Life Stories (FRE4604.01)

Stephen Shapiro

This course will focus on reading and analyzing a variety of autobiographical writing forms as well as perfecting your written French through creative autobiographical writing. Literary readings will offer both a critical perspective on a wide variety of autobiographical genres as well as models for inspiration and imitation in your own writing. We will also examine style and register while striving to master some of the stylistic and grammatical difficulties which confound even native speakers. Workshop sessions will allow students to present each othersʹ work in a workshop setting. Intermediate-high level.


Learning Outcomes:
1. Effectively communicate ideas in the target language, both orally and in writing
2. Understand, situate, evaluate, and critique various types of discourse used to write the self within multiple contexts
3. Analyze the ideas and the concepts from the perspectives of the culture studied
4. Understand how sexual and gender identity intersect with nationality, race, ethnicity, religion, and
socio-economic class in the context of French and Francophone life writing.
5. Build your proficiency in spoken and written French:
6. Perfect your spoken French in a formal setting
7. Progress in spontaneous, interactive communication.
8. Enrich your vocabulary and develop an ease with increasingly complex syntactical structures.
9. Develop the skills of advanced-level speakers:
10. Mastery of narration in the present, past, and future,
11. Narrating, describing, and arguing in paragraph-level connected discourse


Delivery Method: Fully in-person
Prerequisites: Proficiency level to be assessed by the instructor. Please contact Stephen at sshapiro@bennington.edu by November 12.
Corequisites: Attendance at CSL speaker series events
Course Level: 4000-level
Credits: 4
M/Th 10:00AM - 11:50AM (Full-term)
Maximum Enrollment: 18
Course Frequency: Every 2-3 years

Categories: All courses , French , Fully In-Person
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