French

The French program welcomes students at all levels, from beginners to students with several years of French. Our courses in Bronxville are closely associated with Sarah Lawrence’s excellent French program in Paris, and our priority is to give our students the opportunity to study in Paris during their junior or senior year. This may include students who start at the beginning level in their first year at Sarah Lawrence, provided that they fully dedicate themselves to learning the language. 

Our program in Paris is of the highest level, with all courses taught in French and with the possibility for students to take courses (with conference work) at French universities and other Parisian institutions of higher education. Our courses in Bronxville are, therefore, fairly intensive in order to bring every student to the level required to attend our program in Paris. 

Even for students who don’t intend to go abroad with Sarah Lawrence, the French program provides the opportunity to learn the language in close relation to French culture and literature, starting at the beginning level. At all levels except for beginning, students conduct individual conference projects in French on an array of topics—from medieval literature to Gainsbourg and the culture of the 1960s, from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to avant-garde French female playwrights. On campus, the French program tries to foster a Francophile atmosphere with our newsletter La Feuille, our French Table, our French ciné-club, and other francophone events—all run by students, along with two French assistants who come to the College every year from Paris.

In order to allow students to study French while pursuing other interests, students are also encouraged, after their first year, to take advantage of our Language Third and Language/Conference Third options that allow them to combine the study of French with either another language or a lecture on the topic of their choice.

During their senior year, students may consider applying to the English assistantship program in France, which is run by the French Embassy in Washington, DC. Every year, Sarah Lawrence graduates are admitted to this selective program and spend a year in France, working in local schools for the French Department of Education.

Bienvenue!

French 2023-2024 Courses

Beginning French

Open, Large seminar—Year | 10 credits

This class is designed primarily for students who haven’t had any exposure to French and will allow them to develop, over the course of the year, an active command of the fundamentals of spoken and written French. We will use grammar lessons to learn how to speak, read, and write in French. In-class dialogue will center on the study of theatre, cinema, and short texts, including poems, newspaper articles, and short stories from French and francophone cultures. During the spring semester, students will be able to conduct a small-scale project in French on a topic of their choice. There are no individual conference meetings for this level. The class meets three times a week, and a weekly conversation session with a French language tutor is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. Students who successfully complete a beginning and an intermediate-level French course are eligible to study in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

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Intermediate French II: Colonialism and its Legacy: The Relationship Between France and Sub-Saharan Africa

Intermediate, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

Prerequisite: Intermediate French I (possibly Advanced Beginning French for outstanding students) or by placement test taken during interview week at the beginning of the fall semester

This course will analyze the relationship between France and its former colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa. We will look at works written by thinkers of the time that analyzed questions of value and morality regarding the colonial project. Students will have the chance to get familiar with the different eras of colonialism, including the moment of decolonization and the postcolonial era. How can we view the colonizers all these years later? In what ways does the legacy of colonialism continue to affect Sub-Saharan Africa? Theoretical texts, film, and literary texts will be used to further the students’ knowledge of this topic through written and oral assignments.

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Intermediate French I (Section 2): Scène(s) de littérature

Intermediate, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

Prerequisite: admission by placement test (to be taken during interview week at the beginning of the fall semester) or completion of Beginning French.

This course will offer a systematic review of French grammar and is designed to strengthen and deepen students’ mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students will also learn to begin to use linguistic concepts as tools for developing their analytic writing. Over the course of the year, we will study a series of scenes from French and francophone literature from its origins to today. From the 11th-century Chanson de Roland and 12th-century “lais” and fables of Marie de France to 20th-century works by Aimé Césaire, Aminata Sow-Fall and Annie Ernaux, we will look at scenes specific to literature. What is it about literary scenes that differs from those created in other media? And what happens when we encounter them as part of a class rather than on our own? Where possible, our discussion will include points of comparison with scenes in visual media such as theatre and photography. Readings will include excerpts from Marie de Rabutin-Chantal (Madame de Sévigné), Madame de La Fayette, Gustave Flaubert, or Léon-Gontran Damas. At regular intervals, we will also study the headlines of Libération, a major Parisian daily. In this part of the course, we will consider the way climate change, food, or secularism are discussed, as well as aesthetic and ethical choices in presenting the news. In addition to conferences, a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant(e) is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. The Intermediate I and II courses in French are specially designed to help prepare students for studying in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

