Autumn 2019 Course Offerings

GE Courses


French 1801 - Masterpieces of the French-Speaking World: French Existentialism: Texts, Contexts, and Legacy

Instructor Mackenzie Leadston, Tuesday/Thursday 11:10-12:30 pm, 3 credit hours

While French Existentialism was one of the most popular philosophical movements in the 20th century, its impact extended far beyond the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. This course will examine not only the origins and central themes of existentialism, but also its cultural, political and artistic implications. By studying literary works by Sartre, Camus, Boris Vian, Samuel Beckett, and films by Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, this course unpacks the ideas and influences of existentialism and its enduring legacy. Taught in English.

Italian 2051 - Italian Journeys: Renaissance Tales of Travel and Transformation, GE Literature; and Diversity: Global Studies

Professor Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Tuesday/Thursday 9:35-10:55 am, 3 credit hours

While Italy is one of today’s most popular tourist destinations, for centuries it was shaped by the travels of Italians both within and beyond its peninsular borders.  In this course we will examine Italian cultural mobility in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance through fictional and nonfictional texts, including chronicles, letters, travel guides, and epic narratives.  We will begin and end with firsthand accounts of real (if at times marvelous) exploration—Marco Polo’s chronicle of his expedition to and from China; and Antonio Pigafetta’s record of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe—but we will also journey as far as Hell (Dante’s Inferno) and the moon (Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso) to examine the foundational importance of travel to Italian identity and imagination.  Taught in English.

Italian 2053 - Italian Cinema, GE Visual Performing Arts and Diversity Global Studies

Professor Luca Peretti, MW 12:40-1:35 pm, 3 credit hours

This course presents students with an overview of Italian cinema of the last seventy years and looks at films and serial television by important Italian directorsWe touch upon major genres and movements in Italian screen history, including Neorealism, comedy Italian style, political cinema, the woman’s film, the spaghetti western, mafia movies, the film noir, coming-of-age film, the docudrama, and quality television. Taught in English. 

Italian 3052 - Mediterranean Voyages: Migration and Travel, GE Culture and Ideas; and Diversity: Global Studies

Professor Danielle Schoon, Wednesday/Friday 11:10-12:30 pm, 3 credit hours

How do different types of travelers move through the Mediterranean Sea? The intersecting routes of migrants and tourists suggest new ways of thinking about the Mediterranean as a space of desire and dreaming. We will read a selection of contemporary literature about displacement in the Mediterranean zone.

CLLC 2302S - Global Citizens After School Program, GE Service Learning

Professor Janice Aski, 3:55-5:15 pm

Teach the world language and culture(s) that you are studying at OSU to Middle School Students at Indianola K8. You will learn the fundamentals of full-immersion language teaching and of teaching culture, and create your lessons with the guidance of a professor specializing in world language pedagogy. An opportunity not to be missed!

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Introductory Language Courses


Please refer to the Schedule of Classes via BuckeyeLink to view days and times of these offerrings.

French 1101.01, 1102.01, 1103.01 - Beginning French I, II, and III Classroom (4 credit hours)

French 1101.51, 1102.51, 1103.51 - Beginning French I, II, and III Individualized Instruction (2-4 credit hours)

French 1101.61, 1102.61, 1103.61 - Beginning French I, II, and III Individualized Distance Learning (2-4 credit hours)

French 1155.01 - Beginning French Review Classroom (4 credit hours)

Italian 1101.03, 1102.03, 1103.03 - Beginning Italian I, II, and III Blended (4 credit hours)

Italian 1101.71, 1102.71, 1103.71 - Beginning Italian II and III Online (4 credit hours)

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French Undergraduate Courses


French 2101.01 - Introduction to French and Francophone Studies

Section 19151: Professor Eric Essono Tsimi, Tuesday/Thursday 2:20-3:40 pm, 3 credit hours

Section 34235: Professor Eric Essono Tsimi, Tuesday/Thursday 12:45-2:05 pm, 3 credit hours

Section 36480: Instructor Badou Fall, Tuesday/Thursday 2:20-3:40 pm, 3 credit hours

Get to know French culture, geography, and history by reading texts and images critically. Learn techniques for reading and interpreting different kinds of French texts: prose, poetry, plays. Build your vocabulary, your comprehension, your conversation skills and your writing skills as you learn techniques for navigating longer readings. French 2101 is a course designed to help students transition from beginning and intermediate language courses to the more advanced reading required at the 4000-level. It should help students develop reading, writing, and analytical skills to enable them to function at the higher level, as well as develop cultural recognition to help them understand their reading in context. Conducted in French. Prereq: 1103 or 1104.

