Currently offered courses

Beginning French - Mr. Cohen

This course will give you a solid grounding in French conversation and grammar. Using the French in Action program, students follow a simple story presenting everyday topics through short films, readings, and exercises. The films will be watched in the library. Class time will be devoted to enhancing listening comprehension of the film reinforced through question-and-answer sessions and accompanying workbook. The second half of each class will be conversational, building on the structures and vocabulary already learned and extending the situations from the story and related topics to our own ideas and experiences. Students will write dialogues and vignettes together and pre-sent them in class. There will be biweekly grammar tests and regular written homework. Conference work will be in groups and includes review, joint presentations, and more advanced readings. Class outings to French events in New York will also be featured.
Open to any interested student.

French for Advanced Beginners - Mr. Dickinson

This course is designed for students who have had some solid preparation in French but who still need to work with the basic grammar of the language. We will use what the student knows to review thoroughly and rapidly the phonetics and the verbal structure of French. By the end of the year, we will have covered all the essential points of French grammar. From the beginning we will read, starting slowly with plays by Anouilh, Beckett, Ionesco, Cocteau, and Genet. We also will look at paintings by the most important painters of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Students will be expected to write short weekly papers on the plays and paintings and sometimes on their personal experiences or their work in other courses. Once written, these papers will be corrected and rewritten, and each student will keep a notebook of the vocabulary and idioms needed in order to express what he or she wants to say. The course will be conducted entirely in French, and a great deal of time will be spent in assuring that the student can manipulate the French verbal system in direct and indirect discourse and in questions.
Advanced beginning.

From Text to Action - Mr. Leveau

In this course we will systematically review the basics of French grammar and language while continuing to explore their complexities. We will organize our work on language around the relationship between text and action, exploring how a text can be turned into a performance. We will study multiple examples of plays as well as novels adapted to the screen and poems. Excerpts from plays and dialogues in particular will give us examples of dynamic exchanges from which to elaborate linguistic activities in the classroom and start discussions. Literary material will lead to an array of written and oral exercises that will strengthen linguistic skills while providing opportunities to discover French literature and culture. In addition, we will undertake a guided reading of a major French prose text over each semester.
Intermediate I.

French Identities - Mr. Leveau

In this course we will systematically study the nuances of French grammar and acquire the tools to develop a complex discourse in French. We will explore how the notion of French identity has taken shape over the centuries, and how it has been challenged in recent times. Topics will include questions of colonialism, nation, immigration, religion, and secularism, but we will also try to follow the developments of “l’esprit français” from Cartesianism to French cuisine. We will study a selection of French literary masterpieces from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, but also explore cultural, historical, and political contemporary controversies through a variety of material (films, media, music, franco-phone resources in New York City). Through a variety of written and oral contributions, students will work on acquiring the tools they need to express complex and nuanced analyses in French.
Intermediate II.

Writing Women: Boundary Crossings - Ms. Moger

In the first semester we will explore a broad spectrum of female writing in the twentieth century, drawing our objects of study from different genres and different countries. Examination of poems, short stories, essays, memoirs, and novels produced outside of France, Belgium, and Switzerland by francophone women in Egypt, Algeria, Canada, and the Caribbean will permit appreciation of the diversity of views among contemporary women on the issues of interpersonal relationships, political power, the function of writing, and the formation of identity in a polyphonic and pluralistic world. In the second semester we will focus exclusively on novels, especially, if not exclusively, on first-person narratives, by women from a full range of francophone cultures to explore the potential link between marginalized voices and generic border crossings. That is, it is interesting to note the recurrent phenomenon whereby the first-person synthesis of narrator and protagonist in female writing seems coincident with genre disturbance. Combining as they do memoir, prose poem, novel, and philosophical essay, many such works resist classification and thus offer subversive versions of the world and the place of writing in constituting it. Readings will include, among others, the destabilizing fictional creations of Miriama Bâ (Senegal), Marie Chauvet (Haiti), Andrée Chédid (Egypt/France), Simone Schwarz-Bart (Guadeloupe), and Anne Hébert (Canada). Students may take either or both semesters of the course.
Intermediate III.

French Lyrical Poetry - Mr. Dickinson

We will study in depth the three French poets who left the greatest impression on modern French literature. Les Fleurs du Mal and the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris were of immeasurable importance for the poets who came after Baudelaire. We will study many poems from the two collections and then will try to see how Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud continued Baudelaire’s explorations. The work of these poets makes the second half of the nineteenth century in France one of the extraordinary moments in the development of Western poetry. We will also study four poets of the Renaissance, DuBellay, Ronsard, Scève, and Louise Labè, and two dramatists of the seventeenth century, Corneille and Racine. Knowledge of these poets and dramatists is essential in the study of Baudelaire’s immense prosodic and imaginal accomplishment, which became a foundation and a means of liberation for the poetic invention of Mallarmé and Rimbaud. Conference work for the course will follow the old idea of a contract, the terms of which are the reading of Madame Bovary, La Princesse de Clèves, Manon Lescault, and Moderato Cantabile. These novels, from four different centuries, can be studied as the student wills—as monuments of style or of feminism, or as historical documents—and the student can choose any additional novels or stories to complement what she or he learns from the four required texts.
Advanced.