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Intermediate French I (Section 1): French Identities

Intermediate, Seminar—Year | 10 credits

Prerequisite: Beginning French or 3-4 years of high-school French and placement test taken during interview week

This course will offer a systematic review of French grammar and is designed to strengthen and deepen students’ mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students will also begin to use linguistic concepts as tools for developing their analytic writing. More than other countries, France’s identity was shaped by centuries of what is now perceived by the French as a historically coherent past. In this course, we will explore the complexities of today’s French identity—or, rather, identities—following the most contemporary controversies that have shaken French society in the past 30 years while, at the same time, exploring historical influences and cultural paradigms at play in these débats franco-français. Thus, in addition to newspapers, online resources, recent films, TV series, and songs, we will study masterpieces of the past in literature and in the arts. Topics discussed will include, among others, school and separation from faith; cuisine and traditions; immigration and urban ghettos; women and feminism in France; France’s relation to nature and the environment; the heritage of French Enlightenment (les Lumières), duty to remember (devoir de mémoire), and France's relationship with dark episodes of its history (slavery, Régime de Vichy and Nazi occupation, Algerian war). Authors studied will include Marie de France, Montaigne, Voltaire, Hugo, Flaubert, Proust, Colette, Duras, Césaire, Djebar, Chamoiseau, Bouraoui. In addition to conferences, a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant(e) is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. The Intermediate I and II French courses are specially designed to help prepare students for studying in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their Junior year.

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Advanced French: Writing the Modern Self: Autobiography, Autoportrait, Autofiction

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits

Prerequisite: Intermediate French II, returned from Study Abroad, or placed into this level according to the SLC French proficiency test

This course will explore how French and francophone writers in the postwar era have used literature as a means of writing their identities, memories, and life narratives. We will study how writers made use of both traditional genres of life writing (such as autobiography, diaries, and memoirs) and more experimental and hybrid forms of narrative. We will see how authors constructed their identities on the page through the lens of gender, race, sexuality, class, or history. Theoretical readings on memory, trauma, and testimony will allow us to explore the fraught relationship between fact and fiction when writing the self. Topics to be addressed will include the representation of childhood and the family, women’s autobiography, confessional narratives, witnessing and testimony, intellectual development, language and learning, authenticity and documentation, and the relationship between self and other. Students will read both excerpts from longer texts and several works in their entirety. Authors studied could include Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Hervé Guibert, Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, Annie Ernaux, Patrick Modiano, Nina Bouraoui, Emmanuel Carrère, Marie NDiaye, and Edouard Louis. We might also screen several autobiographical films that help us understand the relationship between memory and media. In conference, students may undertake a critical or creative autobiographical project of their own or study other aspects of modern and contemporary French and francophone literature and culture. Alongside our study of literary texts, we will review some key lessons in French grammar and composition.

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Romanesque and Gothic Art: Castle and Cathedral at the Birth of Europe

Open, Lecture—Spring

This course explores the powerful architecture, sculpture, and painting styles that lie at the heart of the creation of Europe and the idea of the West. We will use a number of strategies to explore how expressive narrative painting and sculpture and new monumental architectural styles were engaged in the formation of a common European identity and uncover, as well, the artistic vestiges of diverse groups and cultures that challenge that uniform vision. These are arts that chronicle deep social struggles between classes, intense devotion through pilgrimage, the rise of cities and universities, and movements that could both advocate genocide and nurture enormous creativity—in styles both flamboyant and austere—growing from places as diverse as castles and rural monasteries to Gothic cathedrals. The course will explore those aspects of expressive visual language that link works of art to social history, the history of ideas, and political ideology.

