COMP 107
Advanced French: Danger and Desire in French Film and Fiction Spring 2025
Division I Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed RLFR 106

This is an advanced course in French language designed to help you improve your speaking, comprehension, reading, and writing, through the dynamic study of short literary texts and films focusing on danger and desire in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century France and the Francophone World. Through active discussion and debate, textual and cinematic analysis, grammatical review, and careful writing and revision, you will improve your command of spoken and written French, strengthen your ability to express complex ideas, expand your vocabulary, and deepen your understanding of French and Francophone fiction, film, and cultures. This is an ideal course to prepare for study abroad or for more advanced coursework in French and Francophone literature and cinema. As a focus for improving your French, we will examine a broad range of texts and films on danger and desire in France, Québec, and Algeria from 1820 to 2025, with an emphasis on passion and ambition, infatuation and seduction, betrayal and vengeance, courage and cruelty, warfare and resistance. Works to include nineteenth-century texts by Chateaubriand, Duras, Balzac, Mérimée, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola; twentieth-century texts by Colette, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Duras, Ernaux, Guibert, Quint, Lindon, Vilrouge; and twenty-first-century films by Caron, Ozon, Ducastel, Martineau, Dercourt, and Becker. Conducted in French.