Undergraduate Studies

French Major: Regular (non-honors) Literature Courses

After 400-level literature courses, students:

• have some basic knowledge of the historical, cultural and literary background and context needed for textual interpretation
• possess some of the critical vocabulary needed for literary analysis
• have acquired some analytical skills
• are able to read and understand key themes in full-length texts of all three major genres (prose, poetry and theatre) and to comment on them
• have greatly increased their general vocabulary and their knowledge of French language structures (as well as those of English, by comparison)
• are able to write three-to-five-page essays with significantly better grammatical accuracy (that is, with considerably fewer mistakes in elision, agreement, and conjugation, for example) and with significantly more complex sentence structures than at the 200-level

After 600-level literature courses, students:

• have a fairly good background in the historical, cultural and literary context needed for textual interpretation, greater enjoyment of reading, as well as for functioning with relative ease in social situations
• possess most of the critical vocabulary needed for literary analysis
• have acquired fairly good textual analysis skills, allowing them to place the ideas expressed in a text in a certain perspective
• are able to read and understand more complex and abstract aspects of full-length literary works and comment on them with relative ease
• have a broad range of general vocabulary, and an increasing grasp of the more complex and idiomatic French thought and language structures
• write longer (10-15 page) essays with relative ease, good grammatical accuracy, idiomatic language, and fairly complex linguistic structures