciamma, Mati Diop, and others, examining their distinctive contributions to the aesthetics and politics of cinema. These films span topics including gender relations, the family, sexuality, colonialism, and religion, and genres from experimental, to documentary, to narrative fiction. We will ask: in a collaborative medium like the cinema, what is an author? Is the so-called politique des auteurs (“auteur theory”) that has come to dominate accounts of French film history inherently masculinist? Is “women’s cinema” a coherent category, or do differences of gender and sexuality, as well as race, religion and culture attenuate its usefulness? What is a “woman” in this context? Alongside a weekly film screening, we will read works of feminist and queer theory that cast light on some of the questions they raise. Class discussions and most readings are in French.

Completion of FR102, Placement Exam, or Native Language Fluency Required for Enrollment. MUST HAVE TAKEN FRENCH 4 AT UC BERKELEY OR A FRENCH DEPARTMENT PLACEMENT TEST - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu.

FRENCH 197

Fall 2024
Class No: 17925
Instructor: Vesna Rodic

All work in this class is conducted in French.

Supervised field work program involving experiences in schools and school-related activities.

Regular individual meetings with faculty sponsor and written reports required. Students must be declared in the French Major, be in their senior year, and have a minimum 3.0 GPA in UCB French coursework. Completion of one semester of French-immersion study abroad is recommended. Intended majors and eligible French minors may also enroll on a space-available basis, based on instructor approval.

Completion of FR102, Placement Exam, or Native Language Fluency Required for Enrollment. MUST HAVE TAKEN FRENCH 4 AT UC BERKELEY OR A FRENCH DEPARTMENT PLACEMENT TEST - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu.

Field Studies
FRENCH 197

Fall 2024
Class No: 17924
Instructor: Daniel R. Hoffmann

Supervised field programs involving experiences in schools and school-related activities. Regular individual meetings with faculty sponsor and written reports required.

Supervised Independent Study and Research for Advanced Undergraduates
FRENCH 199

Fall 2024
Class No: 16347
Instructor: Claire Delphine Tourmen Perron

Enrollment restricted according to College regulations. Individual instruction only in areas not covered by courses.

Graduate Courses

Proseminar
FRENCH 200A

Fall 2024
Class No: 33766
Dwinelle 4226
F
Instructor: Susan Maslan
1:00 PM - 1:59 PM

This course is designed to give all new graduate students a broad view of the department's faculty, the courses they teach, and their fields of research. In addition, it will introduce students to some practical aspects of the graduate career, issues that pertain to specific fields of research, and questions currently being debated across the profession.

Entangled Pasts at the Border: Aesthetics, Race and Migration
FRENCH 260A : Studies in 20th-Century Literature

Fall 2024
Class No: 31384
Dwinelle 6331
TH
Instructor: Debarati Sanyal, Rhiannon Welch
2:00 PM - 4:59 PM

This team-taught seminar (cross-listed with the D Italian and Critical Theory) examines histories of racialized violence–slavery, colonialism, the Nazi genocide– and their convergence at select border sites. Our primary works are mostly drawn from Francophone and Italian geographies. We turn to literature, visual media and multidisciplinary studies to sound out the reverberations of violent histories at contemporary borders such as Lampedusa, Gaza, Melilla or Calais. How do contemporary border technologies and policies reanimate histories of extraction, racism and empire? How are borders felt and sensed by migrants who seek to cross them? How do literature and film, in conjunction with theory, help us better understand race and racialization and to question dominant discourses of humanity, human rights and humanitarianism? How do testimonies by migrants and their aesthetic representations resist border violence, historicize the refugee “crisis,” and convey new modes of becoming or belonging? How do we understand poesis– making, self-fashioning, world-building– as lived practices as well as aesthetic representations that show us the power of life to endure and escape the border’s power over life? We will consider theories of biopolitics, necropolitics, anti-Blackness, postcoloniality, and migration, paying particular attention to the critical and creative resources of postcolonial and Black radical thought.

