An introduction to the French language within the context of Francophone cultures. In the first semester, emphasis is placed on oral proficiency with conversational practice to discover various aspects of contemporary French and Francophone cultures. The course is grounded in the acquisition of vocabulary, basic grammar, and reading and writing skills facilitated by short readings, film, and other cultural media. This course is not open to students with two or more years of French in secondary school.

A direct continuation of FRE 101 and also intended for students with no more than three years of French in high school or the equivalent. In this second semester introductory course, students concentrate on further developing vocabulary, grammar, writing skills, and comprehension of French and Francophone cultures with short readings, films, and other cultural media. Prerequisite(s): FRE 101.

This course explores representations of gender, race, and class including the intersectionality and historical evolution of these categories of difference. Students acquire analytical tools to better appreciate and contextualize French and Francophone films and look critically at their various aesthetic frameworks. How do classic French cinema, surrealism, avant-garde cinema, the New Wave, and postcolonial cinema question social norms and values? How do French and Francophone films represent personal memory, national history, gender relations, and colonial and postcolonial gazes? How do filmmakers address social change and capture shifting identities within French and Francophone history and cultures? Course and reading materials are in English; films are in the original with English subtitles. Not open to students who have earned credit for FRE S15.

An exploration of the diversity of Francophone voices while developing your own. This course focuses on proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing and provides a general review of grammar. Students read and discuss a range of films and short texts from the French-speaking world. Class discussions in French explore postcolonial issues of identity, power, race and gender.

The course is designed to develop oral fluency and aural acuity, with attention to vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, syntax, and pronunciation. The course is constructed around an unfolding suite of humorous adventures in dialogue form that explore North Africa's cultural legacy in the French and Francophone world. Students explore topics of contemporary interest such as orientalism, colonialism, women's rights, Islam and France, and North African culture, through weekly performances, improvisation, debate, and one-on-one evaluations. Recommended background: FRE 201.

This course develops facility in speaking, reading, and writing French by focusing on the evolution of French society and culture. Students explore contemporary France through content-based cultural materials such as magazine and newspaper articles, published interviews, video, film, music, and podcasts.. Students prepare oral reports and written essays on a wide range of issues such as immigration, national identity, post-colonial legacies, politics, social welfare, women and LGBTQ+ rights and environmental policies.

This course focuses on the Francophone world while developing greater facility in speaking, reading, and writing in French. The Francophone world is first presented through the history of colonization, the slave trade, and the decolonization movements in several areas such as the Caribbean, West and North Africa, and Maine. The diversity of Francophone cultures and voices is explored through a variety of cultural material including newspaper and magazine articles, documentaries, guest speakers and the work of directors and authors such as Pépin (Guadeloupe), Dracius and Chamoiseau (Martinique), Djebar and Salem (Algeria), Bugul and Mambety (Senegal), Chabot (Maine), or Richard (Louisiana). Class presentations and discussions are conducted entirely in French. Recommended background: FRE 201.

The course is designed to develop facility in conversing, debating and writing in idiomatic French with ease and fluency. Students review linguistic structures and develop new analytical skills to expand their critical thinking in French with attention to written expression. In addition to reading short essays by French and Francophone theorists, students acquire specific conceptual vocabulary to analyze filmmakers' formal and ideological choices to explore questions of language, power, and privilege; constructions of gender, national, and racial identities; and their intersectionalities.

An appreciation and analysis of the amply recorded experience of childhood in North Africa. Students examine the rich body of memoirs, historical accounts, novels, films, and short stories that explore the experience of childhood with particular attention to its cultural specificity in North Africa, a Francophone region deeply affected by the legacy of colonization. Particular attention is paid to issues of gender, orientalism, and religious and cultural diversity within the Maghreb. Authors include Sebbar, Adimi, Djebar, and Mernissi, and filmmakers Ferroukhi and Boughedir. Prerequisite(s): FRE 207, 208, or 235.

