Patrick Weil, a research fellow at the CNRS and also a former professor of mine, has just published an essay entitled Etre français, les quatre piliers de la nationalité (Editions de l’Aube, January 2011). Although I haven’t yet had the chance to read it, an abstract describes his conjecture that French nationality is based...Read more »
Welcome to a new semester! I’m teaching a civilization class this spring and thought I’d share some of the ideas I’m using for course material. In this post I talked about using Gallica to find primary sources, and used the example of a geography text book to demonstrate the process. As an introduction to...Read more »
Literature from outside of metropolitan France is finding an expanding presence in undergraduate French courses, freeing students from the idea that the great works of French literature must only come from France (or Paris). The incorporation of francophone literature into survey courses has been a valuable addition to presenting the broader role of the...Read more »
Many instructors of French shy away from literary analysis in elementary and intermediate language classes. To be sure, discussion of literary theory can be difficult even in advanced courses. It can be daunting to aim to read texts and analyse them when even the basic verb tenses are still unclear. But it is important...Read more »
In spite of the very public criticism of Google Books by the administrators of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the latter has engaged for years in a similar digitization project called Gallica. Ironically, you can often find texts on Gallica that are not available on Google Books because Google cannot publish full-text documents if there is...Read more »
When learning adjectives in an elementary language course, I often use examples from the visual arts to create a comparaison exercise. Two paintings that lend themselves well to this kind of exercise are Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862-1863) and Monet’s painting of the same title (1865-66). Manet, Déjeuner sur l’herbe, painted 1862-1863 Monet, Déjeuner...Read more »
What student of 19th-century literature doesn’t remember the striking portrayal of the young Charles Bovary that begins Flaubert’s 1857 novel? The opening passage – which depicts the child as an awkward “nouveau” joining a class of students younger than him – is particularly illustrative of Flaubert’s specific realist endeavor to portray meaning through description....Read more »
Digging through some course materials that have been handed down to me, I came across Alphonse Daudet’s short story La Dernière classe. As is the case with most any short story from the 19th century, this is a great text to use to identify the common literary uses of the past tense (imparfait vs....Read more »