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Paris: A History Through Art, Architecture, and City Planning

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

In this course, we will trace the history of Paris from its foundation until World War I, working from the visual arts that both defined and emanated from this remarkable city. We will explore works of art, architecture, and urban design as documents of history, of social and cultural values, and of the history of ideas. Our readings and discussions will lead us to interactions between the arts and the history, fashion, religion, science, and literature of Paris. Student projects will chart these relationships graphically and construct, in both individual and group projects, a cultural history of Paris from Roman Lutetia to the City of Lights.

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The Movie Musical

Open, Lecture—Spring

Long dismissed as shallow mass entertainment, the movie musical remains an understudied genre despite its century-long popularity, global scope, and recurring role in film history. This lecture course offers a layered cultural history of the movie musical from the 1920s to the present, approaching it as a uniquely intermedial, transnational perspective from which to study film. Students will learn to read movie musicals through a mixture of formal analysis and material history. We will read canonical scholars, as well as more recent multidisciplinary work on the movie musical as a site for ideological contestation; performance politics; and aesthetic, narrative, and technological experimentation. In particular, we will highlight the genre’s power for hiding labor behind spectacles of seemingly spontaneous mass performance and rehearsing modern social conflicts through heterosexual couple-driven, dual-focus plots (Jets vs. Sharks, town vs. city, etc.). Other topics include: the roots of the movie musical in vaudeville, minstrelsy, opera, and ballet; the musical’s relationship to new cinematic technologies, labor forms, and industrial practices; the musical’s relationship to questions of gender, sexuality, and race; and the musical as a globally circulating and mutating “mass” cultural form. While much of our focus will be on classical Hollywood (1920s-1960s), we will also watch films from France, the Soviet Union, England, East Germany, Mexico, India, and Australia.

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Feminist Film History

Open, Seminar—Fall

What happened to women in the silent-film industry? Why are there so few female voiceovers and so many plucky secretaries in classical Hollywood films? Should dead starlets be revived as feminist icons? Can dominant aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” or feminist filmmaking techniques? How do you uncover invisible or suppressed histories? This seminar offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film studies by retracing film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. While our focus will be on US and European films and scholarship from the Silent Era to the end of the 20th century, students are encouraged to pursue conference projects on feminist movements, films, and film theory from any era or any part of the world. Screenings will highlight a mixture of obscure and canonical films, and readings will cover a multidisciplinary range of feminist film scholarship—from psychoanalytic film theory to media archaeology and cyberfeminism. Topics to be discussed include women at the origins of film, women’s work onscreen and on the studio lot, the male gaze and spectacular female stars of classical cinema, fan culture and gendered genres, second-wave feminism and the French New Wave, race and Technicolor, lesbian representability, and feminist authorship as political practice.

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Intermediate French I (Section 2): Scène(s) de littérature

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

This course will offer a systematic review of French grammar and is designed to strengthen and deepen students’ mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students will also learn to begin to use linguistic concepts as tools for developing their analytic writing. Over the course of the year, we will study a series of scenes from French and francophone literature from its origins to today. From the 11th-century Chanson de Roland and 12th-century “lais” and fables of Marie de France to 20th-century works by Aimé Césaire, Aminata Sow-Fall and Annie Ernaux, we will look at scenes specific to literature. What is it about literary scenes that differs from those created in other media? And what happens when we encounter them as part of a class rather than on our own? Where possible, our discussion will include points of comparison with scenes in visual media such as theatre and photography. Readings will include excerpts from Marie de Rabutin-Chantal (Madame de Sévigné), Madame de La Fayette, Gustave Flaubert, or Léon-Gontran Damas. At regular intervals, we will also study the headlines of Libération, a major Parisian daily. In this part of the course, we will consider the way climate change, food, or secularism are discussed, as well as aesthetic and ethical choices in presenting the news. In addition to conferences, a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant(e) is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. The Intermediate I and II courses in French are specially designed to help prepare students for studying in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