French 2101.01H - Honors Introduction to French and Francophone Studies

Professor Jennifer Willging, Tuesday/Thursday 2:20-3:40 pm, 3 credit hours

Get to know French culture, geography and history by reading texts and images critically. Learn techniques for reading and interpreting different kinds of French texts: prose, poetry, plays. Build your vocabulary, your comprehension, your conversation skills and your writing skills as you learn techniques for navigating longer readings. Conducted in French. Prereq: 1103 or 104.

French 3101 - French Grammar Review

Section 19152: Instructor Julie Parson, Wednesday/Friday 12:45-2:05 pm, 3 credit hours

Section 19153: Instructor Gloria Torrini-Roblin, Monday/Wesneday/Friday 3:00-3:55 pm, 3 credit hours

Section 29068: Profesor Wynne Wong, Tuesday/Thursday 2:20-3:40 pm, 3 credit hours

In this course you will find all the information that you need to speak and write like the French. Review grammar you've seen, learn some you haven't, and practice translations in order to rid your French of those pesky anglicismes! We will look at usage examples in French popular songs, film clips, and short readings, and do plenty of conversation.

French 3102 - French Pronunciation and Performance

Instructor Garett Heysel, Wednesday/Friday 3:55-5:15 pm, 3 credit hours

Formation of French sounds, rules of pronunciation and diction.  Reading and performing poems, excerpts from plays, public performances, television or film scripts. 

French 3103 - French Conversation
 
Second 7-week session: Professor Danielle Marx-Scouras, Wednesday/Friday 2:20-5:00 pm, 3 credit hours
 
Prereq: French 3101 and at least one (but preferably two) additional 3000 or higher courses.
 

Watch Monsieur Nobek Teaches Français From Saturday Night Live

L'accent - Fabulous Trobador

“Parlez-vous Français?

Oui!

Parlez-vous Français?

Oui!

Si tu peux le parler allez tombez la chemise” (Art vs. Science)

Several decades ago, a colleague asked me why I was teaching slang in my conversation course considering that the students had not mastered French. I replied: “What’s ‘French’?”.

What’s “French” anyway? What does it mean to “master” a language? When someone tells you, “Mais vous n’avez aucun accent,” what are they actually saying? Is slang French? Is Marseillais French? What about French spoken in Quebec and Africa? These are only a few of the questions we shall address in this course.

As we listen to and practice French in a variety of contexts, we shall reflect on what it means for us–as individuals–to speak “French”.  I hope that each one of you will find your own idiolect amidst the endless possibilities that this local, national and world language affords us: an idiolect in which you affirm your unique identity and fluency.

This is an intensive, seven-week course. You are expected to attend and actively participate in every single class. No perks for wallflowers! Please practice projecting your voice before the onset of the course so that everyone can hear you from the moment you arrive!

Quelques voix pour vous inspirer!

Recent OSU distinguished invited speaker Ta-Nehisi Coates (Middlebury French language program) (Vimeo) (YouTube)

Bradley Cooper (Studied in Aix-en-Provence for six months)

Angela Davis (French major at Brandeis University, junior year abroad in Paris)

Jodie Foster (attended the Lycée Français in LA)

Shan Sa (French writer)

Jack Kerouac (French-American writer of the Beat Generation)

Kim Thuy (Quebec writer)

David Sedaris (from Me Talk Pretty One Day)

French 3401 - Introduction to Contemporary French Culture

Instructor Elizabeth Bishop, Tuesday/Thursday 3:55-5:15 pm, 3 credit hours

Learn about the social, cultural, and political history of France from World War II to the present, then explore contemporary French culture and the often bewildering differences between it and American culture. In what ways do the French think about money, sex, religion, politics, Europe, and the United States? How does the multi-cultural make-up of contemporary France complicate the answers to these questions? Come find out!

French 3403 - Le Québec à travers ses produits culturels, Je vous entends chanter!

Professor Wynne Wong, Tuesday/Thursday 11:10-12:30pm, 3 credit hours

This course initiates students to the culture, traditions, and civilisation of Quebec as they continue to develop their oral and written proficiency in French.  This goal is realized through exploring different forms of cultural expression that have contributed to making Quebec a distinct society in North America. These cultural products include art, architecture, music, television and cinema. Special emphasis will be placed on the important role that la chanson québécoise played in shaping Quebec society. It has often been said that la Révolution tranquille was largely created by artists and chansonniers. We will study the songs of important figures of this period such as Félix Leclerc, Gilles Vigneault, and Robert Charlebois as well as the repertoire of more contemporary artists such as Michel Rivard, Richard Séguin, and Les Cowboys fringants to understand why many say la chanson is Quebec’s most beautiful and important national treasure.