A study of the various experiences of immigration that the Francophone world has made possible and, in certain cases, forced upon people for political and economic reasons. In an era of globalization, students examine how increasingly migrants and hosts must negotiate their sense of self through multiple heritages and places, and how Francophone novels and films imagine new forms of belonging that embrace the complex and fluid status of the migrant experience. How does one define "home" within one's host country without denying one's past and cultural origins? The course envisions the Francophone world as a theater of multiple encounters that lead to the creation of new hybrid identities that transform both the immigrant and the host. Authors and filmmakers include Bouchareb, Bouraoui, Condé, De Duve, Diome, Flem, Glissant, Gomis, Miano, and Soumahoro. Prerequisite(s): FRE207, 208 or 235.

This course explores how scientific concepts such as entropy, fractals, and systems theory influence literary form and meaning in contemporary French and Francophone texts and films. Students examine how narrative structure, temporality, and representations of identity borrow from these scientific paradigms. Attention will be paid primarily to close readings of novels, films, and poems, to tease out the thematic, structural, or epistemological interference between science and literature. Featured authors include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Antoine Volodine, Fatou Diome, J.M.G. Le Clézio, or Maïssa Bey, authors who invite reflections on race, gender, colonialism, and the human condition. Readings may be supplemented by short scientific articles from Brillouin, Mandelbrot, Shanon & Weaver; philosophical works from Serres and Deleuze; and decolonial critiques of European epistemology from authors such as Thiong’o, Glissant, or Sarr. Select films further develop the course’s cross-disciplinary approach. No background in science is required. Prerequisite(s): FRE 207, 208, or 235.

An appreciation and analysis of what it means to speak French and to be "French" or Francophone in the local and regional context. Students examine questions of language, ethnic identity, and cultural expression through novels, short stories, autobiographies, film, and written and oral histories. Visits to local cultural sites enhance students' understanding of the Franco-American community and its heritage as well as other French speaking communities in Maine. Prerequisite(s): FRE 207, 208, or 235.

A study of French and Francophone cultural production, mainly literary, across time and various genres. The course does not attempt comprehensive, encyclopedic knowledge of a textural canon, but rather a thematic approach that focuses on key works and important authors and creators from the French-speaking world. Power and resistance provides a capacious lens through which students consider issues relevant to the history of France and its reach into the cultural life of its former colonies and beyond. Gender and race are foremost among the course’s defining influences. Students become acquainted with iconic moments and texts from the Francophone world as well as those that have been traditionally underprivileged or unrecognized. This course may be repeated for credit with permission of the instructor. Prerequisite(s): FRE 207, 208, or 235.

This course introduces translation as both an artistic practice and a political act. Students translate literary excerpts in both prose and poetry, while weekly readings drawn from translation theory explore the ethical and political dimensions of translating across linguistic, gender, and cultural boundaries. The course emphasizes not only stylistic and aesthetic concerns, but also the translator’s active role in shaping meaning and mediating cultural difference. Prerequisite(s): FRE 235, 240, or 250.

This seminar explores the French judicial system through recent novels, films, documentaries, and essays that highlight the relations of power, social norms, and institutionalized inequities at play in high-profile criminal and terrorist cases. By adopting new vantage points and alternative discursive lenses, these works propose counter narratives that question the judicial categories of truth, evidence, rational, or guilt. Focusing on how relevant evidence, facts, and testimonies function within judicial discourses to craft social profiles and psychologic portraits, students identify presuppositions that (auto)biography as a normative genre shares with judicial discourse. Students also address the complexities of soliciting and evaluating life stories in the case of asylum seekers in France. Finally, they analyze the differences between punitive and restorative models of justice in France and the role transitional justice played in Rwanda’s post-genocide reconciliation process. Course entirely conducted in French. Prerequisite(s): FRE 240, 250, or 271; or permission of the instructor.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester.

This seminar explores the French Enlightenment’s legacy in contemporary film, with particular attention to changing gender roles, colonial expansion, and the rise of class consciousness. Through pairings of 18th-century texts with films, we examine how Enlightenment ideals were constructed or contested in period texts and how these ideas continue to resonate either through adaptations or as inspiration in contemporary cinema. Readings include canonical works by Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, or Robespierre, alongside lesser-known or marginalized voices such as Olympe de Gouges, Marie Louise Vigée Le Brun, or Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve. Supplemental readings in film theory, visual culture, history, and gender studies provide critical frameworks for analysis. Prerequisite(s): FRE 240, 250, or 251.