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The Jewish Century: European Jewish History From Emancipation to Destruction

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

Europe during the 19th century witnessed the legal and social emancipation of Jews. But it also witnessed the emergence of modern racial antisemitism, which eventually underpinned the ideology leading to European Jewry’s near destruction during the Holocaust. Neither of those two developments was preordained. Moreover, European Jews were active in shaping their own history as advocates for their own rights, as makers of European and Jewish culture, and as resistors to their persecution and murder. In this course, we will try to make sense of this European story of Jewish emancipation and near destruction. In the lecture part, we will go over the broad developments and events in European Jewish history from the beginning of the 19th century to 1945. The focus will be on the years between 1848 and 1933. While we will also cover the Holocaust, this is not primarily a course about the murder of European Jews but rather about the lives of European Jews. In the weekly group conferences—with help from secondary and primary sources such as diaries, letters, photo albums, short stories, and movies—we will dive deeper into these lives. For example, we will discuss the experience of middle-class Jewish women in Germany, the Jewish working class in Poland, the emergence of distinctly Jewish politics between Zionism and non-Zionist Bundism, or Jews’ presence among their countries’ nationalists. During the semester, students will also engage in two group research projects exploring Jewish lives in the 1880s and the 1930s.

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Global Surrealisms

Open, Large seminar—Spring

The surrealist movement emerged in France in the early 1920s, when a group of writers questioned the narrative of reason, progress, and tradition that had long defined European culture. In exploring the potential of the unconscious, the surrealists endeavored to create an avant-garde artistic and political revolution motivated by desire, madness, and dreams. The concepts and techniques developed by the French surrealists would go on to have an enormous influence on writers, artists, and filmmakers across the globe. This course will explore some of the key ideas, practices, and figures in the history of surrealism. The first portion of the semester will focus on the group’s origin in France: We will read several of its foundational texts and study many of the strategies that the surrealists invented for artistic creation. From there, we will examine the legacy of surrealism in a variety of locations—from Latin America and the Caribbean to Egypt, Japan, and the United States—in order to see how the movement’s message of revolution and nonconformity has been adopted and adapted by writers and artists up through the present day. Topics addressed will include automatic writing, dream work, mad love, the marvelous, games and chance, urban flânerie, gender and surrealism, anticapitalist and anticolonial surrealism, and reality itself. Although our first focus will be on the literature of surrealism, this will be a very interdisciplinary course: Students will see how surrealists made use of many types of media and expression (drawing, painting, collage, photography, film). For conference, students will follow the collective model of the movement and pursue small-group projects that will carry on the creative and critical legacy of surrealism.

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Colette, Duras, Ernaux

Open, Seminar—Spring

At first glance, the grouping of these three French female writers might seem just to be the arbitrary product of alphabetical order. They come from three different generations, after all, and their works perhaps present more aesthetic differences than similarities. Thus, part of our goal in this class will be to understand the unique role that each has played in the history of modern French literature. The preeminent woman of letters of the first half of the 20th century, Colette, depicted the social and sexual mores of her time in a sophisticated and wry prose. Marguerite Duras, one of the most significant writers and intellectuals of the postwar era, pushed the boundaries of the novel’s form through experimentations in dialogue, character, and narrative. Annie Ernaux, the first Frenchwoman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, has long dissected the nature of personal memory with an approach closer to sociology than creative literature. A separate aim of the course will be to understand the connecting threads between and among the three. Most significantly, we will see how Colette, Duras, and Ernaux all draw on the material of their own lives in their writing, blurring the line between autobiography and fiction. We will also explore a set of shared preoccupations in their work, including the tensions of domestic life, the enduring influence of maternal figures, the power of female sexuality and desire, the transformations of the aging body, the relationship between memory and history, and the determinative role of social class. We will ask, finally, why each of these authors has been regarded as “scandalous” in some way and also why each is having a “translation moment” of sorts in the present-day anglophone world. We will read full works in English translation; qualified students of French may read works in the original and do their conference work in French.

