Courses

Credits: 4

For students with no previous training in the language; oral practice and conversation, grammar, reading, vocabulary building, and study of French and Francophone cultures.

Pre-Requisite: None

Read about this course

Credits: 4

Continuation of French 101

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 101 or appropriate score on placement exam.

Read about this course

Credits: 4

Oral practice and conversation, grammar review, reading, vocabulary expansion, creative writing and study of French and Francophone cultures.

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 102 or appropriate score on placement exam.

Credits: 4

Continuation of FRENCH 203 with more advanced materials – Oral practice and conversation, grammar review, reading, vocabulary expansion, creative writing and study of French and Francophone cultures.

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 203 or appropriate score on placement exam.

Credits: 3

Development of oral and written skills, based on reading and discussion of contemporary socio-cultural topics.

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 203 or appropriate score on placement exam.* *Open to entering Freshman students only, non-freshman who place into this course should take FR 228 instead.

Credits: 3

Enhance writing and speaking proficiency through cultural readings on France and the francophone world. Review of grammar and focus on more complex grammatical structures. A required prerequisite for the French major. Classes conducted in French.

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 204 or 227.

Credits: 3

An introduction to reading and analyzing literary works, with special emphasis on the development of writing skills in French. The program will concentrate on shorter works from the major genres of French literature, and prepare students for future study of literature. Classes conducted in French.

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 228.

Credits: 3-4

(3 cr lecture only / 4 cr lecture and discussion – Comm B)

Taught in English

Professor: Nevine El Nossery

Explores how women from different francophone regions (North and Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East) gain agency through literature, movies, comics, and songs, contesting different forms of domination, exclusion, and injustice, based on gender, race, class, and religion.

Pre-Requisite: None

VIEW FLYER

Credits: 3

Taught in English

Professor: Gilles Bousquet

An overview of the global humanitarian NGO, Doctors without Borders (or Médecins sans Frontières, MSF) including its history, mission, organization, and the cultural, political, and ethical challenges it faces. Explores issues of global health, social justice, and humanitarian action. Features distinguished global practitioners with first-hand experience in health crisis situations.

Pre-Requisite: None

VIEW FLYER

Credits: 3

Trains students to write essays on a variety of topics, using different registers of French, and work to correct pronunciation and improve conversation skills. Classes conducted in French.

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 228.

Credits: 3

Study and analysis of the culture and sociology of professional environments in the French and Francophone worlds, including government, international organizations, NGO’s and business. Students develop communication skills through interactive teaching methods in multimedia labs.

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 228 or 311.

Credits: 3

Introduction to important literary works from the medieval era to the French Revolution. Classes conducted in French.

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 271.

Credits: 3

Introduction to important literary works of modernity (from the French Revolution to the twenty-first century). Classes conducted in French.

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 271.

Credits: 3

An introduction to the political, social, intellectual, artistic and literary development of French culture, from its origins to the French Revolution (1789).

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 321 or 322.

Credits: 3

An introduction to political, social, intellectual, artistic and literary developments in French and Francophone culture, within the time period from the French Revolution to the current era.

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 271.

Credits: 3

Exploration of a thematic selection of texts from the Early Modern period.

Pre-Requisite: FRENCH 321 or 322.

VIEW FLYER

Credits: 4

Oral practice and conversation, grammar, reading, vocabulary building, and study of Italian cultures.

Pre-Requisite: None

Credits: 4

Oral practice and conversation, grammar, reading, vocabulary building, and study of Italian cultures. Continuation of Italian 101.

Pre-Requisite: ITALIAN 101, ITALIAN 181 or through informal placement test*

*contact Mandi Schoville for information

Credits: 4

Conversational practice, review of grammar, viewing and discussion of Italian films, and class reading of short stories.

Pre-Requisite: Italian 102, 201 or through informal placement test*

*contact Mandi Schoville for information

Credits: 4

Conversation and writing practice, review of grammar, and class reading of a modern Italian novel.

Pre-Requisite: Italian 203 or through informal placement test*

*contact Mandi Schoville for information

Credits: 3

A survey of Italian history, literature, art, music, politics, and popular culture of the 20th-21st centuries.

Pre-Requisite: Italian 202 or 204

Credits: 3

Development of accurate and nuanced capacity for expression in Italian and for understanding the spoken and written language. Also addresses Italian phonetics and phonology to develop accurate pronunciation.

