French Minor

As a French minor, you will study great texts with an eye to gender roles, traditions, communities, individual freedom, social obligations, and many other topics of critical importance today You will also study the French language. This minor is housed in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

sample courses:

French Level 1: Essential French

This first course in the French language stresses rapid acquisition of spoken French, listening comprehension, reading, and writing skills. It is designed to immerse students as much as possible into French language and culture. The five-day-a-week course is taught in French to impart communicative competence through the acquisition of everyday grammar and vocabulary. The textbook works with a feature-length French film in order to create a meaningful and culturally relevant context for the grammatical and thematic structures studied.

At Home in Paris, Versailles, Amsterdam, and Delft

This course will examine palaces, town houses, and gardens in France and Holland in the 17th century through a focus on four classes of objects: letters, food, flowers, and paintings. Such objects allow us to imagine the lives of those who attend court spectacles and witnessed the effects of Louis XIV's centralization of power as he changed first Paris and then Versailles, just as they inform us about Dutch trade, including items imported from Asia and the Americas; the science of lenses and perspective; the tulip craze and a fascination with cityscapes and landscapes for this country that grew by reclaiming land from the sea. Based on comparisons of letters, both written and painted; flowers, both real and in still lifes; interiors both lavish and more austere; the expansion of Versailles and Dutch cities, we will consider the rivalry between France and Holland.