Our readings and screenings include: Literary works by Primo Levi, Marie NDiaye, Laila Lalami, Valeria Luiselli Theoretical writings by Enzo Traverso, Saree Makdisi, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Winter, Alexander Weheliye, Saidiya Hartman, Achille Mbembe, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Nicolas de Genova Visual works by Dagmawi Yimer, Hélène Crouzillat & Laetitia Tura, Forensic Architecture, Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah

The Ends of Man
FRENCH 274 : Traditions of Critical Thought: French Theory

Fall 2024
Class No: 31381
Dwinelle 4226
F
Instructor: William Burton
2:00 PM - 4:59 PM

This seminar will offer an historical and interdisciplinary introduction to classic works of “French theory” and “French feminism.” Readings will constellate around the notion of antihumanism or the end of the subject and will include some key concepts (antihumanism, the death of the author, différance, discourse, écriture, interpellation, intertextuality, text). We will track the notion’s migration across different disciplinary sectors (anthropology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, philosophy, literary criticism, and literature). We will set these developments against the backdrop of the transatlantic exchange that gave rise to the corpora of “French theory” and “French feminism,” as well as critiques of their claims and validity.

Assignments: One in-class presentation, one midterm paper, one term paper.

Language: English or French according to student interest.

Readings:

Readings will include essays by L. Althusser, R. Barthes, S. de Beauvoir, M. Blanchot, N. Brossard, J. Butler, H. Cixous, J. Derrida, F. Fanon, M. Foucault, B. Godard, L. Irigaray, J. Kristeva, J. Lacan, C. Lévi-Strauss, P. Macherey, M. Wittig, and S. Wynter, as well as historiographic treatments of the corpus.

Students should acquire copies of the following books:

Brossard, Nicole. Le Désert mauve : roman. Hexagone, 1987.
Foucault, Michel. L’Ordre du discours : leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970. Gallimard, 2009.
Ouologuem, Yambo. Le Devoir de violence : roman. Seuil, 1968.
Wittig, Monique. Les Guérillères. Minuit, 1969.

Touch: Philosophy, Art, Literature, Film
FRENCH 281 : Interdisciplinary Topics in Literary and Cultural Studies

Fall 2024
Class No: 26472
Dwinelle 4226
W
Instructor: Henry Ravenhall
2:00 PM - 4:59 PM

In this seminar, we’ll read and dissect important works that deal with touch from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives. If touch, for Aristotle, is the base, most material sense, it is also what allows a thinking of sense to be possible at all. A thinking of touch pervades western philosophy, which Jacques Derrida took to task precisely for its “haptocentrism”. In the first few weeks of the seminar, we’ll work through some of the philosophical complexities linked to touch, paying particular attention to the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. We’ll then turn to more recent work on touching art, from cave painting to medieval icons, from oil painting to modernist sculpture. We’ll also put pressure on the “phenomenological” turn in Film Theory and especially the influential model of “haptic visuality” (as Laura U. Marks reads Gilles Deleuze). In the second half of the course, we’ll think about touch more expansively in relation to: queerness and the archive (Roland Barthes and Carolyn Dinshaw); affect and reading; Didier Anzieu’s “skin-ego”; ethics (Emmanuel Levinas’ caress); erotics and intimacy; and, finally, the digital. Although many of the readings are originally in French, English translations will also be made available, and discussion will be in English. Seminar members will work towards a research paper in which they reread a cultural artefact from a theoretical perspective informed by the figure of touch.

Teaching French in College: First Semester
FRENCH 375A

Fall 2024
Class No: 26897
Dwinelle 4226
M
Instructor: Vesna Rodic
2:00 PM - 4:59 PM

This seminar provides participants with an understanding of basic principles of first- and second-language acquisition and the theoretical underpinnings of commonly used language teaching methods. It additionally offers in-service training in teaching, in creating and adapting instructional materials through the Discovery-based approach, and in designing tests for use in the Lower Division Program in French. The two-hour weekly meetings consist of lecture, discussion of readings and a focus on the practicum. GSIs are also required to attend a pilot class on select dates and as indicated on the lesson plans.
Enrollment in this course is required for GSIs in their first semester of teaching in the French Department. The course is also open to GSIs teaching other foreign languages and whose departments do not offer a pedagogy program, as it qualifies for the GSI Teaching and Resource Center's Certificate of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

Required Texts:

o Lightbown, P. and Spada, N. How Languages Are Learned, 4th edition. Oxford University Press.

o Additional select readings (to be found on BCourses)