Pre-Requisite: Italian 202 or 204

Credits: 3

Focuses on masterworks of Italian literature in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, and on the ways in which this period laid a foundation of today’s Italian society and culture. Includes historical, social, and cultural contexts of the Medieval and Renaissance periods.

Pre-Requisite: Italian 202 or 204

Credits: 3

Examination of Italian phonetics and phonology, morphology and word formation, and syntax, with attention to contrasts with English. Prepares for advanced courses in Italian linguistics.

Pre-Requisite: Italian 202, 204 or graduate/professional standing

Credits: 3

Introduces students to the major works of Machiavelli through the close reading of his writings in cultural and historical contexts. Discussion and targeted writing assignments will aim at cultivating in students 1) a broad understanding of Machiavelli’s principal intellectual attitudes, 2) a deeper understanding of his literary sensibility, and 3) the ability to articulate controversies and complexities surrounding his thought.

Pre-Requisite: None

Credits: 3

Examination of an aspect of Italian studies: culture, film, language; topic varies. Fall 2022 TOPIC: Italian-American Cinema and TV

Pre-Requisite: Italian 230, 301, 310, 311, 312, 321, 322, 340, 350, 365 or graduate/professional standing

Credits: 3

Covers Italian history and culture from the Unification (1860) to the 21st century.

Pre-Requisite: Sophomore Standing

Credits: 3

Have you ever wondered what it was like to live during the Black Death? Were our medieval and early-modern ancestors different from us, or are we challenged with similar problems? What can we learn from their lives? And, if we could, what could we teach each other? Discuss these topics while reading one of the world’s greatest literary classics, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a text that will make us both laugh and cry. Through reading the Decameron, investigate medicine, art, culture, music, politics, religion, interpersonal and transcultural relations, warfare, fashion, gender and gender roles, as well as everyday life in the Middle Ages and early modernity. Also examines medieval written documents, twentieth-century feminist responses to the Decameron and filmic renditions of it, medieval frescoes, historical descriptions of the plague, and modern descriptions of, and reactions to, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pre-Requisite: Sophomore Standing

Credits: 3

Focuses on the central role played by Italy in the European vision of America between Columbus’s voyages and the Second World War.

Pre-Requisite: None

Credits: 3

Treatment of a specific perific period, genre, theme or movement in Italian literature

Pre-Requisite: Sophomore Standing

Section 002 FIG ONLY

Section 002 Topic: National Identity and the Global World: The Italian Case

“La littérature face à la catastrophe, du XVIIIe siècle à aujourd’hui”

Professor: Anne Vila

TR 4-5:15 p.m

Meets with FR 431

The modern notion of catastrophe was invented in the eighteenth century, as causal interpretations of plagues and other cataclysms shifted away from the religious notion of divine punishment, toward natural and social explanations. This was also the period when the term catastrophe underwent a major semantic expansion: the term’s older, theatrical meaning as a synonym of dénouement persisted, but authors increasingly adapted it to refer to personal dramas–or to cataclysms affecting an entire society or country. The massive earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in 1755 was a key historical catalyst for some of those shifts: Walter Benjamin would later argue that this disaster “singular and strange” deeply affected modern thought and literature from Voltaire to Kant and beyond. So, too, was the idea, popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that the very foundation of human society was a calamitous event. Catastrophism in this foundational era entailed both literary and philosophical responses to events perceived as unprecedented and unimaginable; and among other things, it inspired new forms of artistic representation.

Using a conceptual framework inspired by contemporary theorists (L. Boltanski, J. Baudrillard, J.-P. Dupuy, F. Walter, M. O’Dea, M-H. Huet, etc.) as well as historical thinkers, this course will explore representations of catastrophes across various genres of 18th-century French literature. In our main module, we will focus on the ways in which Enlightenment-era authors thought both within and beyond calamity and catastrophe, and the forms of writing in which they did so. Here, we will read authors such as Montesquieu, Prévost, Voltaire, Diderot, Graffigny, Mercier, Sade, and Sylvain Maréchal–author of Le Jugement dernier des rois (1793; this is a “volcano” play of the Revolutionary era). We will also examine the shadow of catastrophism that looms over the Encyclopédie, the French Enlightenment’s grand collective attempt to preserve worthwhile knowledge for future generations. Students will work in teams for this mini-module on the Encyclopédie, and follow the threads of renvois that link a particular set of Encyclopédie articles or plates. In the short final module, we will examine a couple of contemporary French and Francophone works that dwell on ruins or dramatize the unfolding of environmental and/or social disasters.