This class will involve singing (no talent required) and the creation of media projects.

French 3501 - Introduction to French for the Professions

Instructor Kelly Campbell, Wednesday/Friday 9:35-10:55 am, 3 credit hours

An introduction to business French with emphasis on basic business terminology, commercial correspondence, similarities and differences in business transactions, and international procedures.

French 4100 - Advanced Grammar: Grammar Through Current Events

Instructor Gloria Torrini-Roblin, Wednesday/Friday 12:45-2:05 pm, 3 credit hours

Why study advanced French grammar if you are interested in international affairs? Human rights? Food?  Finance?  Migrants?  Medicine? To follow these issues in the francophone media, you need to master the written language by becoming a more educated, informed reader, as well as a more skilled, articulate writer of French. This course replaces FR 5101 and is required for the French major for those have not yet taken 5101. Students who have already taken 5101 cannot register for this course.

French 4401 - Trans-Atlantic Frenemies: French Visions of the United States Since Tocqueville

Professor Jennifer Willging, Tuesday/Thursday 9:35-10:55am, 3 credit hours

How have the French conceived of and represented "the American" in travel writing, novels, comics, film, and song over the last two centuries? What kinds of images have changed over time and what kinds have proved nearly indelible, and why? What can these images teach us not only, or even principally, about Americans, but about the French? Register now to find out more about this enduring love-hate relationship. Taught in French.

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French 5000-level (UG/G) and Graduate Courses


French 5205 - Black Africa and Diaspora: Texts and Contexts 

Professor Eric Essono Tsimi, Wedneday/Friday 11:10-12:30 pm, 3 credit hours

Qu’est-ce que c’est que l'indigénisme, la négritude, la migritude, l’afropolitanisme, l’afropéanisme,  la créolité, la pensée archipélique, la postcolonialité du genre (et le mysoginoir), la littérature-monde en français, l’engagement comme posture et positionnement, l’approche afrodécoloniale, l’approche du soi dialogique (dialogical self) ?...

We will explore the poetics of Senghor and Nemrod, Yanick Lahens, Dany Laferrière, Calixthe Beyala, Leonora Miano, Marie Ndiaye, Ananda Devi, Ali Zamir. These will be supplemented by discussions (lecture en situation) of Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop, Mongo Beti, Achille Mbembé, Edouard Glissant, Françoise Vergès, and Seloua Luste Boulbina… All of which (colonial, anticolonial, postcolonial, decolonial) seems to beg the question, as Catherine Coquio put it: is the Colonial coming back?

Your experience in this course will provide you with a range of interdisciplinary approaches (sociology, psychology, history, and philosophy) and critical perspectives (writer, reader, text, society) to examine major intellectual and literary currents in black Africa and the Caribbean. 

French 5401 - From the Sun King to WWI

Professor Benjamin Hoffmann, Tuesday/Thursday 12:45-2:05 pm, 3 credit hours

The aim of the course is to cover three hundred years of French history. It will focus on the major cultural and political events that have shaped the image of France over the centuries and have given rise to one of the most dynamic and influential cultures in the world. The periods to be studied and illustrated via texts and films include the Age of the Sun King, the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolutions, the First and Second Empires, the Restoration, the Monarchy of July, the Second and Third Republic, and World War I. Authors to be studied will include Descartes, La Fontaine, La Bruyère, Saint-Simon, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Olympe de Gouges, Beaumarchais, Crèvecoeur, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Zola, Proust, Apollinaire, and Céline. Other works to be examined will include paintings by Watteau, Fragonard, Monet, and Renoir, as well as cinematic representations of the period by Guitry, Leconte, Enrico, and Tavernier. The course will be conducted in French. Prerequisites: Fr 3101 and Fr 3401.

French/Italian 8602 - The Middle Sea: Theories of the Mediterranean

Professor Harry Kashdan, Tuesday 2:20-5:00 pm, 3 credit hours

Over the past decade, scholars have increasingly employed a Mediterranean perspective to think outside the inherited frameworks of area studies. A Mediterranean perspective can encourage interdisciplinarity and comparison in research across the political, cultural, and linguistic borders that structure both the contemporary world and the contemporary academy. More than simply substituting the geography of the Mediterranean for the received geographies of Europe, Asia, and Africa, researchers in the growing field of Mediterranean Studies have developed a rich body of theory describing the critical potential of a Mediterranean lens. In this course we will survey Mediterranean theory from its inception in Fernand Braudel’s magisterial Mediterranean (1949) through recent work by historians, classicists, artists and writers, anthropologists, and scholars of literature. We will explore the potentials – and pitfalls – of a Mediterranean perspective across disciplines and perform a meta-scholarly analysis of the development of this nascent field.

