St. Lawrence University
France Programs

Academic Programs and Credit

FALL | SPRING

FALL SEMESTER
French 240F: French Encounters (.5 unit)
REQUIRED FOR ALL PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS.
Taught by the director of the France Program, this half-unit course draws together the village home stay, the home stay in Rouen, field trips and community activities in Rouen.

French 321F: French Culture and Language (1 unit)
REQUIRED FOR ALL PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS.
Approximately half of this course will focus on grammar and half on written and oral expression.

French 279F or African Studies 279F: Culture of Francophone Africa (.5 unit)
REQUIRED FOR ALL PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS.
This course prepares students for participation in the week-long field trip to Senegal, West Africa.

Students take two additional courses, from those listed below.

French 363F: French Literature I (1 unit)
REQUIRED FOR ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY FRENCH MAJORS.
This is a special tropics literature course with a thematic focus that varies from year to year.

Fine Arts 205F or French 205F: French Painting and Sculpture (1 unit)
The major topics of the course will be the history of art in Normandy (Rouen, Normandy, Le Havre) with class visits to museums, expositions and monuments in and around Rouen.

Government 249F or French 249F: Contemporary Politics (1 unit)
This course will analyze the political forces at work in contemporary France. Topics will include the Vichy Regime, the Fourth and Fifth Republics, the influence of DeGaulle, special interest and labor groups. Students will examine France's political, social and economic policies in its European context.

History 306F or French 306F: History of Modern France from the Revolution to the Present (1 unit)
This course will survey the history of France beginning with the Revolution of 1789 to examine both the changes and the continuity in French society and culture over the past two hundred years.  The class will make use of the program location and excursions for a detailed examination of selected topics in French history.

 

For academic year students who continue in the spring:

French 241F: January Internship (.5 Unit)
REQUIRED FOR ALL ACADEMIC-YEAR PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS.
During the month of January, year-program participants engage in a three-week, full-time internship in Rouen. Recent sponsors include attorneys, radio stations, banks, boutiques, public agencies, a veterinarian, and others. Every attempt is made to match the internship assignment to the individual's interests, and requests for specific types of internships can generally be accomodated. The internship is designed to be a challenging personal and intellectual experience. During the internship, students remain under the supervision of the program and continue to reside with their families in Rouen. They participate in a weekly seminar and carry out required reading and writing assignments.

In the spring, students on the academic-year program will work closely with the director to find appropriate courses with French students through various departments at the University of Rouen or take independent studies. All French majors are required to take French Literature II. In addition, these students are expected to design an independent cultural program, including travel. This will, in part, be covered by a stipend from SLU. They will not participate in the excursions for the spring group.

SPRING TERM: Comparing Francophone Cultures
For second-semester first year students and sophomores and juniors with one semester of college French or one-to-two years of high school study

French 107 (2 units) or French 108 (2 units)
REQUIRED FOR ALL SPRING PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS
All spring semester students take either French 107 or French 108, determined by the amount of previous language study. Students begin in early January with a two-week residence in Quebec City, with intensive French instruction at Laval University, home stays, and an introduction to Quebecois culture. The group then travels to Rouen where they continue with the 2 units of French language and conversation and take the three other required courses listed below.

French 248: Introduction to French Cultures and Traditions (.5 unit, taught in English)
REQUIRED FOR ALL SPRING PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS
This course is designed to introduce students to aspects of French metropolitan culture, particularly associated with Rouen and Paris ; to prepare them for the excursion to Senegal , a French-speaking country in West Africa ; and to encourage reflection on the connections and divergences of francophone cultures.

French/AFS 279F: Culture of Francophone Africa (.5 unit, taught in English and French)
REQUIRED FOR ALL SPRING PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS
This course will introduce students to the history and culture of Francophone West Africa and prepare them for the field trip to Senegal.

First Year Seminar
FRPG 188: First Year Seminar France Determined by Accompanying Faculty Member (1.5 units, taught in English)
For Spring 2008 -- Finding the Lost Generation: American Writers in France, Henry James to James Baldwin (and Beyond)
France was an irresistible magnet for artists and Bohemian hangers-on in the first half of the 20th Century. The expatriate avant garde flourished there, far from American censorship, provincialism (and Prohibition). Adventurous writers in particular, many having been shunned by large publishers, made their way to Paris: Hemingway and Fitzgerald of course, but also e.e. cummings and Henry Miller, Kay Boyle and Djuna Barnes. Students in this course will study not only the cultural forces that motivated expatriation and made France the center of the literary universe but also how exile in France affected the careers of these writers, making pilgrimages to sites like Hemingway's Montparnasse, Sylvia Beach's "Shakespeare and Company" and Wharton's Pavillion Colombe. In keeping with the goals of the FYS, students will use a variety of written and oral assignments and work through the stages of writing and revising a short research paper about one expatriate writer, from the list of usual "Lost Generation" suspects or of their precursors (Henry James and Edith Wharton) or antecedents (James Baldwin, Richard Wright).
REQUIRED FOR ALL FIRST YEAR PARTICIPANTS

or

Upper-level Elective Determined by Accompanying Faculty Member (1 unit, taught in English)
REQUIRED FOR ALL SOPHOMORE AND JUNIOR SPRING-SEMESTER-ONLY PARTICIPANTS
For Spring 2008 -- Travel Writing
Critic Kristi Siegel argues that travel writing "extends the inward direction of autobiography to consider the journey outward, intersecting provocatively with studies of multiculturalism, gender, and subjectivity." As a means of enriching their abroad experience in the ways Siegel describes, students in this course will read much classic and contemporary travel writing, keep a detailed "travel log" and write several short travel essays. Each student will write one final essay about an excursion planned and undertaken independently to a destination of his/her choosing.

Credit

Academic credit earned by participating in the program in France is considered resident credit earned at St. Lawrence University. Consequently, this is not transfer credit for the St. Lawrence student. Students from other institutions receive a St. Lawrence transcript.