Students in FR672 will have the option of doing either a traditional final research paper or a hybrid final project that combines a pedagogical element (a course syllabus, for example) with close literary analysis on a selected work; either sort of final project can focus on the 18th century, or it can be transecular. More details on assignments will be provided on the syllabus.

Professor: Joshua Armstrong

Meets with 752

This course is a practicum providing students with the necessary skills for success in the French MA and PhD programs as in the profession after graduation. It includes an exploration of the structure and expectations of our graduate program, including the prelim exam, the dissertation proposal, and the dissertation. It covers the basics of advanced scholarly research and prepares students for academic conferences, dissertation writing, and publishing.
Learning Outcomes:
• Identify the different kinds of research tasks and projects you will have to carry out as a graduate student in our program
• Distinguish and effectively locate the different kinds of scholarly resources in your field
• Describe the different research fields of department faculty and begin to develop your own
• Execute strategies for successfully delivering a research paper before an academic audience
• Implement strategies for creating a professional research/teaching portfolio and CV
• Identify the different kinds of research tasks and projects you will have to carry out as a professional in your field
• Implement strategies for developing relevant and meaningful research questions
• Distinguish the current state of scholarship on a given topic in your field
• Develop an original scholarly contribution to a topic in your field
• Design an effective teaching activity using content from your research

Note: this course is mandatory for all grad students working under the new, most recent guidelines. Students grandfathered in under the old guidelines are certainly welcome to take it, but are not obliged to. It should be taken the first time it is offered after a student has already
completed one year in the program (i.e. should not be taken by incoming first-year students).

Professor: Joshua Armstrong

Meets with 750

See FRENCH 750 for details

Professor: Heather Willis Allen

Friday 10:00-12:00

Introduction to teaching collegiate world languages with an emphasis on communicative and literacy-based pedagogical strategies.

Professor: Richard Goodkin

Mondays 2:30-4:30

In this seminar, the semester will be more or less evenly divided between tragedies by Racine and comedies by Molière in which female characters figure prominently and exemplify various aspects of the psychological and theoretical issues raised by the gender identity during the French Classical period. The tentative reading list is as follow:
Racine, La Thébaïde
Racine, Andromaque
Racine, Britannicus
Racine, Bajazet
Racine, Iphigénie
Racine, Phèdre
Racine, Athalie
Molière, Les précieuses ridicules
Molière, L’École des femmes
Molière, Le Misanthrope
Molière, Tartuffe
Molière, Les Femmes savantes

The work of the course will include two papers (total length: 20 pages max.) and an oral presentation. 1-2 critical readings will accompany each work, but the pace of reading, one play per week, should be quite doable. The entire seminar will be conducted in French. Students from other departments may do their writing in English.

Professor: Jelena Todorovic

Tuesdays 4:00-6:30 pm

Systematic study of the earliest literary texts in Italy; the rise of the love lyric among the Sicilian poets; representative narrative works. The development of the lyric from Guittoe d’Arezzo to the poets of the Dolce Stil Nuovo.

Theme: Il Duecento

Professor: Kristin Phillips-Court

Mondays 4:00-6:30 pm

In-depth exploration of periods and concepts of Italian literature, from the Middle Ages to Baroque period.

Theme: Prosatori del Cinquecento (late-15th- 16th- century prose writers)

Professor: Grazia Menechella

Thursdays 4:00-6:00 pm

“Sperimentalismi e nuove tendenze da Manganelli a Ballestra”

2022 marks the Centennial celebration of Giorgio Manganelli’s birth. What better way to celebrate than starting the seminar discussing Giorgio Manganelli’s work? We will focus on Giorgio Manganelli (essays, fiction, and travel literature), Gruppo 63, Elio Pagliarani, Nanni Balestrini, Giulia Niccolai, Italo Calvino, Dacia Maraini, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Maria Rosa
Cutrufelli, Aldo Nove, Simona Vinci, Gabriella Ghermandi, Silvia Ballestra, etc. We will also look closely also at journals such as Grammatica, Quindici, Baldus, La bestia.

For more information, contact Prof. Menechella at gmeneche@wisc.edu