 

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Italian Undergraduate Courses


Italian 2102 - Contemporary Italian Studies

Instructor Lauren De Camilla, Wednesday/Friday 9:35-10:55 am, 3 credit hours

In this course you will learn about a variety of aspects of Italian contemporary society and culture, while at the same time focusing on the four language skills: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. Since you are transitioning from the elementary to the intermediate level, at this point more emphasis will be placed on developing your reading skills, so you will be exposed to a lot of authentic Italian in different genres. (However, your listening, writing, and speaking skills will not be ignored!) You will learn techniques to improve your reading in Italian and you will progress from reading relatively short texts to reading a short novel. Grammar will be reviewed and tested throughout the course. The targeted structures are: irregular plurals of nouns and adjectives, the forms and functions of the regular and some irregular present indicative verbs, direct and indirect object pronouns; the passato prossimo, the imperfect, and the past perfect (trapassato prossimo), and the remote past. 

Italian 3220 - Italian Culture Through the Ages

Professor Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Tuesday/Thursday 12:45 - 2:05 pm, 3 credit hours 

This course will take you on a voyage through the major events, issues and figures in Italian cultural history (Ancient Rome, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Enlightenment, Italian Unification, Fascism, the Mafia, Immigration, etc.) through readings, music, art, films and other visual media. We will investigate both “high” and “popular” culture, ranging from the refined sonnets and saucy short stories of medieval Italian literature to the heartbreaking operas and bass-thumping hip hop of modern Italian music. Alongside our cultural odyssey, your Italian language skills will be refined through class discussion, and oral and web based presentations, and essays. Taught in Italian.

Italian 4225 - Italian Identities

Instructor Luca Peretti, Monday/Wednesday 9:35 - 10:55 am, 3 credit hours

What is Italian identity? Or should we rather talk about Italian identities, plural? Is Italian identity the same in Rome, Sicily, colonial Libya, or New York Little Italy? And what is the relationship between local regional identities within Italy and those of the Mediterranean and Europe?

During the class we will examine the experiences and perspectives of Italians (including migrants) through reading, film, media and discussion. Topics will include popular culture, Italian Americans, and immigration in Italy. We will look back at the creation of Italy as a united nation, we will study how cultural identity is currently shaped in the peninsula, and look forward to the challenges that old and new Italians are facing.

Italian 5051 - Latin and Romance Languages

Professor Fernando Martinez-Gil, Tuesday/Thursday 2:20-3:40 pm, 3 credit hours

Examines the socio-historical factors and the linguistic processes that contributed to the formation of the Romance languages and to their divergences. Course taught in English. 

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Italian 5000-level (UG/G) and Graduate Courses


Italian 8243 - Studies in Italian Cinema: Italian Cinema and Videographic Criticism

Professors Dana Renga and Alan O’Leary (University of Leeds), Wednesday 2:20-5:00 pm, 3 credit hours

This course will use Italian film and television as a case study to investigate the utility and power of videographic criticism (the audiovisual analysis of film and cinema in video essays). As an approach to analytical work on film, videographic criticism is increasingly practiced within as well as beyond the academy and can be considered a growing part of digital humanities. This course will ask what forms of knowledge videographic criticism can provide about Italian films and television? Can it deal as effectively with questions of audience, ideology, or industry as it does with formal aspects of individual films? What advantages does the practice of videographic criticism have over traditional academic forms of research and writing, and what are its disadvantages? Students may choose to make their own video essays as part of this course if they wish. Relatively few video essays have so far been made on Italian film and TV, so this course is opportunity to take stock of, and to contribute to, a small but growing field.

French/Italian 8602 - The Middle Sea: Theories of the Mediterranean

Professor Harry Kashdan, Tuesday 2:20-5:00 pm, 3 credit hours

Over the past decade, scholars have increasingly employed a Mediterranean perspective to think outside the inherited frameworks of area studies. A Mediterranean perspective can encourage interdisciplinarity and comparison in research across the political, cultural, and linguistic borders that structure both the contemporary world and the contemporary academy. More than simply substituting the geography of the Mediterranean for the received geographies of Europe, Asia, and Africa, researchers in the growing field of Mediterranean Studies have developed a rich body of theory describing the critical potential of a Mediterranean lens. In this course we will survey Mediterranean theory from its inception in Fernand Braudel’s magisterial Mediterranean (1949) through recent work by historians, classicists, artists and writers, anthropologists, and scholars of literature. We will explore the potentials – and pitfalls – of a Mediterranean perspective across disciplines and perform a meta-scholarly analysis of the development of this nascent field.

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