This course studies the colonial, postcolonial, and immigrant experience of North Africans as portrayed in Francophone literature and film. Readings include narratives and journals from the beginning of the colonial period (1830), as well as the contemporary novels, films, and discourse of writers and artists from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, such as Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem, Lyes Salem, Rachid Bouchareb, and Leïla Sebbar. Gender and colonialism are highlighted as categories of analysis. Prerequisite(s): FRE 240, 250, or 251.

An examination of voices from the French-speaking Caribbean from the first half of the twentieth century to the contemporary period, including works by authors such as Césaire, Depestre, Glissant, Condé, Pineau, Chamoiseau, and Lahens. The course explores the legacies of the colonial past and slavery, political and social justice, hybridity, and créolité. Prerequisite(s): FRE 240 or 250.

This course presents a historical and rhetorical examination of various media and genres that bear witness to the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda and question the ability to document genocide in Africa through Western modes of representation and information. Students analyze literary works written by Francophone sub-Saharan African writers such as Lamko (Chad) and Diop (Senegal), the play Rwanda 94, written testimonies by Tutsi and Hutu survivors such as Mukagasana and Mujawayo and those of foreign journalists present during or after the genocide such as Hatzfeld, fictional films by Peck, and numerous documentaries by Western and Rwandan filmakers. Course conducted in English. Prerequisite(s): FRE 240, 250, or 251.

Open only to senior majors, with departmental permission. Before registering for 457 or 458 a student must present to the department chair an acceptable plan, including an outline and a tentative bibliography, after discussion with a member of the department. Students register for FRE 457 in the fall semester. Senior majors register for 457 or 458 only, unless the department gives permission for a second semester's credit because the nature of the project warrants it. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both FRE 457 and 458.

Open only to senior majors, with departmental permission. Before registering for 457 or 458 a student must present to the department chair an acceptable plan, including an outline and a tentative bibliography, after discussion with a member of the department. Students register for FRE 458 in the winter semester. Senior majors register for 457 or 458 only, unless the department gives permission for a second semester's credit because the nature of the project warrants it. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both FRE 457 and 458.

This course explores representations of gender, race, and class including the intersectionality and historical evolution of these categories of difference. Students acquire analytical tools to better appreciate and contextualize French and Francophone films and look critically at their various aesthetic frameworks. How do classic French cinema, surrealism, avant-garde cinema, the New Wave, and postcolonial cinema question social norms and values? How do French and Francophone films represent personal memory, national history, gender relations, and colonial and postcolonial gazes? How do filmmakers address social change and capture shifting identities within French and Francophone history and cultures? Course and reading materials are in English; films are in the original with English subtitles. Not open to students who have earned credit for FRE 151.

The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin wrote, "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are." This course studies the ways in which food is prepared and eaten in selected works of French literature and film and what those culinary traditions tell us about the changing identity of the French. Literary and cinematic representations may include works by Flaubert, Zola, Proust, Buñuel, Axel, Jeunet, Ferreri, Barbery, and Gavalda. The course includes some practice in food preparation and service. Prerequisite(s): FRE 201 or higher.

This course studies the intrepid boy reporter Tintin as a cultural icon of vast international acclaim. His adventures, drawn and written by the Belgian writer and artist Georges Remi (Hergé), have been translated into over fifty languages and sold hundreds of millions of copies. Hergé’s legacy is both beloved and troubling: the two bestselling adventures remain Tintin au Congo and Tintin en Amérique, both of which include exceedingly racist and colonialist stereotypes and tropes. In this course, students explore the Tintin phenomenon as artistic production, as colonialist discourse, as commodified object, and as part of a distinctly European tradition of graphic storytelling. Readings include a selection of the twenty-three adventures, studies and interviews concerning Hergé, theoretical works on the art form, and related critical works on the reception and controversy of Tintin's enduring popularity. Recommended background: One course at or above FRE 205.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study during a Short Term.