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Descartes and Princess Elizabeth: From Metaphysics to Morals

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

René Descartes can be seen as the founder of modern philosophy. He carried out much of his intellectual life through correspondence, and one of his most important correspondents was Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. A central topic of their correspondence is the “union of mind and body”; i.e., how thought is related to matter but also how the perspective of science is related to the passions and human life. This problem is posed by Descartes’ treatment of mind and body in his Meditations, which led Elizabeth to begin the correspondence. Their exchanges led Descartes to write his last book, The Passions of the Soul, on psychology, the passions, virtue, and vice. We will begin by reading the Meditations, then focus on the correspondence between Descartes and Elizabeth, and finally turn to the Passions.

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Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

This reading seminar will consist of a close study of one book, A Thousand Plateaus, which was coauthored in 1980 by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari.A Thousand Plateaus, the second volume of their magnum opus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia—the founding text of a movement of thought called “poststructuralism”—is among the most influential books of 20th-century philosophy. As its name suggests, the book presents a vision, or visions, of the world and of history as multilayered and multiplex rather than homogenous and linear. The book teaches us to look and to think of things and of ourselves from a variety of new and shifting angles, with the aim of providing means of resistance, empowerment, and sometimes escape against capitalism, fascism, and forces of normalization. To do this, Deleuze and Guattari draw on a broad range of philosophical, literary, and artistic texts and on modalities of experience that have traditionally been associated with madness. Their writing style is bold and dazzling, full to the brim with new terminologies (many of which have since become common tropes in the humanities and the social sciences); it is also challenging and dense. Engaging their work fruitfully requires a mind that is, like theirs, open and adventurous, willing to take risks and follow unpredictable turns. We will proceed in workshop fashion, reading 30-40 pages a week in advance of each class, writing short analyses throughout the semester, and coming to class prepared and eager to work together toward increased understanding. In addition to the prerequisite, students enrolling in this class should, more importantly, have a philosophical passion and commitment, a diligent work ethic, and a spirit of camaraderie, collaboration, and generosity.

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Concepts of the Mind: How Language and Culture Challenge Cognitive Science

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

How does the human mind represent the world? And how do these representations vary across people? Could knowing a different language change how we experience time or even how we see color? Even seemingly simple concepts like “in” vs. “on” mean different things in different cultures, and words like “one” and “two” may not be linguistically universal. Indeed, the very course description that you are reading makes culturally-specific assumptions about psychology and implicitly assumes objectivity. At the same time, humans seem to share certain core experiences, such as perceiving events, creating categories, and recalling the past. Which aspects are shared, and which are unique? In this course, we will draw on research from psycholinguistics, cognitive development, and cultural psychology to learn cognitive science in a larger context. Critically, we will consider how each of those fields have been severely constrained by an emphasis on white, Western, industrialized experiences. We will investigate the broader social and ethical consequences of these assumptions and explore insights and challenges that emerge when we step out of this limited perspective. We’ll draw on primary and secondary sources, including research articles, literature, videos, raw experimental data, and audio recordings. Students will develop projects in conference work that combine their interests with the course content, such as designing an experiment to test cross-linguistic differences in visual attention, analyzing vocabulary from languages other than English, or replicating and reinterpreting an existing experiment using culturally-responsive practices.

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Creative Nonfiction

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Fall

This is a course for creative writers who are interested in exploring nonfiction as an art form. We will focus on reading and interpreting outside work—essays, articles, and journalism by some of our best writers—in order to understand what good nonfiction is and how it is created. During the first part of the semester, writing will be comprised mostly of exercises and short pieces aimed at putting into practice what is being illuminated in the readings; in the second half of the semester, students will create longer, formal essays to be presented in workshop.

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